SOME FACTS ABOUT REINHOLD ZUCKER

he would say. Oh, and one more thing.

"He's cheating, I swear it," he muttered. They were in a shed that served as their barracks and Hans Hubermann had just won his third consecutive hand. Zucker threw his cards down in disgust and combed his greasy hair with a threesome of dirty fingernails.

He would die with his mouth open.

He was twenty-four. When he won a round of cards,

he gloated -- he would hold the thin cylinders of tobacco to his nose and breathe them in. "The smell of victory,"

Around the time Liesel and Rudy were eating the cookies, the resting men of the LSE were playing cards in a town not far from Essen. They'd just completed the long trip from Stuttgart and were gambling for cigarettes. Reinhold Zucker was not a happy man.

Unlike the young man to his left, Hans Hubermann didn't gloat when he won. He was even generous enough to give each colleague one of his cigarettes back and light it for him. All but Reinhold Zucker took up the invitation. He snatched at the offering and flung it back to the middle of the turned-over box. "I don't need your charity, old man." He stood up and left.

"What's wrong with him?" the sergeant inquired, but no one cared enough to answer. Reinhold Zucker was just a twenty-four-year-old boy who could not play cards to save his life.

One seat, two men, a short argument, and me.

Had he not lost his cigarettes to Hans Hubermann, he wouldn't have despised him. If he hadn't despised him, he might not have taken his place a few weeks later on a fairly innocuous road.

It kills me sometimes, how people die.