The Weight of the Door

The air inside the freight car died the moment the iron locking bar dropped into place outside.

It was a blunt, heavy sound—clack-thud—that echoed against the corrugated steel walls, sealing eighty-nine women into a space built for forty. Outside, the rain of mid-April 1945 was turning the gravel railway sidings near Frankfurt into a gray mire. Inside, the darkness was instantaneous, broken only by four narrow, wire-meshed slits near the roofline that admitted thin ribbons of cold, gray light.

“Listen to me!”

The voice belonged to Oberleutnant Kress. He had not boarded the train. He stood on the gravel outside, his voice muffled by the thick timber and metal of the door, reaching them through the ventilation slits. He sounded thin, breathless, and desperate, the tone of a man who had already burned his papers and was looking at his watch.

“The division is redirecting to the east. The lines are broken. If you leave this transport, you are deserters. If you stay, the Reich will reconstitute your units at the secondary assembly point. But hear this: the American spearheads are less than twenty kilometers away. They are not taking prisoners. They are executing all auxiliary personnel—especially the signals and radio corps. If they find you, they will clear the car with phosphorus grenades. Do not make a sound. Do not open the doors from within. Wait for the recovery detail.”

Then came the sound of his boots—the rapid, crunching rhythm of a man running away over wet stones. Then, nothing but the hiss of steam from an engine three hundred yards down the track, a locomotive that didn’t belong to them and wasn’t hooked to their carriage.

For a long minute, nobody breathed. The air was already shifting, losing its crisp morning chill and taking on the flat, metallic taste of eighty-nine lungs competing for the same oxygen.

“He’s lying,” someone whispered from the back, near the dark corner where the floorboards met the wheel well.

“He’s an officer,” a sharper voice shot back. It was Hannelore Voss. She was twenty-four, her hair pinned back with the severe discipline of the Hamburg signals office where she had spent three years translation-routing Luftwaffe intercepts. In her lap, her fingers clutched a small leather-bound notebook and a stub of graphite pencil. “He doesn’t lie about the enemy. You’ve seen the pamphlets from the Ministry. The Americans use Negro troops in the vanguard specifically to—”

“Hannelore, stop,” another voice interrupted. Waltraud “Trudy” Ebner didn’t shout, but her tone had the flat, heavy weight of a hospital ward. She was twenty-eight, a nurse who had seen the bombings of Kassel and the long trains of gray-faced boys coming back from the Vistula. She was already moving through the press of bodies, her hands touching shoulders, feeling the high, thin pulse-rates through the wool of their gray Wehrmachtshelferinnen uniforms. “Save your breath. The air is going to get thin very quickly if we all talk at once.”

Beside Hannelore sat Dora Feifer. Dora was twenty, her uniform jacket slightly too large across the shoulders, making her look like a child playing at soldiering. Her hands were buried in her pockets, her right thumb obsessively rubbing the corner of a photograph—her mother and father standing before a small grocery shop in Thuringia that had ceased to exist during an aggregate raid fourteen months ago.

“Trudy,” Dora whispered, her voice cracking slightly. “How long to the assembly point?”

“Two days if the tracks are clear,” Trudy said, though she knew the tracks weren’t clear. She had seen the crumpled locomotives lying like dead beetles in the ditches all the way from Fulda. “We must arrange ourselves. Look at the floor. We cannot all stand, and we cannot all sit. We will divide into two shifts. Row one and two, sit with your knees drawn up. The rest, stand against the walls. In four hours, we rotate.”

“Who made you captain?” a voice muttered from the gloom.

“The fact that I am the only one here who knows what a gangrenous leg smells like,” Trudy said cleanly. “We keep order, or we die of our own panic before the train even moves.”

The train didn’t move.

For the first six hours, they listened to the distant, rhythmic thud-thud-thud of heavy artillery toward the west—the low, percussive thumping of American guns clearing the river crossings. Every hour, the light from the narrow slits shifted across the ceiling, a slow, gray sundial marking their burial.

The Leather Tongue

By the third day, the concept of time had broken down into three distinct elements: the heat of the afternoon, the freezing damp of the midnight, and the smell.

