The first indication of something wrong was the sound of crying. He had heard soldiers crying before, but only after gunshots or explosions, only as they lay dying thousands of miles from home on a patch of land they weren’t even sure why they were defending. But there had been no gunshots and no explosions. They marched on a railway spur, and ahead Jasper saw about a dozen or so boxcars, doors open, with something cascading out of them and onto the ground. Not until he came almost abreast of the cars did he realize that the something was dead bodies—not the bodies of soldiers in uniform, but civilians in ragged clothes who looked as if they had starved to death. Jasper felt the knot in his stomach pull tighter. The K ration started to seem like a bad idea.

The sound and the smell struck him at the same time—shouting that seemed simultaneously the most joyful noise Jasper could imagine and the most mournful dirge uttered by man, mixed with a stench he could not venture to describe. It was the smell of more than death—it was the smell of despair, of cruelty, of unadulterated evil. Jasper followed the soldiers in front of him through an open gate and past a few blocks of apparently deserted brick buildings. Turning past the corner of the last building, he saw the fence, and he saw what stretched out behind the fence, and he knew at last what he had been fighting for, or at least what he had been fighting against, all these months.

The camp was called Dachau. Jasper would later learn that tens of thousands of people had died there during the war. Political prisoners, Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and foreign nationals had all been imprisoned there and treated in the most inhumane ways. They had been subject to forced labor, medical experimentation, and physical torture that left many dead. Others died of malnutrition and disease or were executed by the SS guards who ruled Dachau. But Jasper knew none of this as he rounded that brick building. He had never heard the term “concentration camp” or “final solution.” Nothing in his past experience had prepared him for what he was about to see.

A tall fence topped with barbed wire stretched in front of him and on the other side, a foot or two away from the wire, seethed a mass of humanity that did not look human. These were the living dead, skeletons stretched with skin, crying in joy and sorrow, reeking of death and torture. At first Jasper did not even understand what he saw. The bulk of the survivors crowded around the area where the American soldiers had arrived. “The electricity is off,” cried one soldier, and the prisoners surged closer to the fence.