He says nothing more. I remain still, trying not to breathe too deep in case I cough. A long, quiet while goes by. I ponder on Frobisher.

—

“Is that where you found God?” I ask him a while later. “In the mine?”

Frobisher shakes his head. “No. I was converted on the march. But you know about marching in the snow. Sagan, was it? The details of your file are somewhat misty.”

And yet he had the right camp, nonetheless. “Yes.”

Frobisher’s gaze is distant. “I walked two hundred miles. Yes. Two hundred, before I fell by the wayside. Those who went all the way to Luckenwalde, double that.”

I had marched fifty.

—

In April 1942 Frobisher’s ship was two days out from Trinidad when a German warship attacked. “We were terribly outgunned,” he says. “We landed perhaps one blow on the enemy before we began to sink. By that time all our decks were on fire. The German captain sent his lifeboats. All of ours were burned.”

Many died in the battle and the sinking. The rest, the captain took on board his vessel. They were sent to the camp at Lamsdorf; from there they went out in Arbeitskommando, working parties, to the fields and factories. In the summer of ’43 Frobisher was sent eighty miles from Lamsdorf to the mine.

“More men died in the mine, of course.”

I am silent. In the summer of 1943, many of us at Sagan had passed the time playing golf.

—

Like us, Frobisher and his fellows had been marched out of the camp ahead of the Russian advance. Streaming out in long, straggling columns, the guards frightened, the men rapidly beginning to freeze and starve to death. Some tried a route via the mountains. Four hundred died out of a thousand.

“And then, oh, there came a day when I couldn’t walk any farther. I was stripped to the bone.” Frobisher looks down at his bulk. “Hard to imagine now, of course. So the Germans left me for dead in a schoolhouse. Try as I might I can’t remember the name of the village.”

He has erased it, I think, from his mind.

“But I was still alive a week later when the Americans came. Barely alive, but they saved me.” He turns his gaze on me, a sudden fire in his eyes. “God be thanked for the Americans, without whom all our suffering would have been in vain.”

“Amen,” I whisper, in sincere accord.