The train had moved once, a violent, bone-jarring lurch that carried them perhaps three miles down a branch line before stopping with a screech of rusty iron that set everyone’s teeth on edge. Then, the silence returned—thicker this time, heavy with the realization that the engine had uncoupled and gone. They were on a siding, forgotten in some pine-bordered clearing where the only sound was the wind through the needles and the occasional high-altitude drone of Allied fighters patrolling the clouds.

The water had run out on forty-eight hours.

Dora Feifer lay with her head in Hannelore’s lap. Her lips had split vertically, the small fissures filled with dark, dry crusts. Her tongue felt like a piece of salted beef, too large for her mouth, sticking to the roof of her palate whenever she tried to swallow.

“Hannelore,” she croaked.

“Don’t speak,” Hannelore said. Her own voice sounded like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together. In the total darkness of the third night, she had learned to write by feel, keeping her left index finger pressed against the margin of the paper while her right hand guided the pencil stub.

Day 3. Alfreda has stopped crying. That is worse than the crying. The corner smells of the bucket we filled on the first night. We don’t use it anymore because nobody can move across the floor without treading on someone’s legs. My stockings are soaked through with someone else’s sweat. Dora keeps asking for her brother. I told her he was in Berlin. I don’t know if Berlin is still there.

“Trudy,” a voice called out from the center of the car. “Come here. Alfreda won’t wake up.”

Trudy crawled. It took her ten minutes to navigate the four meters of floor, her knees striking hips and shins. The women didn’t pull away anymore; they didn’t have the energy to move. When she reached Alfreda Hagedorn—a nineteen-year-old typist from Leipzig who had spent the first two days talking about her cat—Trudy reached for the girl’s carotid artery.

The skin was cold, dry, and lacked the elastic snap of life. There was no pulse.

“Is she…?” the girl next to her asked.

“She’s sleeping,” Trudy said loudly enough for the immediate circle to hear. Then she leaned down and whispered to the girl’s neighbor, “Help me move her to the far corner. Near the door. Don’t let the others see her face.”

They dragged the body through the press. It was surprisingly light—the weight of a girl who had lived on turnips and sawdust bread for six months before entering the car. They propped her up against the iron ribs of the carriage wall. In the dim light from the vent, Alfreda looked as though she were simply bored, her chin tucked into the collar of her gray tunic.

By day six, Alfreda was not alone.

The heat during the daytime became a physical weight, baking the metal roof until the air inside reached the temperature of a laundry house. The condensation from eighty-odd women breathing in an enclosed space dripped from the ceiling bolts like greasy rain. The stench was an absolute entity now—a thick, yellow presence composed of stale urine, menstrual blood, dysenteric waste, and the distinct, sweetish odor of mortified flesh.

Hannelore didn’t write on day seven. Her pencil had slipped from her numb fingers into the filth between the floorboards, and she lacked the strength to grope for it. She spent the day watching a bluebottle fly that had somehow entered through the vent slit. It was the only living thing in the car that moved with purpose.

“Dora,” she whispered on the ninth day. “Dora, look at the light.”

Dora didn’t move. Her eyes were half-open, showing only the yellowed whites. Her skin had turned the color of old tallow, drawn so tight over her cheekbones that she looked like a wood carving of an old woman.

“The Americans,” Dora mumbled. Her mind had wandered into a orchard in Thuringia. “They’re picking the plums. Tell them not to drop them. Mother wants the skins whole for the preserves.”

“Yes,” Hannelore said, her own mind drifting. “The plums are big this year.”

On the eleventh day, the silence outside was broken by the sound of boots on gravel.

Not one pair, but several. Heavy boots. They didn’t have the iron-shod rhythm of Wehrmacht marchers; they moved with a loose, swinging stride. Then came a sound that none of the women recognized—a high-pitched, nasal laugh, followed by a voice that spoke in a language that sounded like a series of rapid, flat clicks.

“English,” Trudy whispered from the floor. She had lost the use of her legs two days prior; they lay beneath her like two logs of damp wood. “They’re English.”

“The Americans,” Hannelore said. Her heart didn’t leap; it struck her ribs with a dull, heavy dread. The phosphorus. She gathered her knees to her chest, trying to hide behind the limp weight of Dora’s body. They’re going to burn us.

Outside, a metal tool struck the locking bar. Clang. Clang.

The sound was like an artillery shell detonating against the car. Several women screamed, but the screams were only dry clicks in their throats. They huddled toward the back wall, climbing over each other like dying bees, leaving the three corpses propped against the front corner to face the door alone.

