He tried to move on. This wasn’t what he was searching for. But then he came across the Einsatzgruppen reports—the SS’s death squads—and he couldn’t bring himself to look away. Men crowing over the results of their pogroms—blood and bone and brain flying in a hail of bullets, of shouts, of fire and shattered glass and hate—boiled down to nothing but numbers, sometimes in the thousands on a single ledger line.

Three thousand dead at a fort in Kaunas.

Thirty-seven hundred in Vilnius.

Eighteen hundred as reprisal for a German officer’s death inside a Jewish ghetto.

A slow calculation of death and devastation, all the meat stripped from it, personalities flattened like tin, names erased, bones bleached to nothing but tally marks. He couldn’t take in the volume of it, the enormity of its blandness, how completely and utterly banal—how exhausting—it all was. How drearily they’d had to codify murder and genocide as if it were just another thing to requisition, like filing folders and typewriter ink. So repetitious it required blank templates, boxes to be checked, forms to be filed in triplicate. So pervasive it filled this entire music hall—so blatant it cared nothing about leaving behind such a massive, meticulous record of its crimes.

Die Endlösung der Judenfrage, one document read. A report on the final solution to the Jewish problem. Slowly, methodically, he read through them all, unable to do anything but bear witness. Someone had to see these horrors for what they were—

And then he reached a contract—an agreement for the Chełmno camp to sell human hair to a candy cloth factory, at fifty Pfennigs a pound.

Cement was hardening in Daniel’s blood. That’s what did it—the weight of human hair. That’s what turned him into stone.

Ari’s loose curls, his mother’s long, wavy locks, their father’s thick hair—shaved from their corpses and sold by the bag so Germans could use it to decorate their hats. All while SS soldiers bickered about who got the gold fillings and shoes and wedding bands.

It wasn’t a record of crimes. It was merely law now, from the repeal of Jewish citizenship to the Nuremberg Laws to the ghettos to the death camps. It was enough to crush Daniel where he stood. How quickly the Nazis had smothered down their humanity, how willingly a whole nation had turned human beings into things. A problem to be solved. An entire culture to be erased. How straightforward they had made it, how many checklists they had designed, so easy anyone could replicate their system, anyone willing to forget that they were people, that they were alive—

“I think I have something,” Rebeka called to Liam, from the other side of the stacks.

But Daniel moved on to the next box.