Sul Campo Del Mare - Vilenica

V2-2010.PM52506/13/100, 12:14 PMThrough a Cold Country(Excerpt)Jáchym TopolNow he was looking me straight in the eye, and I was standing there likeriveted to the spot.“Mark Isakiyevich Kagan,” he said as he gripped my hand. “You tookyour time, but never mind, you’re here now. I take it the journey fromTheresienstadt passed without a hitch.”He turned away, not interested in my reply; we moved on by the lightof his torch, with me keeping an eye out for Maruška. I slithered acrossthe wet earth, mentally thanking Alex for getting me a decent pair of boots;then we reached the big pit, where there were some naked light-bulbsattached to a pole.They shone down into the crates, which contained corpses, ancient,mouldered corpses. One or two in each crate, but just heaps of bones insome of them. The old skin looked like old rags or paper covered in a filmof dry, grey cement dust. Some crates held just skulls and bones. Theyobviously carried out special patrols because of the rats; that much wasobvious.In our own catacombs we never had any finds like this; Lebo wouldhave hauled us away – it would have been too much.But I knew the way the air moved down there underground, so it wasobvious why some of those ancient corpses hadn’t rotted away completely.In the vaults of Theresienstadt you might have found the odd strangledsquirrel or dog in this condition, but any people were collected and removedafter the war by working parties. What with subsidence and undergroundstreams changing course, some human remains did get leftbehind. But hardly this many.One of the workmen came trundling his wheelbarrow towards us fromthe pit; Kagan had called him over. He shone his torch into the barrow,yep, full of bones. The other was a young lad with a pigtail, and he struggledto get across the wet clay.The lad stopped next to an empty crate. Wearing gloves, he picked outthe bones and laid them in the crate.Up to this point I hadn’t noticed the low, sturdy table: on it lay coins,some papers, a few cartridge cases. Some old, yellowed photos. Kaganpointed his torch at them.“Of course, no one must know we’re digging here,” Kagan said. “Andyou can see for yourself what conditions are like. But we’re getting results.Believe me, Katyń’s nothing compared to this place!” And he clappedme on the shoulder. Sure, he was keen to radiate friendship, and he wastrying very hard, but instead he emitted the tension inside him like anelectricity pylon. He kept picking things up off the table.“The bottom layer is pre-war,” he said. “There’s thousands of them, perhapstens of thousands. That’s why they built the Museum on this veryspot after the war. To cover up the execution site.”250