"Some prayed, but some who had prayed before they arrived would say: 'There cannot be a God if Auschwitz exists.'" For six weeks, Piechowski was set to work carrying corpses after executions.
If the result is a mountain of corpses, the OCC will neither know nor care.
But the need to dispose of the mounting number of corpses cheated some of the chance for closure.
"You do feel like things are on the edge of something going horribly wrong when you've got people piling up at the entrance and cars coming with corpses in the back and driving off with them before you've got a chance to test the corpse or isolate it," he says.
Ninety-two corpses have been found in the Niger desert; mothers with braided hair and infants strapped to their backs, children with Qur'anic boards tucked under their arms, old men in prayer caps and long robes.
Across the street from the corpses, men and women waited silently for a bus with their plastic shopping bags and children in hand, keeping their gaze away from the dead bodies.
Carr described that period for the ALP as playing out a "Jacobean revenge drama: in one act the knife is flashing, the blood is flowing, the next act that's got to be avenged, the next act he's smoldering with hatred, the final act the stage is littered with gasping corpses".
The fear of the people who handle corpses is not limited to rural villages in faraway lands Though we despise the undertaker, we know why we need them.
According to other witnesses, Ramsay Smith was also known to shoot corpses with a rifle, then study the wounds.
"The fans have blown life into these corpses," Sparks says.
As the island's quayside was lined with corpses, hopes for more survivors dimmed.