The Light from the West

The bolt-cutters bit through the padlock with a sharp ping. Then came the sound of the iron bar being lifted—the same sound that had ended their lives twelve days before.

The door didn’t slide easily. It had rusted into its track during the spring rains. The men outside cursed in their strange, wide-voweled language, their boots scraping for purchase on the gravel. Then, with a scream of complaining iron, the door vanished to the right.

The sunlight didn’t look like light; it looked like a solid white wall that hit them in the eyes like a fist.

Hannelore shielded her face with both hands, screaming as the glare burned through her swollen eyelids. The fresh air followed—not a gentle breeze, but a cold, violent torrent of oxygen that made her lungs heave and her stomach turn over.

“Jesus H. Christ,” a voice said outside.

The shape in the doorway was huge. To Hannelore, looking up from the filth of the floor, the man appeared ten feet tall, silhouetted against the blinding white of the sky. He wore a heavy, round helmet that looked like a green turtle shell, and he carried a short, black machine-gun slung across his chest. He was chewing something, his jaw moving with a slow, rhythmic grind.

It was Sergeant Roscoe Henrikson. He took two steps into the car, his boots crunching on something dry. Then he stopped. His jaw went still.

Behind him, Private Virgil Lundquist reached the threshold, looked in, and immediately turned around, his hands against the side of the van as his stomach emptied itself onto the tracks.

Henrikson didn’t move. He had been through the gate at Dachau nine days ago; he had seen the flat-cars full of striped uniforms outside the Munich switchyards. But those had been men, mostly. And those had been dead. This was a shifting, gray mass of women’s clothes, out of which dozens of hollow, black-ringed eyes were staring at him with an expression of pure, unadulterated terror.

“Hey,” Henrikson said, his voice dropping an octave, losing its Pittsburgh rasp. “Hey, it’s okay. We ain’t gonna hurt you.”

He knelt down near the door. The smell of his clothes—clean wool, laundry soap, tobacco, and the sweet scent of Hershey’s chocolate—was so intense it made Hannelore dizzy. He reached for his canteen, his thick, calloused fingers unscrewing the cap with a metallic click.

When he reached toward Dora, the girl shrieked—a high, bird-like sound—and tried to burrow into the floorboards.

“Easy, sister,” Henrikson muttered. He didn’t force her. He poured a small stream of water onto his own clean handkerchief, then held the wet cloth out toward her like a man offering grass to a broken-legged mare. “Just water. See? Good old Pennsylvania tap water.”

Dora looked at the wet cloth. Her hand—the fingers gray with filth, the nails split down to the quick—reached out. She didn’t take the cloth; she grabbed his wrist. Her grip was surprisingly fierce, the desperation of a drowning creature. She dragged his hand toward her mouth and began to suck the moisture from the linen.

“Lundquist!” Henrikson yelled over his shoulder, not looking away from the girl’s hollow face. “Get the medics up here! Get the whole damn company. Tell them we got eighty… ninety women in a boxcar. Tell ’em they’re ours—I mean, they’re Krauts, but they’re alive. Move your ass!”

Within twenty minutes, the railway yard was full of the sound of heavy engines—not locomotives, but the deep, multi-cylindered growl of GMC three-quarter-ton trucks.

Hannelore felt herself being lifted. The arms that took her were strong, wrapped in clean, rough olive-drab wool. She expected the rough handling the SS details used when clearing stations, but the soldier who held her—a corporal named Pilaski who had a Polish name but spoke with a Chicago accent—carried her as if she were made of thin glass.

“Twelve days,” she whispered into his collar. She didn’t know why she said it, only that the number seemed important, the measure of the distance they had traveled from the world of the living.

Pilaski looked down at her. He understood enough German to catch the numbers. “Twelve days in that hole? Christ Jesus.” He turned to a medic who was setting up a plasma bottle on the hood of a Jeep. “Hey, Doc! This one says twelve days. No water.”

The medic, a young captain with grease under his fingernails and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, didn’t look up from his syringe. “Get her into the ambulance. Glucose first. Don’t let them crowd the water cans or they’ll kill themselves drinking too fast.”

