“I’m coming to that,” he said. “The only thing I remember between our descent and waking up here—is that he came back. In my dreams. I saw him again, this Mr. Leech…and he was smiling.”

INTERLUDE II

THE BURNING HOLE

HIS NIGHTMARES WERE ALWAYS THE SAME: ABRAHAM, OLD or young, naked and kneeling before the huge hole in the ground, the bodies burning below as a Nazi officer moved down the row of kneeling prisoners, shooting them in the back of the head.

The burning hole was behind the infirmary in the extermination camp known as Treblinka. Prisoners too sick or too old to work were taken through the white-painted barracks with a red cross painted on it, and into the hole they went. Young Abraham saw many die there, but he himself came close to it only once.

He tried to avoid notice, worked in silence, and kept to himself. Each morning he pricked his finger and smeared a drop of blood on each cheek in order to appear as healthy as possible at roll call.

He first saw the hole while repairing some shelving in the infirmary. At age sixteen, Abraham Setrakian was a yellow patch, a craftsman. He curried no favor; he was no one’s pet, merely a slave with a talent for woodwork that, in a death camp, was a talent for living. He had some value for the Nazi Hauptmann who used him without mercy, without regard, and without end. He raised barbed-wire fences, crafted a library set, repaired the railways. He carved elaborate pipes for the Ukrainian guard captain at Christmastime in ’42.

It was his hands that kept Abraham away from the hole. At dusk he could see its glow, and sometimes from his workshop the smell of flesh and petrol mixed with sawdust. As his fear took hold of his heart, so did the hole take residence there.

To this day, Setrakian still felt it in him, every time fear took hold—whether crossing a dark street, closing his shop at night, or upon waking from the nightmares—the tatters of his memories revived. Himself kneeling, naked, praying. In his dreams he could feel the mouth of the gun pressing against his neck.

Extermination camps had no function other than killing. Treblinka was disguised to look like a train station, with travel posters and timetables, and greenery woven into the barbed wire. He arrived there in September 1942 and spent all of his time working. “Earning his breath,” he called it. He was a quiet man, young but well raised, full of wisdom and compassion. He helped as many prisoners as he could and prayed in silence all the time. Even with the atrocities he witnessed daily, he believed that God was watching over all men.

But one winter night, in the eyes of a dead thing, Abraham saw the devil. And understood the ways of the world to be different from what he’d thought.

It was past midnight and the camp was as quiet as Setrakian ever saw it. The forest murmur had quieted down and the cold air was splitting his bones. He shifted quietly in his bunk and gazed blindly at the darkness surrounding him. And then he heard it—