574
PARTISAN REVIEW
the constant chill of a human body that keeps dragging itself along and
living.
Gershanovich walked past the camp for Russian prisoners of war.
There was no one to be seen now behind the wire fence. Then a Russian
soldier got up in the distance and walked towards the fence. He had no hat
and was wearing a charred greatcoat; one foot was bare, the other wrapped
in a rag, and he was walking through snow. As he moved on his emaciat–
ed, difficult legs, he muttered something in delirium, the words of his
eternal separation from life; then he collapsed onto his hands and lay there
face down.
There were a lot of people by the entrance to the camp.
"It
was just
as crowded then," Gershanovich remembered. "There are always people
here."
On a bench, beside the sentry box, sat two fascists, senior Gestapo
security officers. They were silently smoking pipes and smiling at what
they saw before them.
Two Russian prisoners in proper military uniforms and with well-fed
faces were chasing two other people out of the camp, also Russian prison–
ers, but so frail, wasted, and apathetic that they seemed already to have died,
to be dragging themselves forward with a strength that was not theirs.
The fascists said something to the Russians, and the two decently uni–
formed ones gave a push to their two comrades, who submissively fell
down, since their weakness made them helpless. Then the two well-nour–
ished Russians forcibly lifted up the enfeebled ones and threw them
against the ground. Mter this the well-fed Russians stopped expectantly,
wanting to rest. The Germans shouted out that they must go on working
until the last breath of life had left the weak and useless ones. The well–
fed traitors obediently picked up the exhausted soldiers and again flung
them down, smashing their heads against frozen hummocks of earth.
The fascists began to laugh and ordered them to work faster.
Gershanovich stood at a distance and watched; he understood that this
murder was taking place in order to economize on cartridges, with which
the Germans in the rear were extremely sparing, and that the fascists found
it necessary, moreover, to make murder into something instructive and edi–
fYing for the prisoners who were still alive.
Five prisoners walked up to the gates from inside the camp and
watched silently as their comrades were tortured to death. The Germans
did not chase them away; they watched the Russians wi th a smile of accus–
tomed, almost indifferent hatred, ordering the traitors to work more slowly
now. But by then there was no more point in their work: what they picked
up from the ground and threw down again against the hummocks were
mere corpses with battered heads and blood that had gone cold and
