They dug a pit in the ground, about eighteen feet long, seven feet wide, and five feet deep. Those were the dimensions, so they said, that forty bodies could fill. The first ten would be lined up in front of the pit they had dug, and three soldiers would shoot them all down into the pit. The next ten would lie face down on the backs of the first group, awaiting their deaths, then the next group, and the next.

Jacob was the kicker. When the bodies, young and old, fell from the hail of automatic fire, some would not drop backward into the pit, but forward onto the dusty ground. His job is unique: he would walk down the line, kicking the corpses into the pit, and straightening them out so that they would fit well.

There were forty-four human beings in the 5:30 group, and the grave would only fit forty. Corporal Mühlhausen would see to it that four of them would have special treatment.

"Attention, all Jews!" Mühlhausen had bellowed over the Katowice town square that morning. Twelve hundred Jews filled the town square, including several rabbis. Babies cried, but children did not complain; the rifles and jackboots of the soldiers silenced their whines.

"You will be divided into groups of roughly forty," Corporal Mühlhausen had continued. "From nine in the morning to midnight, in half-hour intervals, your group will report to a section of the woods outside Katowice, where you will be processed."

"Sir, what does that mean?"

The voice had cried out from somewhere in the mumbling crowd. Scanning his beady eyes across the square to see who had asked, Mühlhausen replied, "You will be relocated. Simply moved from Katowice to another place, a place made special for Jews. And I want all of you to come. Jacob will not be tolerated if you attempt to run away."

One of the more foolhardy young men, only in his early twenties, stepped forward. "And what if we have other affairs? What if we would rather stay in Katowice?" he asked brashly.
Jacob took a step back from his place at Corporal Mühlhausen's side. Some of the other officers and soldiers winced from the furious rage in Mühlhausen's eyes.

"Young man, step up here." Mühlhausen commanded. As the young, fair-haired Jewish lad timidly walked forward, Mühlhausen nodded to one of the soldiers next to him.

The K98 rifle gave its distinctive pop, and the boy cried out and fell to the pavement, blood gushing from the massive hole in his chest. Before the crowd could even gasp, Mühlhausen had drawn a pistol and blown apart the young man's head. Jacob had looked away; he had known what was coming.
"I am deadly serious," Mühlhausen said. "Everyone will come at their scheduled time, or by God, you Jews will have hell to pay."

Jacob was twenty-one years old, a soldier of the fatherland. He had seen his first action at Lodz, against lightly-entrenched Polish soldiers. Some comrades died, others survived. Some took great joy in slaughtering the near-defenseless Poles, some abstained. Jacob was one of the latter.

Jacob never killed a man; he was a medic, a medic as well as a kicker. During the liquidation of Walzybrch, Jacob was asked by Mühlhausen, his commanding officer, to kick in the bodies after the German had processed them. Several weeks later, he was also the kicker at the liquidation of the Legnica Jewry, and made permanent kicker by Mühlhausen.

This was no different. Katowice was just another Polish town, another population of Jews to either kill or send to a Warsaw ghetto. And in a few days, his battalion would move on to Sosnowiec in the north, and process the Jews there as well.

His platoon was taking care of the 11:00 group, the 1:30 group, the 5:30 group, and the midnight group. All of the groups of Jews had roughly forty men, women and children in them. The 5:30 group had only forty-four.

"Why forty-four?" Jacob asked his comrade Hessen as Mühlhausen directed the forty-four Jews to start digging the pit in the clearing, a good distance removed from the city.

Hessen, surprised at the amount of speech from his usually reserved self, answered, "Odd numbers I suppose. We also have the head rabbi for this town, and his wife and two daughters. I don't really know, Jacob."

"Where?"

Hessen pointed at a bearded man and his family standing aside from the grave. His two daughters could not have been more than nine or ten.

Mühlhausen blew a whistle. Hessen stood up; he was a shooter. He would be one of the three or so soldiers destroying the group of Jews.

"Everyone out of the pit! I want ten of you standing in front of it!"

People mumbled in a foreign tongue and stood aside, all except the ten who now stood before the opening of the mass grave. Hessen and two others took their positions in front of the ten Jews, MP40 automatic rifles at their sides.

The ten consisted of three middle-aged gentleman, five Jewish women, apparently the men's wives, and three children: two older girls and a little boy.

Without any ceremony or emotion, Mühlhausen shouted, "Ready weapons!"

The shooters raised their guns to eye level, aiming down the sights. Jacob watched hollowly, thinking only of his task to come. The Jews cried out final prayers, or accepted in resignation their death. The thirty-four standing to the side screamed.

"Fire!"

In a roar of gunfire, ten men, women and children perished, the bullets passing entirely through their bodies and striking the trees and dirt behind them, throwing up piles of dust and sod. They fell back into the pit, some twitching in their final moments.

Jacob walked along the edge of the bloody pit as the shooters lowered their guns. The little boy had fallen on the edge of the grave, his jaw shattered, but not dead. Raising his eyes to me, he mouthed words in Polish.

Jacob paused, his foot on the little boy's back. Jacob stared into the boy's eyes, bloody and wet with tears, and asked himself, what would a little boy do to deserve this?

