“Oh yes!. . .” Blum said (now we were lying in the darkness in other words intertwined overlapping huddled together until we couldn’t move an arm or a leg without touching or shifting another arm or leg, stifling, the sweat streaming over our chests gasping for breath like stranded fish, the wagon stopping once again in the dark and no sound audible except for the noise of breathing the lungs desperately sucking in that thick clamminess that stench of bodies mingled as if we were already deader than the dead since we were capable of realizing it as if the darkness the night . . . And I could feel them sense them swarming slowly creeping over each other like reptiles in the suffocating odour of excrement and sweat, trying to remember how long we had been in that train a day and a night or a night and a day and a night but that didn’t have any meaning time doesn’t exist What time is it I said can you see the, What difference does it make to you he said What difference will it make when it’s morning Are you so eager to see our filthy prisoners’ faces Are you so eager to see my filthy Jew’s face they, Oh I said shut up shut up shut up), Blum repeating: “Yeah. And then he took that burst of machine-gun fire at point-blank range. Maybe it would have been smarter on his part if