Gotz and Meyer, two noncommissioned SS officers, are entrusted with an assignment, "not a big one," but one that "requires efficiency." Their task is to transport five thousand concentration camp prisoners, one hundred at a time, in a hermetically sealed truck in which they are gassed. As Albahari's anonymous narrator, a teacher, obsessively pursues the truth of this systematic annihilation, he shares his findings with his students. Their school bus becomes that truck, and as the memory of Belgrade's lost Jewish souls is evoked, the students are bewildered. Their teacher, exhausted as much by the task of making history come alive as by the toll his research has taken on him, is finally overwhelmed by the horror of his own imaginings.
A masterfully written story of the mass murder of Serbia's Jews in 1942, full of compassion, irony, and lyricism.