They were marched through the gates in ranks of five. Three hundred women, all of them starving, beaten, barely alive. They were spies and resistance fighters. Doctors, nurses. An art historian. One old woman, clinging to life, whose last and only wish was to die in France.
They wore a strange pastiche of civilian clothes — prisoners pushed out a death camp in mouldering frocks and at least one gown.
For days they’d been culled. Culled for swollen legs. Culled for noble names. Culled if their heads had been too recently shaved. They had been lined up and winnowed. Stripped, showered, left waiting for two days and nights in the cold. Then winnowed again. Lined up again. Stripped again. Showered. And now here they were, outside the gates.
Behind them they left only death. By starvation. By cold. By beating, neglect and medical torture. In the last months, there had been death by gas, too — in the chamber and in the van. And death by marching — to other camps in a collapsing Reich, pitted by madness and craters, and to nowhere at all.
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