That first sight of the prisoners, their bodies a barely living testament to the unimaginable cruelty of their captors, would, for the rest of his years, remain the single most shocking thing Jasper ever saw—if not the most disturbing. By the time he saw American soldiers lining up the few remaining SS officers and shooting them, by the time he saw a guard literally pulled apart by inmates as if they were a pack of wolves, by the time he saw heaps of bodies thrown away like so much rubbish, he had become numb. Those images and sounds and their accompanying stench, which only seemed to deepen as the day wore on, would stay with him, but neither they, nor that gut-punching first view of the camp, would dominate Jasper’s memory and his dreams like the first two deaths he witnessed at Dachau.

Far off to his right, away from the bulk of the prisoners, Jasper saw a solitary man clinging to the fence. He seemed barely able to stand and he could not have weighed more than eighty pounds. Jasper stepped away from the rest of his division and walked over to the man, in part to escape the overwhelming incomprehensibility of the crowd before him. He looked into the man’s eyes and felt as if he were falling into a bottomless well of blackness. Was there anything left behind those eyes that could be called human? Jasper tried to treat this meeting like any other, tried to smile as he pulled a half-eaten chocolate bar from his pocket and passed it through the fence to the man, tried to sound nonchalant as he said, “I’m Jasper. Everything is going to be OK,” to a man who almost certainly spoke no English, if he could speak at all. And even as he said the words, Jasper knew that nothing would be OK ever again. The man’s fingers barely clung to the fence and his body sagged below his outstretched arms, but he returned Jasper’s gaze and for just a moment, Jasper saw a flicker of life behind those dull eyes.

“Bitte,” said the man, the sound barely escaping his cracked lips. “Bitte.”

“I’ll come around and help you,” said Jasper, but before the words had escaped his mouth the man fell sideways, his grip on the fence giving way. Jasper tried to reach through the fence, tried to catch the man by the wrist, but he could not. When he squatted to look into those eyes again, he could tell the man was dead.