The Wolf of Sarajevo by Matthew Palmer Read Free Book Online Page B

from the river that had not been boiled long enough to sterilize it. Natasa pushed away the battered tin cup that was almost her sole earthly possession with an expression of disgust. Her cousin, Ivan, pushed it back.
    â€œYou have to eat, Natasa.”
    They were sitting on the back steps of the barracks. The wood was slick with mud and slime, but there was no place else. They were lucky. Most of the prisoners ate standing up. A few crouched in the muddy yard bent over their cups and bowls like dogs.
    â€œEat,” Ivan said, gently this time.
    â€œI won’t. It’s disgusting.”
    â€œIt’s life, Natasa. If you don’t eat, you die.”
    â€œI’ll die anyway.”
    â€œMaybe,” Ivan acknowledged. “Maybe even probably, but if you don’t eat, you’ll end up a
muselmann
first.”
    The
muselmanner
were the living dead. Skeletons. They were empty husks who had lost the will to perform the most basic human functions. They would not eat or sleep or clean themselves. Some shuffled mindlessly through the camp moaning softly. Some cowered in the darkest corners of the common buildings, their rough cotton pants soiled with urine and feces. They were no longer human. The Croatian guards called them
muselmanner
. It was the German word for Muslims. The Croatian fascists, the Ustaše, must have picked it up from their Nazi overlords.
    â€œWhy do they use that word?” Natasa asked, as she grudgingly took a sip of the dirty water that passed as soup.
    â€œI think it’s because of the ones who lie curled up on the floor like Muslims in prayer. Don’t worry about it, Natasa, don’t worry about anything except living one more day.”
    Ivan smiled and Natasa felt warmer even though the March weather was damp and cold. The winter had been harsh. Thousands of prisoners had died of malnutrition and exhaustion. Thousands more had been judged too weak to work and sent to the brick factory. What happened there no one knew for certain, but no one ever came back from the factory. The clouds of ash that spewed from the factory’s tall chimney were thick and black and reeked of death.
    Natasa finished her soup and firmly rebuffed Ivan’s efforts to give her the last few swallows of his serving. Ivan was only a few years older than Natasa—twenty to her fifteen. But he acted as though he were the grown-up and Natasa the child. She did not mind so much. She wanted so desperately to be a child.
    He had always been protective of her even back in the village near Mount Kozara, where the fields were fertile, the streams clean and clear, and the larders full of smoked meat and cheese, apricots and honey. That was before the madness.
    Ivan’s father and Natasa’s mother had been brother and sister. They were dead, along with their spouses. Natasa’s father had died back in the village resisting deportation by the Croatian fascists. Her mother had died in the fall from typhus. Ivan’s father had died before the war, and his mother had been taken to the brick factory soon after their arrival in the camp. She had always been somewhat frail.
    There were a few others in the camp who Natasa knew, even a couple of distant relatives. But Ivan was the only one she was close to. This was not a place you made friends.
    There was nothing alive in the camp. No trees. No grass. No flowers. Nothing beautiful. Everything was colored in muted shades of gray and brown. Outside the barbed-wire fence, the landscape was covered in ash from the furnaces.
    In truth, Natasa was not entirely sure why they were here. Ivan said it was just because they were Serbs, and the blue ribbon pinned to her thin jacket marked her as a Serb as clearly as the Jews were identified by their yellow stars and the communist Partisans by a red badge. Only the Gypsies were not marked by a color, and they largely kept to themselves in a part of the camp that was if anything even more squalid and fetid