As Hannelore’s stretcher was slid into the dark interior of the ambulance, she saw Trudy Ebner. The nurse was sitting on a wooden crate by the tracks, an American blanket with the letters U.S. Army Medical Department stamped in blue across her shoulders. She was holding a tin cup of broth, her fingers trembling so hard the soup slopped over the rim. A young American soldier was kneeling before her, using his own pocketknife to gently cut the stiff, filthy wool of her stockings away from her ulcerated shins.

Trudy wasn’t looking at her legs. She was looking at the soldier’s helmet, watching the way the sunlight caught the small white clover painted on the side.

The Warehouse District

The field hospital was not a hospital; it was a requisitioned tobacco warehouse on the outskirts of Hanau. The smell of dried leaf still hung in the rafters, mixing with the sharp, clean sting of carbolic acid, Lysol, and DDT powder.

Nurse Corinne Ashworth adjusted the drip-rate on the third IV stand in Row C. She was thirty-three, from South Carolina, with pale blue eyes that had seen enough torn flesh since the Normandy orchards to last three lifetimes. But the women from the boxcar were different. They didn’t have wounds; they had been deleted.

“Nurse,” a voice called from the end of the aisle.

It was Lieutenant Fern Kavanagh, a sharp-tongued girl from Philadelphia who usually handled the admissions desk. She was holding a large tin pitcher of clear broth.

“The one in bed forty-two—the radio girl, Voss—she’s refused the solid ration again. Keeps asking if the names are being sent to the police.”

Corinne walked down the row of cots. The eighty-six survivors occupied the entire northern half of the floor. They looked like an army of gray ghosts, their heads shaved to get rid of the lice that had thrived in the boxcar, their bodies clad in oversized white men’s undershirts provided by the quartermaster.

Hannelore Voss was staring at the corrugated iron ceiling. Her face had filled out slightly after three days of intravenous fluids, but her eyes remained deep in her skull, dark and suspicious.

“Hannelore,” Corinne said, sitting on the edge of the wooden cot. She spoke the flat, book-learned German she had acquired at the college in Charleston. “You must eat the soup. The doctors say your kidneys will stop if you do not drink.”

“Why are you doing this?” Hannelore asked. Her voice was still thin, but the leather-sharp edge had returned. “The war is over. Our government is gone. We have no information for you. The codes were destroyed at Frankfurt. We are not… we have nothing to buy our lives with.”

Corinne dipped a tin spoon into the broth and held it to the girl’s lips. “Eat.”

Hannelore didn’t open her mouth. “The Oberleutnant said you would shoot us. He said the Americans do not keep German women alive because of what happened in the east.”

“Your Oberleutnant was an idiot,” Corinne said without heat. “And he ran away, didn’t he? We don’t shoot women. We don’t shoot prisoners who can’t stand up. Now take the soup.”

Hannelore took a sip. The warmth of the fat and chicken salt hit her tongue, and her eyes closed involuntarily. “Then it is for work? We are to go to the factories in Russia?”

“You’re going to a displacement camp in Baden until we can find your families,” Corinne said. She wiped a drop of broth from Hannelore’s chin with the edge of her apron. “Then you’re going home. Wherever that is.”

Hannelore opened her eyes. They were wet now, the tears running down into the small hollows beneath her temples. “I don’t understand you. We were your enemies. My brother was a gunner on a U-boat. He sank your ships.”

Corinne looked across the warehouse floor. In the next aisle, Lieutenant Kavanagh was trying to explain to Dora Feifer that the large copper boilers at the back of the room were for hot baths, not for steam-killing. Dora was clinging to Kavanagh’s skirt, her small, scarred hands bunching the white cotton fabric into knots, her face white with the old terror of the propaganda films.

Kavanagh didn’t push her away. She simply reached down, took Dora’s hands in her own, and held them against her chest until the girl’s shaking stopped.

“We don’t care about your brother, Hannelore,” Corinne said softly, turning back to the cot. “Right now, you’re just sixty pounds of skin and bone that needs to be eighty. Drink.”

The Truth of the Screen

By June, the warehouse had been cleared, and the survivors were moved to a former Luftwaffe barracks near Darmstadt. It was a clean camp, surrounded by wire but managed with a light hand. There were regular meals—white bread that tasted like cake to women who had lived on rye-husks, real butter, and mugs of black coffee that smelled of Brazil.

