by Mark de Rond
A yellow sky pressed on a crowd gathered in Munsterplatz to watch matters being put to rest. A bibarhund wandered the perimeter in search of scraps. It stopped to sniff the hand of a prisoner boy. As the boy patted its big head, the dog wagged contentedly. The boy’s other hand was in his mum’s and his mum’s in his dad’s as they, the accused, waited for others to join their ranks.
To their backs was Freiburg Minster, and in front and to their sides the neighbours they’d known all their lives. There were the town’s butchers, the Dingfelders, and the Von Vogt’s and the Degenhardt’s, and the boy’s dad nodded to Albert Schmidt, who’d made their shoes, but Albert didn’t acknowledge the gesture. He, like nearly all gathered on this sodden January morning, kept himself to himself, as did his wife, their eyes trained on the cobbled town square.
One of the prisoners tried getting the attention of the commander who worried about making up numbers, and because he didn’t hear her, or because he ignored her, she began to wail and to tear her dress top to bottom to bare her stomach. Look, she shouted, just you look, and some of the townspeople watching told her to be quiet and did she have no self-respect. But she kept yelling that she was with child even if only just beginning to show and so she didn’t belong here. She was told to move to the side.
At the call of a bugle the prisoners set out on a short walk towards the banks of the Rhine, flanked on each side by an army of volunteer guards. Several prisoners, men included, had begun to sob. A woman dropped like a sack of barley in the snowmelt. Her husband helped her stand back up and, paying no attention to the guards’ protestations, took care brushing the snow from her coat. Unlike the townspeople, she wasn’t embarrassed by the kerfuffle. Instead, she seemed transformed by it: she dried the tears of her cheeks, flattened her hair, raised her chin, and with a straight back and new resolve continued.
The wooden house stood on a sandbank. The commander ordered the prisoners and guards to wade through shallow water. The dog meanwhile had come along too, clearly pleased at the large turnout. It wagged all of its body and darted between townspeople and prisoners. It found the boy it met earlier and jumped to lick his face. It took one of the guards to tie the dog up with twine lest it join the prisoners as they filed into the wooden house one by one. On the commander’s instructions, two of the guards bolted the door shut while others set light to it — and as the pregnant woman began to say the Shema.