Undying Love, Brian Hesse [historical books to read .TXT] 📗

hold their babies close to their naked chests as they also receive a bullet. My friend even said that toward the night, the SS must have been anxious to get into the tent for sleep so they began throwing live babies into the pit to die of exposure.”

            Aleksander was at a loss for words. No poetry came to mind. No witty come back or questioning Abraham’s story crossed his overtaxed brain. His thoughts swarmed hopelessly out of control as he tried to fight off the vision of screaming babies and children wounded, purple, bloated, and dying on top of their Mothers stiffening bloodied bodies.

            “I hear now that their using gas vans to kill Jews in Russia. They pile Jews into the back of sealed vans. Hoses run from the exhaust pipes to the back. They say that after fifteen minutes the doors are opened spilling the pink carbon dioxide filled bodies onto the ground.”

            Without listening to more, Aleksander walked back to his now near empty flat. Over the last week Nazi SS and Order Police have been “evacuating” the sick, elderly, and dying to other camps. The SS announced through loudspeakers, posters, and through the Jewish Council representatives that some inhabitants are leaving for better care. But Aleksander witnessed many hundreds of sick and elderly being shot in the streets for not having the strength to walk to the transport trucks. He now wondered if there was truth to what Abraham had said. His ghetto home, just three years ago, always held more than fifty people to each of the rooms. Now, barely twenty occupied each room. The ghetto was still overcrowded, but obviously reduced in number. Aleksander laid down on the cold and hard floor feeling the lice wiggle beneath his clothes. He thought of Anastazja for the first time in months. Sometimes even the smiling face of a lost love brings more pain than the mind can tolerate. However, the flame of hope is never fully extinguished. If there was even the slightest chance that his Anastazja was alive, he would find her.

     Aleksander waited in the only shadow unmolested by the large camouflaged searchlight sitting on the Western corner of the nine-foot-high brick wall. The entire ghetto was encased by this solid structure with searchlights placed strategically all along the perimeter. To Aleksander, they looked like the large soulless eyes of a monster in constant search of the rats, the human skeletons, contained within these walls. He now referred to himself and, his fellow inmates, as rats because they lived no better than the vermin that plagued the ghetto day and night. In fact, he thought with a heavy heart, that the rats of the ghetto lived much better than the human inhabitants. They feasted on the dead flesh of those who finally succumbed to the different faces of death that stalked the enclosure. Just as natural selection takes the sick and old from say a herd of deer or, a flock of birds, death also has a design for thinning the human herd too. The first to die are the sick. People who have preexisting conditions of the heart, cancer, or even pneumonia, can live for an extended period with adequate rest, proper shelter from the elements, and good nutrition. However, take away any, or all, of these necessities and the result is predictable. The sick quickly succumb to their disease at a much quicker pace. The half-dead speedily race toward that inevitable darkness with which they are so familiar. The next to die are the old. Standing in the darkened doorway of the only real latrine in existence in the ghetto, Aleksander thought about the elderly. He thought with a shadow of guilt creeping into his veins how little he cared when he witnessed the elderly die. Under normal circumstances, the sight of an elderly woman, or man, dying would bring tears of sadness to his eyes. Here, now, in the hell of captivity, people get closer to a real understanding of nature in its purest form. The old no longer reproduce, contribute to the economy, in any real way, or have any real hopes of doing so in the short future they have left. Here in the ghetto, abstract concepts such as love and happiness are smothered by the real sounds of screaming, the smell of death and garbage, and the feeling of hunger twisting the belly into knots. The next to die are the suicides. In the ghetto, even religion takes a faded role in the daily lives of the oppressed. People gather to celebrate their respective observances, but all the signs that God is dead linger in the daily lives of the inhabitants. Many find comfort in nothingness through the rope, knife, or just sampling laying down to die.

     Aleksander saw his chance as the spotlight slowly swung away from his position to the East. He timed this rhythm for the last several weeks since his talk with Abraham about the death squads in Russia. The spotlight would not swing back to his position for another three minutes. Beyond this portion of the wall were few guards, no barbed wire, and no German Shepherds ready to tear the throat out of any skeleton stupid enough to attempt escape. Aleksander ran outside the doorway and reached underneath the latrine directly to the left of the entrance. His hand groped through foul smelling sludge, feeling for the seven-foot ladder he pieced together using broken flooring from his dilapidated flat. He wretched as he realized that he was placing his hand in the human excrement of hundreds of individuals dumb enough to sit on overflowing makeshift latrine holes. He placed the ladder here four days ago, and a pipe must have burst in the meantime. Without running water, the pipes backed up and burst, allowing human waste to drip and ooze to the ground beneath. He regained his composure and breathed a sigh of relief as he felt the splintered wood of the ladder under the slick black sludge. He ran as fast as he could to the wall behind him and placed the ladder into position. As he climbed the seven feet to the top of the ladder, slipping on each rung as he climbed, he saw out of the corner of his eye the bright yellow and white light of the monster’s eye approaching his position. He quickly jumped the two feet and grabbed the top of the wall, but was too weak to pull his body up quick enough to clear the top.

