Erich - One.

Erich

            Nothing could have prepared me for what happened. If anyone had told me that my three roommates from Wellington’s School for Boys would all appear on the snowy streets of the ghetto I would have laughed in his face. I never thought I would see even one of them again.

            It wasn’t exactly just any day. It was my first day as a Sturmmann. I had been on duty for six months. I wasn’t a Schütze anymore. I had been promoted the day before. There were brand new badges on the collar and sleeve of my uniform. The white S’s were still there though. Like two white lighting bolts against the black patch.  SS.

            I wanted to feel proud as I put on my uniform that morning. Usually I should have been able to convince myself that I was doing something to be proud of. Especially today. I was moving up. One day I could be an officer or a lieutenant. If only my father could see me now. I was finally the person he had always wanted me to be. And he would never know.

            But instead I felt sick. The feeling was less frequent that it had been when I first arrived in Poland six months ago. I was learning to accept where I was. But sometimes the feeling still came back. Suffocating and nauseous. In over my head. Guilty. Like everything was wrong. Like something was missing.

            The sick feeling hit as I looked at myself in the dusty mirror in my room that morning. I took myself in. My long gray coat and heavy boots made me look even bigger than usual. But I felt small. Helpless. It had been a rough night. I didn’t sleep much anyway. And when the dreams came they just made everything worse. I had been up half the night. I examined my face. Bloodshot eyes. Unshaven face. My beard was finally coming in, still as pale as my hair. I ran my pomaded comb through my hair. I could never get it to part as sharply as the other soldiers. Eventually I gave up and pulled on my peaked hat.

            No, I wasn’t proud. I hated what I saw in the mirror. I saw a failure and a coward. I saw a Nazi.

            It took everything I had not to put my fist through that mirror. I had to remind myself that breaking my hand would only make things worse. I snarled at my own reflection and stormed down the stairs.

            Down on the street, I made my way to the gate. I had to make my evening rounds inside the ghetto. I had been on watch at the wall all morning already. Now I would be working until nightfall. Boring. No one ever came out anymore. The Resistance, or so the boys who had been here three years ago called it, was dead. The Jews were so beaten down and defeated they rarely even left their filthy rooms.

            It was cold outside. My coat kept me warm enough but the wind whipped my hands raw. I reached in my pocket for my gloves. I went to pull them on, but stopped short. I usually tried so hard not to look at my right hand. Not only because it was so ugly. The skin all the way to my elbow was patchy and mutilated from the burns that had taken months to heal. There was a long, jagged scar running from the space between my thumb to the heel of my hand. And the tendons had never quite healed. The fingers on my right hand curled inward like a claw. After about a year I managed to make a weak fist again. But my fingers would never straighten out all the way. Lucky I was left-handed or I could never have been a soldier.

            That wasn’t why I couldn’t stand to look at my hand, though. I knew where every one of those injuries came from. And thinking about exactly how I had destroyed my entire right arm made me want to kill myself. I remembered things I could almost force myself to forget. Being cornered on a dark path outside the school. Running into a flaming building.

            Delicate hands wrapping strips of cloth around my injured palm. 

            I yanked on my gloves. Disgusted. Covering the deformed arm.

            Like I guessed the streets were deserted. The first two hours of my shift passed painfully slowly. The only sound the crunch of light snow under my heavy boots. I wished there was something to do. I wondered for a minute if what some of the other soldiers were saying was true. That the uprising was inevitable. They said the young leaders of The Resistance were back. Gören von Abraham is what the soldiers called them. The Brats of Abraham. They were the children of the long dead Resistance leaders. Even if they were here it wouldn’t matter. They would never have enough time to fight back. Not with what I knew was coming.

            I shook my head. The silence was killing me. I hated when I could hear my thoughts. It made it so much harder to keep the rage at bay. To convince myself that I was finally where I was supposed to be. If I let my mind wander, he would come back. I let myself go for less than a minute. Loosened the reigns on my control for one second. Closed my eyes. There he was. Delicate hands. Black curls. Dark freckles on muscular shoulders. Long lashed green eyes.

