Last Citadel - [World War II 03] by David L. Robbins Page A

his best
banderillero
, until the cape of Luis’s eyes lifted when the train stuttered to another stop and his father disappeared. He wanted the waiter to bring back the tray of food; he was hungry again. Tidbits satisfied him now only for short periods. He’d lost the old human habit of savoring; still, on occasion the desire for it came back like the echo of a missing limb. Luis swallowed saliva instead and looked out the window. How can anyone get anywhere, he thought, aggravated, stopping like this at every station and encampment?
     
    A Wehrmacht major sat in a seat facing him. The man was overweight, his uniform belt bit into his belly folding into the red velour chair. For all the habits Luis had lost, he’d picked up others. He viewed this major as a glutton, though the man had only a small roll about his waist, and the beginnings of a double chin. Before his wound and long, wasting convalescence, Luis was voracious for women and drink, a Spaniard set loose in wartime Germany; a muscular and hot-blooded Catalonian from the bullrings could have a field day among the cool
fräuleins
. Luis had not had sex in a year, what woman would have him. It would be like coupling with Death himself, white and skeletal. His little stomach could no longer tolerate alcohol or spicy foods. He would not laugh, what is funny to a skeleton? All his former appetites had been replaced by the one, hunger. He ate constantly - no, he nibbled, and this irked him, the memory of great skillets of paella and chilled
jarros
of sangria - and now he had become silent, his Spanish flame banked and his spirit pruned. Luis Ruiz de Vega had not yet become accustomed to what he saw in the mirror, and his hate for the Russians who did this to him smoldered like his hunger, it was never far away.
     
    ‘Where are we?’ he asked the major, not looking from the train window.
     
    ‘Still in Poland, I’m afraid.’
     
    ‘How far from the border?’
     
    ‘Not too far. Northeast of Warsaw.’
     
    The village train station bustled with soldiers on the platform. The town seemed too small for all this activity. Luis brought his head around to gaze out past the curtains on the other side of the train car. Not far from the tracks was a high and vast barbed-wire perimeter. Inside it rose a solid block fence, many watchtowers, and the peaks of a hundred barracks. The place was grim and busy.
     
    Luis looked back to the platform. An armed guard followed three emaciated men hauling a cart filled with the luggage of the debarking passengers. The skinny men wore blue-striped wool trousers and tunics. Their heads were shaven over vacant eyes. Water could have collected in the hollows of their cheeks.
     
    ‘What is this place?’
     
    The major said, ‘Treblinka.’
     
    ‘A work camp?’
     
    The major chose his words. ‘Of sorts.’
     
    Luis watched the three slaves shuffle the cart away from the train. German officers, some of them SS, walked behind their bags, clapping others on the shoulders who’d come to meet them, some saluting higher officers. The SS were
Totenkopf
, the Death’s Head Division, the prison camp guards. To Luis they were fat. The slaves were the ones who looked like him.
     
    He was careful to keep his distaste off his face in front of the watching major. There was so little padding to his features anymore, even a wince was a wrenching gesture. This train trip back to the Russian front was a revelation for him, and he did not like what he was seeing.
     
    In 1941, Luis first crossed through Poland into the Soviet frontier as a soldier. He served in the vanguard of the troops, moving fast with the
Blitzkrieg
over enemy towns and cities, gobbling up territory and prisoners until his army hit the gates of Leningrad. There, the assault ground to a halt, and the old city was surrounded and put under siege. Millions of square miles of Poland, Ukraine, and Russia had been captured and occupied by Hitler. Luis did not know then the quality