   “Stop or I will shoot,” screamed a young but commanding voice. Aleksander instinctively let go of the top and came crashing to the hard ground, twisting his ankle.

    “You, you will come with me now,” commanded the young SS Sergeant. Aleksander looked at the boy and could see that he could not have been more than twenty. Very young for a noncommissioned officer, he thought. Aleksander rose to his feet and decided that he would plead with the young man. Aleksander guessed by looking at the boy’s smooth baby face and large innocent blue eyes, that this young man was not yet hardened by killing civilians. He was not yet twisted by Dr. Joseph Goebbels propaganda machine that dehumanized human beings into a complete state of worthlessness.

     “Young man, he began, I need your attention for just a moment. You look like a student I had at the University.” This was not a lie. Aleksander looked closer at the young man’s face and remembered him from the hundreds of students who passed through his lecture hall. “Your name is Hermann Kline, I remember you.” Hermann was an exchange student. Aleksander remembered him because he was in the young genius programs sponsored by the University. Although only fifteen at the time, young Hermann was operating on an University level. What a sorry state of the world, thought Aleksander, as he considered a child prodigy acting as an armed thug. The boy’s intellect decaying under the bright lights of the Nazi search lights.

      “Professor, I remember you also, stated Hermann with a tone that changed from commanding to pleasantly surprised. You should not have tried to escape professor. We are hanging people for much less as examples to the others.”

            “I understand young man. Do your duty like a good German soldier.” These words seemed to influence the young man.

            “Listen sir, I could be hanged myself for this but I respect you. I am going to place you in building number seven. This is the best I can do. You will also sew the yellow star on your jacket.”

            Aleksander, like many others in the camp, understood that building seven was reserved for workers transferred to one of the many work camps throughout Poland. He also understood that most workers died within six months of transfer. He was grateful for at least another six months to live, to attempt escape on another day.

            “I will never forget this Hermann. One day, your kind actions will be rewarded.”

            That night Aleksander stood in a small room of building number seven with others awaiting transportation to Auschwitz concentration camp. He stared at the yellow star on his coat, still caked with the mud and filth of the ghetto, uncertain of the fate that awaited him.

Killing Hans Gruber

  Anastazja returned to the camp with the other workers at seven in the evening, tired with hands still bleeding from being pinched between the artillery shells traveling down the steel rollers. Her job, for the last several years, was to inspect and reject any shell with the slightest blemish. Not a bad job, she thought, compared to the other tasks assigned to other workers. Other sections of the plant involved breathing, and handling, various powders and chemicals known to cause strange illnesses over time. She was not much interested in the types of chemicals used in the process. She was simply glad to have one of the easiest positions in the plant. Her hands would sometimes become trapped between the heavy shells if she was not quick enough taking the defects off the line, but this was a small price to pay for not becoming ill. Illness meant death. It was becoming much more common for SS overseers to take sick workers into the lot out back of the plant, never to be seen or heard again. She would watch as a pale coughing girl was dragged out the large steel doors just a few feet from her station. She would avoid making eye contact with the guard, in fear of meeting the same fate. She never saw the actual execution at the plant, but she could clearly hear a single shot being fired just seconds after the steel doors clanged shut. This was a sound she would hear in her sleep for the rest of her life.

         She purposely walked slowly in front of the front gate guard house to attract the beast’s attention. She did not even have to see his beady eyes gaze at her from the shadows of the small guard shack. She walked to the one place she knew would be secluded at this time of the evening. Just several hundred yards from the tailor shop, on the Western side of the city, stands a small building used for housing various tools for the workers. A small space filled with shovels, rakes, hedge cutters etc. She walked slowly towards the supply building using backstreets so as not to be seen by any of the SS guards or Jewish police. She was not concerned with inhabitants of the ghetto seeing her enter the house. Hans Gruber was known as the beast for good reason. He reveled in searching the faces of the ghetto inhabitants, always watchful for the slightest provocation to kill. Anastazja recalled to memory a specific incident; fuel for the fire already consuming her since the death