For a moment, Jasper could not breathe. He had never felt so helpless or so angry. Anyone who could do this to another human being didn’t just deserve to lose a war—he deserved the worst sort of pain, the most miserable sort of death that man could devise. Jasper seethed inside even as he wept for this man whose name he would never know. Later he would read that even after the liberation of Dachau, hundreds of former prisoners would die of typhus every day, but all that mattered to him today was that this one man had been stripped not just of his life but of his humanity.

When he could draw breath again, he felt the K ration coming up and he dashed back out the main gate of the compound and into the trees on the other side of the railroad track where he was violently sick in the weeds. And there, alone in those trees, his nightmare would evolve, for there his own anger would drag him down to the level of those who had contrived this place of horrors. After he stopped retching, he heard a soft sound coming from slightly deeper in the woods—the sound of more crying. Assuming it was another soldier who had been broken by what he saw in the camp, Jasper made his way through the bushes until he saw a young man in a German SS uniform leaning against a tree, weeping. He had the blond hair and blue eyes that Jasper had seen in many German soldiers, but this man did not seem a threat—he was practically a boy. Jasper had heard stories of children being recruited into the German armed forces in these late days of the war. This boy couldn’t be more than fifteen.

But that made no difference—he was a German soldier, cowering outside a factory of atrocities, and Jasper felt no space in his soul for mercy. He pulled out his sidearm and pointed it at the soldier. The boy cowered against the tree, shaking with fear and raising his hands to his face.

“Bitte,” he said. “Bitte. Ich wusste es nicht. Ich wusste es nicht!”

But in his pathetic plea, Jasper could hear only the final word spoken by the man who had died by the fence—Bitte.

“I don’t speak German,” hissed Jasper. “And neither will you where you’re going, you bastard.” He raised his gun and fired two shots into the boy’s head.

He watched the boy fall to the ground, then stood for a moment looking at the body, a child who looked even younger in death than in the last moments of life. Then Jasper holstered his weapon and walked back into Dachau to see if he could help. But even before he had made it back to the camp, the guilt began. Because Jasper did speak German, or at least enough German to understand what the boy had said.