Trudy Ebner had taken over the camp dispensary. She wore an American nurse’s aid armband over her clean gray dress—the Americans had let them keep their uniforms after removing all eagles and swastikas.

She was bandaging the wrist of a private named Miller who had scraped himself while unloading flour sacks from a truck.

“You’re very fast with that,” Miller said, watching her fingers work the gauze into a neat, flat square.

“I had three years at the Charité in Berlin,” Trudy said, her English clumsy but functional. “We had eighty casualties an hour during the winter raids. One learns to be quick or one learns to bury.”

“Well, thanks,” Miller said, pulling his sleeve down. He reached into his pocket and dropped a small, red paper package of Lucky Strike cigarettes onto her table. “For the trouble.”

Trudy looked at the package. “I do not smoke.”

“Trade it for chocolate at the canteen,” Miller said with a grin, tip-touching his cap. “See you around, Doc.”

Trudy watched him walk out into the bright June sunshine, where three other soldiers were playing catch with a white leather ball, their laughter echoing off the concrete barracks walls. They are children, she thought. They have no weight in their faces. It was impossible to reconcile these boys with the monsters who had allegedly cleared the villages of the Palatinate with flamethrowers.

That evening, the atmosphere changed.

A large olive-drab truck pulled into the central square, carrying a generator and several heavy iron cases. The women were gathered into the long mess hall—all eighty-three who had survived the first month in the hospital. Three had died in May, their livers failing to recover from the long dehydration; they lay now under neat wooden crosses in the cemetery behind the Hanau churchyard, their names recorded in the American ledger with the same precision as the boys from Kansas.

Colonel Grover Whitmore stood by the projector at the back of the hall. He was an older man, with gray hair at his temples and a chest covered in small ribbons of colored ribbon. He didn’t smile.

“Ladies,” he said through an interpreter—a young German-Jewish sergeant from Frankfurt who had returned in an American uniform. “Tonight we are going to show you some films. These are not entertainment. These are the records taken by our signal corps during the past two weeks at various locations within the former Reich. You are required to watch.”

The lights went out. The projector began its rhythmic clack-clack-clack, and a beam of blue light cut through the tobacco smoke of the officers’ section.

The title card read: BUCHENWALD: A RECORD OF LIBERATION.

For forty-five minutes, the hall was completely silent except for the mechanical hum of the machine. The images were not of battles. They were of things that didn’t look like human beings—piles of white limbs, gray skin drawn over ribs like wicker baskets, open concrete pits filled with the tangled bodies of children, and the huge, black iron doors of the ovens at Dachau.

Someone in the third row began to retch. Another woman—one of the typists from the Frankfurt office—stood up, screamed once, and ran out into the night, her boots clattering on the gravel outside.

Hannelore sat rigid. She didn’t look away. Her fingers were dug into the wood of her bench so hard that her nails turned white. She saw the faces of the guards—men in gray uniforms that looked exactly like the uniforms her brothers wore, men with the same eagles on their caps that she had typed onto her official correspondence for three years.

Beside her, Dora Feifer had hidden her face in Hannelore’s shoulder, her body shaking with a deep, silent sob that seemed to come from her stomach.

“It’s a lie,” a voice muttered from the dark near the window. “It’s American film trickery. They made it in Hollywood.”

“Shut up,” Trudy Ebner said from the center of the hall. Her voice wasn’t loud, but it had the old, heavy authority of the freight car. “You know it’s not a lie. You smelled the trains at the junction last year. We all smelled them. We just told ourselves it was coal smoke.”

The lights came up.

Colonel Whitmore walked to the front of the screen. The blue light from the unreeled film caught the silver eagles on his shoulders, making them shine. He looked at the eighty-three women, his face lined with a combination of weariness and disgust that was more terrible than any anger.

“Most of you were clerks,” he said, the interpreter’s voice following a beat behind his own. “Most of you were nurses and telephone girls. You didn’t turn the valves. You didn’t hold the rifles. But you kept the lines working. You wrote the orders. You filled out the requisitions for the coal that burned those people.”

He paused, looking down at his own boots.

“We found you in a boxcar. Your own people left you there to rot because you were no longer useful to the machine. They lied to you about us so you would stay inside and die without making a mess. We brought you out. We gave you medicine. We buried your dead with the same prayers we use for our own.”

He raised his head, his gray eyes fixing on Hannelore’s row.