            “Nein!” I had to say it to myself out loud. Wrenched my eyes open. No. I couldn’t go there again. I had let myself go the night before. I couldn’t go back

            For once it was easier to look around at where I was than to look inside myself. Normally I hated being on the ground inside the ghetto walls. Even on quiet days I couldn’t ignore the stench of death. There was always a body or two in the ditch. There had been snow the night before. The skeletal corpses would all be frozen. Luckily it wasn’t my job to get rid of them. Not today anyway. At least today the horror around me was enough to distract me from the storm inside my head.

            I reached deep in my pocket for a cigarette. That would calm me down. I just needed to relax a little. My thick gloves made me fumble with the lighter. But I didn’t dare take them off. A freezing wind had picked up. Pinpricks of ice stung the back of my neck. I exhaled smoke. My breath was foggy from the cold.

            The cigarette probably wasn’t a great plan actually. I was already wheezing. After the explosion at Wellington’s, the doctors had rushed to fix my punctured lung. I would have died if I had gotten to the hospital a minute later. My lungs had almost completely recovered now. Except in cold weather. When it got this cold my breath started coming short. I had been dreading December all year. This was not what I wanted to deal with right then.

            I dropped my hand and pocketed my lighter. I nearly dropped my pack. In the time it took my to light the cig, someone had appeared on the corner. I couldn’t make out his face under his hat and scarf. He wasn’t soldier. That much was clear. Not a Jew. There was no yellow star on his jacket. Who was he? He could have been a Pole, but they had to have clearance to get to this side of the wall.

            He froze when he saw me. I could see him contemplating running. But I could have shot him in a second. I put a hand on the revolver in my coat. “Halt! Wer bist du? Zeigen Sie mir Ihre Papiere!” I ordered. He didn’t seem to understand. A Pole then. “Twoje dokumenty!” I yelled in my unsteady Polish. Still no response. The boy cocked his head. Confused. I only had one other language to try. “Show me your papers!”

            He understood that time. “Please…”

            I knew from one word what I was dealing with. The accent gave him away. Pure British. I had a spy. I yanked the gun from my jacket. “Stay where you are!” My own thickly accented English sounded strange to me. I had only spoken German for so long. “Get on the ground! On the ground!” The boy complied. He was terrified. I could see. He definitely was not supposed to be there. “On your knees! Hands on your head!” He knelt in the snow. I dashed down the street to him. Up close I could see he was more of a man than a boy. He was much smaller than me but his build told me he was around my age. I still couldn’t see his face. He kept his eyes on the ground.

            I kept the gun pointed at his head. I couldn’t show how scared I was. In six months I had never had to shoot anyone at such a close range. I wasn’t sure I could do it. I prayed he would just do what I said. “Don’t move,” I ordered, “or I’ll shoot. Who are you?”

            He didn’t answer. But his head bobbed up for just a second, not long enough for me to figure out who he was. "I said don't move!" A sick knot was twisting its way into my stomach. I would really have to shoot him. One more chance. I cocked the gun. “Who are you!”

            The man took a few deep, terrified breaths. “Erich?”

            For a second I didn’t realize he was talking to me. His accent made it sound like “Erik.” I thought he was telling me his name. Then I remembered. That was my name. Not here, but in England. There was place where was something different than what I was here. Only three people in the world had ever called me that.

            The knot didn’t go away as I reached down and yanked off his hat. Tossed it aside.

            Dark curls spilled down across his forehead.

            Slowly, he raised his head. For the first time in more than two years, I gazed back into those huge green eyes. He just looked up at me with the same strange expression as the first time I saw his face.

            “Gabe.”

Reviews

[Jake Donald Stephens]

Just thought I'd let you know that I was reading it.

[Arianna]

do you realize how freaking sad and happy that made me at the same time
this book is amazing
your characters are enthralling
i just..
i cant.
i just cant find words for the perfection that is this book
these characters
or your writing!