Mühlhausen ordered shrilly, "Jacob! Kick him in!"

Wordlessly, Jacob kicked the little boy down into the pit, surrounded by nine other bodies. He felt as though his heart was breaking; for the first time, he felt fear for his immortal soul.
"Next group!" Mühlhausen said, slowly and cruelly.

The slaughter went on. The next groups lay down on the backs of the previous, mothers holding babies so one bullet could do the work of two. The shooters stepped up to the pit and fired down into it, as Jacob watched, in unending guilt and shame. The rabbi and his family were soon the last ones left.

"Step onto the bodies and kneel, facing away," Mühlhausen said stiffly. The good rabbi hugged his weeping family and walked down, feet pressing into the bodies of the other dead.

"Hessen, kill them," Mühlhausen ordered.

In a burst of fire, bullets raked the rabbi's family. His wife's head jerked to the left from the impact of a shell as though she had been kicked, and the rabbi himself fell face down onto the corpses of his countrymen. The two little girls, twins, went down so fast he could have sworn they threw themselves down on purpose.

The scene settled. The platoon stood looking into the pit.

Corpora Mühlhausen yawned and said, "Long day, men. Put the quicklime on, and let's go, there's another group coming in soon."

Jacob looked away as the soldiers spread lime onto the corpses to help them decompose faster. They would be covered in a layer of dirt later. The platoon gathered their gear and left. Jacob was the last one left standing, staring down into the pit, nausea rising in his chest.

Something caught his eye: one of the rabbi's girls! Her chest was rising, as though she was breathing.

He walked slowly over to her, watching his platoon disappear behind the trees as they walked back to Katowice. Kneeling down into the pit and careful not to touch any quicklime, he examined the girls.

Turning them over, he saw one had been shot in the face; she was dead as could be. But the other was breathing! He felt her head to toe, but it seemed she had not been wounded. She was unharmed by the bullets.

He raised her up onto the edge of the grave and laid her out on the cold grass. She was blonde, and beautiful, dressed in a little pink skirt that was now soaked in the blood of her fellow Jews. But she was alive, and for that, Jacob praised God. He would save her, he would take her back to his family in Leipzig, he would have his parents hide her from the Nazis. She would be his own daughter, to raise and love, as her family was dead by his friend's gun.

"I'm sorry, his love," Jacob whispered. "Truly, I am. I never wanted this. I will take you back, and I will love you like a sister."

"Jacob Ehrlicht!"

Jacob's heart leaped, and he stumbled backwards to see Corporal Mühlhausen striding furiously toward him.

"What the hell are you doing?" he roared as Jacob backed up towards a tree trunk. "Playing with the dead? I forget my .45, I come back here, and I see you messing around with some dead Jewish girl?"

"Sir...please sir...she's...she's not..."

He couldn't tell Mühlhausen she was alive. Both the girl and Jacob would be shot.

Mühlhausen knelt down to take a look at the Jewish girl. Jacob searched around frantically for anything that would be of any help. Mühlhausen's .45 was on the ground less than six feet from him.

"...You son of a bitch, you were trying to save her!" Mühlhausen hissed. "I'll have you shot for this!"

Mühlhausen looked back down at the girl, her golden locks, her blood-caked hair and dress—
That was the last thing Corporal Mühlhausen ever saw. His brains exploded from the side of his head, and he fell across the girl. Jacob fired again, this time hitting the center of Mühlhausen's back; he twitched violently, face down on the ground.

The noise of the gunshots seemed to have awakened the little girl. Jacob lowered the pistol, and ran over to her, pulling Mühlhausen off of her. Embracing her and shielding her eyes from Mühlhausen's body, and the mass grave of her friends and family that had died, he whispered into her ear, "Don't look. I'll keep you safe."

She was fully awake now, terrified and breathing heavily. It was a good thing Jacob knew a little Polish.

"There, there," he said in the Polish tongue. "Wy jestescie bezpieczni, wy bedziecie udawac sie dobre miejsce." You're safe, you're going to a safe place."

She stood up, bleary and nervous.

"Matka? Ojciec?"

Jacob's heart broke. She was asking for her parents.

"What's you name, love?" Jacob asked in Polish.

"Zeva," the girl replied.

Tears flowing from his eyes, Jacob hugged her. She was his only reason for living right now; when they found out he killed his officer and saved a Jew, he was a dead man. He was lost in a sea of choices right now, each as bad as the last.

"Jestem zalujace, kocham was," Jacob whispered, wiping the blood from her hair as they knelt together on the grass. "I'm sorry, I love you."

The stomping sound of German jackboots approached, and the clink of helmets and rifles grew louder.

"Come, we must run, Zeva," Jacob said quickly.

"Where?" Zeva asked, eyes full of innocence and fear.

"Anywhere. But you are safe with me, my love," Jacob promised, taking her into his arms and fleeing. He had the pistol in his jacket and the little Jewish girl in his arms. He knew what he was going to do. He was going to make his way to Sosnowiec and warn the Jews there to go into hiding. He would save them. He would save his soul.

Carrying himself and Zeva in his arms, he made his way into the forests of Poland, the German soldiers in furious pursuit.