The machine-gun towers and the palisades could not be recognized. It seemed for a while as though the concentration camp no longer existed; as though the fog had dissolved the enclosure into a soft, treacherous freedom and one had only to walk on to discover it was no longer there. Then came the sirens and soon afterwards the first explosions. They came from some soft nowhere and had no direction and no origin. They could just as well have been in the air or beyond the horizon as in the town. They were flung about, as thunder by many muffled storms, and in the gray-white of the woolly infinity they gave the impression of holding no danger. The inmates of Barrack 22 crouched wearily on the bunks and in the corridors. They had slept little and were wretched from hunger; there had only been a thin soup the evening before. They paid hardly any attention to the bombardment. This, too, had grown familiar by now, it had become a part of their existence. None of them, however, had been prepared for the howling to increase furiously all of a sudden and to end with a gigantic detonation.
