“Then the soldiers walked through the lines asking if anyone knew any trades. They were especially interested in carpenters, shoemakers, and tailors. My father was a shoemaker and I had worked with him since I was eleven. He told the soldiers we had a trade. They took us out of the line. Then young boys walked up and down the line giving people strings to tie their shoes together.

“The old and sick were taken first. They put them on carts. They were told they would be taken to a hospital for care, but they were taken directly to a pit on the other side of camp where they were shot.

“Everyone else was led off in groups past little pretty homes with gardens and flowers in pots. It looked very nice, but it was all part of the trick. They were taken down a path the Nazis called Himmelstrasse, the road to heaven.

“After the old people were gone, they took the women and children away. I waved good-bye to my mother and little brother and sister. My mother blew my father and me a kiss.”

His eyes welled up again. “I did not know it then, but my mother and brother and sister were dead within an hour. The Nazis were very efficient.”

He looked at me and there was a darkness to his gaze. “I heard the screaming once. I had been in Sobibor for three months and I was assigned to weed near the fence in camp two when they started the engines. Even through the concrete walls, the screams escaped. The sound of it froze my blood. It is a sound you never forget. Then they fell off until there was nothing but silence. When I have nightmares, it is that I hear. The silence.

“Sobibor had one purpose. To kill as many people as quickly as the Germans could. When I arrived there, the Germans had three gas chambers, with big truck engines. They could kill six hundred people at a time. But that was not fast enough for them. So three new chambers were made so they could kill twelve hundred people at a time. Imagine—twelve hundred at a time. They were Russian POWs, homosexuals, and gypsies, but mostly Jews.”

He went silent and I just looked at him, my heart pounding, my stomach feeling sick. After a moment he rubbed his eyes then met my gaze.

“In Sobibor, there were three camps. Camp one and camp two were where they prepared food for the officers and guards. Those prisoners who were there cooked or cleaned cars, or washed or made clothing, shoes, gold jewelry, or whatever the guards asked for.

“Camp three was away from us. It was a mystery. One of the cooks wanted to know what was going on in camp three so he hid a note in a dumpling. A note returned to the bottom of a pot. It said, death.