The Woman at 1,000 Degrees

112 Break from Life 1945

Dad had never seen the war advance at such a speed. The offensive into Poland moved so swiftly that they seemed to be running for days. They were often pushing the front back by as much as sixty miles a day. Battles were almost welcomed for the break they provided from the running. Privates lay in makeshift snowy trenches while the artillery launched its attacks. Dad had a close call in the village of Bialystok when he got a piece of a tank’s caterpillar track in his helmet. Black smoke puffed across the white field.

The race was on again, in full uniform, with a rifle and bag on his back – but eventually the forty-year-old started to lag behind. He separated from his platoon and for two weeks moved through a wintry green forest along with four limping, wounded colleagues, shooting nothing but fallow deer and hares.

Finally they stepped out of the thick of the pines into a clearing where squadrons had set up camp. Moustachioed officers stood outside greyish-brown tents smoking pipes – the men seemed strangely calm. The carcass of a horse lay on a heap of wet snow. Some men stood shivering around it, chewing on slices of flesh they had cut out of it. Moving in closer, they noticed an increasingly odd odour wafting through the air, the type of odour no human nose had ever smelled before, some kind of burning scent that hovered over the encampment like an invisible fog. Slightly north of them, white smoke smouldered from a pit that was encircled by a group of soldiers, most of whom had their backs turned to the camp: something big was burning there.

Hans Bios and his comrades approached, casting greetings at their brothers in arms, and then let their silence and gazes direct them towards the smouldering ruins. The smell and heat intensified as they drew closer. Through the thick smoke they caught a glimpse of human legs, arms and heads, naked trunks.

A mass grave appeared before them, crammed with bodies, five layers of corpses and crackling flames that gave off an unbearable heat. They couldn’t come closer to the grave without covering their faces. The bodies were little more than skin and bone, and pops were heard occasionally in the bonfire, like the bursting of twigs in a fireplace. Bladders or boils, someone explained, with the voice of an experienced traveller through hell. What was going on? Were these German prisoners of war?

‘No, people from the camps,’ said a black-browed Cossack, clenching a clumsily rolled snow-white cigarette between his red lips. ‘Who were over there,’ he added, pointing at the ruins of a building, west of the grave.

‘Treblinka.’

Dad looked around at the faces of Russian soldiers and their inscrutable expressions. Young boys and fully grown men stood there, entranced, staring into the open heart of the war, the black hole of humanity. My father’s gaze fell on the figure of a pregnant woman on the top layer. The skin on her abdomen was smooth and taut in contrast with the shrivelled and scrawny bodies all around it. He stood dead still, staring at her belly, as if he’d lost all self-awareness. It was as if life had abandoned him and death poured into him. His life had reached mid-course and he was therefore now being granted a ten-minute break. He didn’t snap out of it until the pregnant bulge succumbed to the heat and burst with the most abhorrent sound.

Through the opening of the gaping womb a fully formed foetus appeared and lived for a blazing red moment before the heat blackened it like a piece of grilled meat.

Dad turned and walked away from the grave, as if in a trance. But couldn’t get away from it. The smell haunted him for the rest of his life, and he always associated it with those pines.

‘It was so strange, but I felt an urge to look up at the horizon beyond the green treetops, and all of a sudden I felt guilt towards those trees. We men had left a black stain on the history of the earth and we had defiled those good trees, with this smell and these evil deeds, which no one should ever have laid eyes upon. It was so peculiar, but I was overwhelmed with guilt towards nature.’

In 1979, Dad was sentenced by the District Court of Reykjavík for chopping down two tall spruce trees on the edge of his garden and forced to pay half a million kronur in damages. Iceland’s version of the Nuremberg trials.