The Master Sniper [antikvár]

Xhe guards in the new camp were kinder.No, Shmuel thought, not kinder. Be precise. Even after many years of rough treatment he took pride in the exactness of his insights. The guards were not kinder, they were merely indifferent. Unlike the pigs in the East, these fellows were blank and efficient. They wore their uniforms with more pride and stood straighter and were cleaner. Scum, but proud scum; a higher form of scum.In the East, the guards had been grotesque. It was a death factory, lurid, unbelievable, even now eroding into fantastic nightmare. It manufactured extermination, the sky above it blazed orange in the night for the burning of corpses in the thousands. You breathed your brothers. And if not selected out in the first minutes, you were kept caked in your own filth. You were Un-termensch, subhuman. He had survived in that place for over a year and a half and if a large part of his survival was luck, a large part also was not.Shmuel came by the skills of survival naturally, without prior training. He had not lived a hardy physical life in the time he thought of as Before. He had in fact been a literary type, full of words and ideas, a poet, and be-