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hissed with the heat of molten metal and white-hot fires that seared away all thought of the cold wind outside. These fires, which created steel for tanks and ships and guns, were fueled by the flesh of men. Furnace doors radiated an unearthly light, illuminating the shining bodies of convicts chosen from the living dead at Dachau for their strength and size. Weary arms lifted heaping shovels of coal to the thrumming rhythm of machines and the clank of metal against metal as the production of armor plate for the battleship Bismarck continued relentlessly.
    Like cymbals and kettledrums, the factory boomed out a symphony to hell, devouring the bodies and souls of those who fed the inferno for the Reich.
    Shimon Feldstein had worked his shift for sixteen hours, taking the place of a man who had collapsed and died in front of the open mouth of the furnace. His sense of his own pain had long been dimmed as he dug his shovel into the black heap and tossed coal back to the insatiable fires.
    Boom! Dig. Crash! Swing. Boom! Dig . . .
    Sometime his shift must end. Sometime. If it did not, then he would die like the man who had fallen and convulsed at his feet. Then the heat would stop. The thirst would be quenched. Someone else would take his shift. There was an unending supply of labor for Hitler’s Four Year Plan. Shimon would not be missed. Not be mourned except by Leah.
    The thought of her helped him lift his arms once again as it had a thousand times over the months. The image of her face stirred his heart with a will to survive.
    Overhead, the giant kettle of molten steel swung from the fire toward the machine that would hammer it into plate metal for the pride of the Reich—the battleships being built in Hamburg’s shipyards.
    Sparks flew up from the glowing yellow liquid as the kettle rocked a bit in its ominous transit above their heads. At this point the sweating Nazi foreman on the catwalk above them always stepped back behind the shelter of his glass cage. Eyes protected by dark goggles, he would watch with pleasure as yet another stream of refined steel spilled from the lip of the receptacle to be counted in the day’s twenty-four hour quota.
    The plant never shut down. The fires never ceased to burn. The steady cadence of his convicts was seldom broken. Even in the event of heatstroke or death, the foreman had trained his workers that the movement of the kettle above them was what they lived for. Interruptions would not be tolerated. A delay in production meant beatings, extra shifts, less food. His methods had worked well thus far. Tonight Shimon remained for an additional twelve hours as an example of a worker who mistakenly stopped to look for a fallen comrade. The big sweating Jew had knelt and called for help and begged water to touch the lips of a convict already dead. Others in the unit would think twice before they broke the momentum again.
    The boom arm holding the hissing steel trembled and groaned as it supported its burden. No one looked up at the noise. The foreman had shot workers for less. The roar of the blasting furnaces was numbing. There was never silence here. The moaning of a hook or the quavering of the container were not matters for contemplation.
    It was not the deafening roar that caused the men below the molten river to look up for an instant to see their own death pouring from the beams above them. It was the light—blinding, brilliant, beautiful in its horror. Screams were lost in the din, and oxygen was sucked from seared lungs as the flesh was consumed from brawny backs.
    Explosions followed as the liquid metal touched the heaps of coal and ignited them instantly. In a fraction of a heartbeat, Shimon caught sight of the limp body of the foreman as he tumbled from his catwalk cage and fell headfirst into the leading edge of a second fierce explosion.
    Raging agony clawed Shimon’s back as he was lifted off his feet and hurled spinning into the air. The artillery of careless haste turned