“Some of you have asked why we did that, if we knew what your government was doing. The reason we treat you with kindness is not because we think you are innocent. It is because we refuse to become what your Reich became. We have the bread, and we have the guns, but we also have our souls. If we let you die in that siding, then Germany would have won the only war that matters.”

He turned and walked out the side door, his helmet tucked under his arm.

The Swing on the Gravel

By August, the grass had grown over the wheel ruts in the Darmstadt yard. The heat was different now—the lazy, dry heat of late summer, full of the smell of dust and ripening clover from the fields beyond the wire.

The repatriation buses were parked in the square—three large, gray omnibuses with French markings that had been requisitioned by the Allied Commission.

Before the boarding began, the camp command set up two phonographs on the grass. Someone had brought a crate of Coca-Cola bottles and several sheets of yellow cake from the officers’ kitchen. A three-piece band from the 84th Division—a trumpet, an accordion, and a drum—played something fast and loose, a song called In the Mood that had a jumping, syncopated rhythm that made the German women stand along the wire, watching the soldiers’ feet.

“You’re going to Berlin?” Hannelore asked Trudy.

They were standing by the bumper of the lead bus. Hannelore had a small cardboard suitcase containing two cotton dresses, three pairs of American wool socks, and her leather notebook, which now had seventy pages of small, dense script.

“The Charité is opening its east wing,” Trudy said. She looked healthier now; her face had lost the gray look of the barracks, though she still walked with a slight limp where the ulcers had scarred her shins. “They need nurses who don’t faint when the lights go out. And you?”

“Boston,” Hannelore said. She smiled, a small, tentative movement of her lips that still felt strange after two years. “Mr. Miller—the sergeant from the quartermaster—he has a brother who writes for the newspapers there. He says they need people who can translate the German radio logs for the archives. I have an interview in Bremen next week with the consulate.”

Dora Feifer came toward them, running across the gravel. She was wearing a blue gingham dress that Nurse Ashworth had given her from a Red Cross shipment. She looked nineteen again, her short hair curling around her ears, her cheeks pink from the afternoon sun.

“Hannelore! Look!”

She held out a small paper bag. Inside were six bars of ivory soap and three packages of chewing gum. “The sergeant with the clover helmet—Sergeant Henrikson—he’s at the gate. He gave them to me. He said I look like his sister in Pittsburgh.”

She looked back toward the guardhouse, where Henrikson was leaning against the sandbags, his hands in his pockets, his helmet tilted back on his head. When he saw them looking, he raised two fingers to the brim of his cap in a short, lazy salute.

“Did you tell him thank you?” Trudy asked.

“I didn’t have the English,” Dora said, her eyes wide. “I just… I kissed his cheek.”

“And what did he do?”

“He turned red like a beet,” Dora laughed, the sound clear and high over the scratchy horn of the phonograph. “He looked like he wanted to run away more than he did when he opened the door.”

The driver of the first bus blew his horn—a sharp, double-blast that cut through the music. “All aboard for Frankfurt and Kassel! Move it along, ladies!”

Hannelore turned to Nurse Corinne Ashworth, who was standing by the steps, a clipboard under her arm, checking off the names as the women climbed the metal stairs.

“Goodbye, Nurse,” Hannelore said in her careful English.

Corinne looked up from her list. She reached out and took Hannelore’s hand—not the quick, professional grip of a medical officer, but the long, warm squeeze of a neighbor. “Good luck, Hannelore. Don’t forget to eat your greens.”

“I will not forget,” Hannelore said. She looked back at the long barracks buildings, at the wire that was now being rolled up into neat spools by a German labor crew, at the American flag that flew small and bright against the blue German sky. “I will tell them.”

“Tell who?”

“My children. When I have them,” Hannelore said, her fingers tightening on the handle of her cardboard suitcase. “I will tell them that the enemy was not the monster we were taught to look for. The monster was the thing we lived inside. The enemy was the person who brought us out.”

She climbed the steps into the bus, taking a seat by the window where the glass was clear. As the engine caught with a cloud of blue exhaust, she looked back one last time.

The American soldiers were still playing catch in the yard, the white ball rising and falling in long, lazy arcs through the gold of the late afternoon, caught and thrown with an easy confidence that seemed to have no relation to the twelve days in the dark, or the iron doors that had once seemed like the end of the world.