All the tracks were being used by military transports, Red Cross carriages, and open cars loaded with army equipment. On the platforms crowds of Soviet soldiers and ex-prisoners in a variety of uniforms jostled along with limping invalids, shabby civilians, and blind people who tapped the flagstones with their canes. Here and there nurses directed emaciated people in striped clothes; the soldiers looked at them in sudden silence - those were the people saved from the furnaces who were returning to life from the concentration camps.
I clutched Yury's hand and looked into the grey faces of these people, with their feverishly burning eyes shining like pieces of broken glass in the ashes of a dying fire.
Nearby a locomotive pushed a gleaming railcar to the centre of the station. A foreign military delegation emerged in colourful uniforms and medals. An honor guard quickly formed and a military band struck up an anthem. The smartly uniformed officers and the men in striped concentration camp clothes passed without a word within a few feet of each other on the narrow platform.
[The Painted Bird, Kosinski, J.]
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