On one summer night in 1943’s Eastern Poland, while arranging corpses in the burial pits of a concentration camp, two workers, Kratko and Zydovska, exchange “little jokes” about the many ways German officers would torture and kill Jews. Zydovska recounts an officer in Chelmno who would hang men at eye-level, “forc[ing] them to look into his eyes.” Kratko retorts with a story of an extermination camp at Maidaneck where men’s hands were boiled until their “skin slid off like a glove.” As they talk, another wagon full of corpses approaches to unload the bodies into the pit. Kratko, enamored by the “angelic” beauty of one of the corpses, is overcome with sadness. After stacking the corpses into the pit, and waiting for the next cart, Zydovska says that at the camp there at, there’s an officer who supposedly shoots children for fun, a game which onlookers including his young daughter quite enjoy. The story makes Kratko grimace.  Andreas Largos is one of the children in Wing 22 of a concentration camp in 1944’s Auschwitz. While the other children have segregated into groups by common language, Andreas, the sole speaker of his language, is often alone reading a book on science and the history of the universe— contraband that he must hide to protect. One morning, after being roused from sleep by the Wing’s manageress, the children are sent to the quarry where they work all day under the crisis conditions of hunger and thirst. In the quarry one of the children ahead of Andreas drops to the ground, “brown bile” gathering at the corner of his mouth, from exhaustion. Later in the day, Andreas finds a fossil imprinted pebble and, without pockets, puts the stone in his mouth to hide and add to his collection under his mattress. In the summer of 1945, after Russian soldiers seize Berlin, a recent widower, Aichele, sits in his dimly lit house near the window waiting for soldiers to pass as they shout “Frau, Frau!” Aichele, from his upstairs bedroom where his wife and daughter’s lifeless bodies lay after an explosion killed them, notices his neighbor’s daughter, only fourteen, cowering in the bathroom and he fears for her. When the Russians, smiling menacingly, arrive at his house, Aichele permits them to enter. They head upstairs and uncover the bodies, at which point they cross themselves and say a short prayer. They leave and continue down the streets shouting “Frau, Frau,” when they enter his neighbor’s house and find the young girl. Aichele watches in horror as the soldiers molests her.  In the fall of 1941, in Lvov, Poland, German officers watch as about a hundred Jews are forced to clean the stones of the town square with their tongues. The officers are particularly stupefied by a young boy, deaf, who seems to enjoy the labor. The boy, “obey[ing] the frightened language of his father’s face,” naively assumes that the soldiers are priests enforcing a rite. In the spring of 1945, a mother and daughter travel through pillaged towns—bombed houses and bodies, prone, stacked along the streets—towards a refugee camp. When they arrive, both hungry and exhausted, they fall asleep on their cot. The mother dreams that she goes to buy food “at a country Gasthaus” where she is served, in a translucent butter sauce, the upper arm of a child. She wakes up to her daughter screaming and soothes her back to sleep. In June of 1941, near Lublin, Poland, a Nazi administrator falsely accuses an old rival of stealing an especially valuable stamp. He watches as the man, and his pregnant wife are hanged. At Russia’s Western border in the winter of 1943, 3 German soldiers trek through huge expanses of snow towards Poland. One of the soldiers remarks that he saw SS soldiers killing women and children, but the other two are incredulous.