Erik watched Schiller open the basement door and throw the corpse he was carrying inside. Even after walking through a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, he had not gotten so much as a spot of blood on his clothes. Considering that he had just carried seven corpses in that position, Erik felt he ought to reconsider the past Schiller had mentioned only in fragments.
Precisely because he had once been a member of the Sonderkommando, Erik knew how difficult it was to carry corpses. Even though executions in the gas chambers were bloodless, many people lost control of their bowels and bladders before dying. They might vomit violently or even have their eyeballs burst from excessive cranial pressure. Learning how to move corpses without getting any of that filth on oneself required extensive practice.
Erik had become skilled at it because he had been forced to do such work. If he kept getting his clothes dirty, he would surely have been driven from the unit and assigned even filthier, more exhausting work. Even the children in the Sonderkommando could work in groups of two or three, handling bodies while maintaining their own hygiene.
When two or three people carried a corpse together, it was not terribly difficult to stay completely clean. But when one adult carried another adult, especially when the one being carried had practically vomited all of their internal organs out through their mouth, transporting seven corpses while remaining neat and spotless seemed more like a superpower.
"What are you going to do?" Erik asked from the entrance to the basement passage.
Schiller looked at him as though slightly puzzled. "Dispose of the bodies, of course."
"They'll definitely find this place. Are we supposed to wait here for them?"
"No, they won't." Schiller said, "Hydra