Ashes by Haunted Computer Books

like his.
Officers might have slightly better rations, but barely two years
into the war, shortages were a staple of every rank.
    “ Herr
Oberleutnant ,” said a guard on the warped
wooden platform, raising his arm with a brisk stamp of his boot
heel.
    Wolfram nodded to acknowledge the salute.
Rear guards hadn’t yet lost the crispness of their routines.
“Cigarette?”
    The guard smiled and Wolfram shook one from
the pouch in the breast pocket of his gray tunic. He lit the
guard’s and then one for himself. The tobacco was Turkish, dark and
sinister like the people who had cultivated it.
    “ Shipping juden ?” Wolfram
asked.
    The guard smiled from his pale moon face.
“Two thousand, maybe. Three. What’s the difference? The trains are
slow.”
    “ Two trains per week.
Globocnik’s orders.”
    The guard looked around,
comfortable in his post, the real war three hundred miles to the
east. “Globocnik? I see no Globocnik.” He leaned close,
conspiratorially, as if they were two friends in a beer hall. “I
don’t even know if Globocnik is real, ja ?”
    Globocnik, an SS police
leader, was rumored to have had personal correspondence with the
Fuhrer himself. Globocnik, who had career
ambitions and sought a place on Himmler’s staff, had stepped up
relocation efforts after a German officer had been killed during a
police action against the Jews. The officer in question had died in
a drunken motorcycle accident, but the German leadership had never
troubled itself over accuracy when a larger purpose was served.
Martyrs were cheap, Wolfram well knew.
    “ So it’s quiet here?”
Wolfram asked.
    The guard shrugged. “I sleep. No one here has
guns.”
    “ Good.” Wolfram drew on his
cigarette as the guard sauntered to the shade of the station’s long
platform.
    “ Rest for now,” Wolfram
shouted at the policemen who had debarked the trains, busily wiping
their brows and sipping from steel canteens. They were mostly older
men, those not fit for combat but who had been pressed into some
sort of duty for the Reich. Though unfit for combat, Wolfram’s
platoon was organized, obedient, and well-trained.
    Some, like Scherr there, the fat one, were
all joviality and bluster, full of the nonsense that came from
believing happy lies. Kleinschmidt, a sausage maker, complained
bitterly about his boots and the poor quality of the field
kitchen’s pork. Wassen had been a journalist and spent his evenings
writing letters to his family. Few of the men in Wolfram’s First
Company platoon thought beyond the immediate soldier’s concerns of
a soft bunk and dry socks.
    At age 32, Wolfram had no career ambitions
himself; he thought only of his wife, Frieda, in the Hamburg
apartment with their four-year-old son Karl. Wolfram had headed a
small family lumber business and benefited from the initial lead-up
to war. When certain high-level officers began hinting that a man
like Wolfram was needed by the Fatherland, he enlisted in the
Reserve Police.
    During 1941, Reserve Police Battalion 101 had
been largely concerned with stamping out partisan uprisings and
rounding up communist Russians in Czechoslovakia. Later in the
year, Jews were targeted as well. Wolfram had heard reports of
entire Jewish sections of cities being burned to the ground, and
truckloads of Jews occasionally disappeared. But such reports were
like the wind, and Wolfram had filed enough of them to know that
only a fool or a zealot dared speak the truth.
    Scherr, his First Sergeant, approached
Wolfram as the train engine let out a long sigh of steam. The smell
of coal smoke briefly obliterated the cloying animal stench that
came from the cattle cars.
    “ Shall I issue the orders?”
Scherr said all too eagerly.
    “ Gather the men,” Wolfram
said.
    Scherr obeyed, no doubt promising the men a
night in the barracks and the eventual arrival of rations. As the
forty reservists gathered around, Wolfram looked into their faces.
He was younger than most, and a good deal