Foreign News: MURDER, INC.

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The crematorium might have been a big bakeshop or a very small blast furnace. Here the Nazis carted the bodies, straight from the gas chambers. They cut them up scientifically. They put the chunks on iron stretchers, slid them on rollers into the five greedy mouths of the coke-fed ovens. They could disintegrate 1,900 people a day. "There was great economy," said Kudriavtsev. "These furnaces also heated the water for the camp."

We heard about a young Polish girl who had refused to undress for a shower. The degenerate, sadistic Mussfelt who ran the crematorium ordered her shoved into the furnace alive. Her hair burned quick and bright. Then she crisped up like bacon on an over-hot skillet.

Near the ovens were the remains of a room with a big stone table. Here gold fillings were extracted from the teeth. No corpse or piece of a corpse could be burned without a stamp on the chest: "Inspected for gold fillings."

Skulls and Buzzing Flies. Kudriavtsev led us to some large, open graves. Here were buried the bodies of the camp's personnel, hastily shot and buried on July 21 in the last hectic days before the Red Army closed in. The pits stank in the warm sun. There were skulls and a piece of a Red Army cap and a buzzing of large flies. Around the pits, in the grass, poppies were growing. Orange red poppies. Big ones.

Back in the camp we saw a room full of passports and documents. Papers of Frenchmen, Russians, Greeks, Czechs, Jews, Italians, Belo-Russians, Serbs, Poles. Records left behind by some of the 1,500,000 of 22 nationalities who were brought to Maidenek.

820,000 Pairs of Shoes. We came to a large, unpainted warehouse. Not suspecting, I stepped up and went inside. It was full of shoes. A sea of shoes. I walked across them unsteadily. They were piled, like pieces of coal in a bin, halfway up the walls. Not only shoes. Boots. Rubbers. Leggings. Slippers. Children's shoes, soldiers' shoes, old shoes, new shoes. They were red and grey and black. Some had once been white. High heels, low heels, shoes with open toes. Evening slippers, beach sandals, wooden Dutch shoes, pumps, Oxfords, high-laced old-ladies' shoes. In one corner there was a stock of artificial limbs. I kicked over a pair of tiny white shoes which might have been my youngest daughter's.

The sea of shoes was engulfing. In one place the sheer weight had broken the wall. Part of the wall had fallen out, and with it a cascade of shoes. Kudriavtsev said: "There are 820,000 pairs here and 18 carloads of the best were shipped to Germany. You will see the receipts at the Gestapo warehouse."

Standing on the sea of shoes, Maidenek suddenly became real. It was no longer a half-remembered sequence from an old movie or a clipping from Pravda or chapters from a book by a German refugee living in Mexico City. The barbed wire had barbs which ripped flesh. The ashes on the big cabbages were the ashes of the brothers of the worn but pretty peasant women who had spoken to us that morning at Mass.

"The loudspeakers from the camp kept screeching Strauss waltzes," a Polish woman in Lublin said to me. "The Beautiful Blue Danube can never be beautiful to us again." She paused and repeated the words so many Poles and Russians had said that day: "I hope you Americans will not be soft with the Germans."