Pökler helped with his own blindness. He knew about Nordhausen, and the Dora camp: he could see—the starved bodies, the eyes of the foreign prisoners being marched to work at four in the morning in the freezing cold and darkness, the shuffling thousands in their striped uniforms. He had known too, all along, that Ilse was living in a re-education camp. But it wasn’t till August, when the furlough arrived as usual in its blank kraft envelope, and Pökler rode northward through the gray kilometers of a Germany he no longer recognized, bombed and burned, the wartime villages and rainy purple
...more
