Work Text:
The summer night fell upon the Cincinnati, coating the city in quietness and the darkness that hid kindly from the bystanders’ eyes city’s grim secrets. The raw buildings made from red bricks on the outskirts of the metropolis were obscured from the human sight, invisible to all but those locked inside and the ones guarding them, so that the rest of the people could squint and pretend nothing wrong was happening in here.
There were lights in the center districts now when the time of wartime dim-out was over, streets illuminated by the lanterns; but here, on the Ohio river only starlight reflected in the black face of the water. A boat drifted through the middle of the river, cutting the even surface of the water, leaving scar of wrinkles behind like a knife splitting flesh, tearing tissues and causing scars. But the disturbance in the water smothered quickly unlike the hurt made on human skin.
The boat floated slowly, its sail folded, moved forward only by the current and sticking to the right course due to the rudder held firmly in place by a man’s hand. John sat on the stern, looking ahead but seeing nothing, navigating the cutter with practiced ease but without erstwhile joy. He wore only a shirt, crumpled and loosened beneath the neck but that didn’t lift the terrible weigh off his chest that made it hard to breathe. Shedding the uniform, black as his soul, with Totenkopf emblements on it, material soaked in the smell of smoke from crematories also didn’t bring much relief.
John’s one hand rested on the rudder, the other held a bottle of whiskey. He drank to forget, to stop thinking of what he had done, of who he was becoming; frightened of what he was capable of.
Once he would sail with his friends, invited Rudy, perhaps threw a little colleague party like in the early days when John had joined them and found the soulmate in Rudolph. Once he would go to Helen straight after work and convince her for a weekend cruise. But that was in the past when he was maybe not innocent but could call himself a good man and believe in it.
He knew he should spent more time with Helen, that she needed it, needed him, especially now when they were expecting they first child. He also missed her company, her warm presence beside him. Yet at the same time he couldn’t bear the thought of touching her with the same hands that forcibly pulled men from the line to shoot them, with those same hands that locked the door to a gas chamber and threw Zyklon B inside.
His newly wed wife wasn’t pleased he disappeared for the whole night or came back home drunk at the 3 am. She didn’t scold him then though, only told him to sleep on the sofa and in the morning served him a breakfast and send him to work in the uniform prepared by her, always neat, clean and ironed.
She never asked about his work straightforwardly but she made it clear she wanted to support him. She encouraged him a few times to tell her what was troubling him and she was ready to listen to it and take a part of his burden on herself. He admired her for that and loved her all the more, only now he started to realize how very strong she was, stronger than him perhaps; but he couldn’t do it to her. He couldn’t bring himself to describe to her all those atrocities he witnessed, and did, every day in his work.
Although he wanted to he wasn’t able to touch her delicate skin, dirty her gentle spirit with his stained hands. He couldn’t stroke her belly, growing rounder every day with their unborn innocent child; not after he had shot a boy today that could be 15 years old at most.
The boy sprung from the line of workers in striped clothes suddenly, started running away and John shout after him to stop. The youth didn’t listened to the order so John pulled the trigger. The bullet hit the boy’s chest and the skinny figure collapsed to the ground. Feeling as if he was in a dream, watching himself from the side, John walked toward the body and rolled it over with his foot. The boy still lived. Big round frightened eyes looked straight at him, the mouths moved but no words came, only blood from the pierced lung. John clenched his jaw so hard that it almost hurt and shoot the second time, straight in the boy’s head to end his misery.
Only then he heard the scream from the group of prisoners and looked over his shoulder to see a woman trying to wring out from the other soldiers’ arms to get to him, crying and cursing him, until a blow with a gun butt from one of the SS-men quieted her. The rest of the prisoners did nothing.
John looked once more at the dead body before him, with the head almost blown out from the shoot from a close distance. It was hard to maintain his composure when he felt like throwing up. Reason told him he did the best thing he could though. If the boy had succeeded, the rest of the Jews would pay the price. For a one escaped prisoner, the ten were shoot in retaliation – Obergruppenführer Heydrich’s idea of collective responsibility.
‘Two bullets to kill one Jew,’ said Heydrich to him afterward. ‘It’s a waste of ammunition, John.’
John dragged in another gulp of whiskey. The liquid burned his throat as he tried to drown the memories that had flooded him in the alcohol, in the vast space of Ohio waters. Nothing brought the wanted results, nothing could bring him peace. In the deafening silence, that would once be comforting, now echoed the screams of the victims, the prisoners whose only fault was a non-Aryan grandfather. How many of them was out there yet? When will it end?
The distant noise of a car horn from the direction of the city sounded like the camp siren calling the exhausted prisoners to the morning appeal.
A large bass jumped over the water surface. Once John would cast a line, caught a few fishes and brought Helen a bucket of basses for a dinner; now the splash of water reminded him of the sound of yet another body being thrown on the pile of other naked bodies, no matter how different the noise was.
Hell, even the seaweed in the river, when there was still light enough to see them, reminded him of the swirling mass of black hair cut from the dead bodies in order to distribute them to the textile factories. No resources should go to waste.
He had signed up to SS because it was supposed to be a kind of party police, reflected John, swallowing more whiskey. After the lost war – and witnessing the bombing of Washington that day John knew already they were defeated – it was the only right motion. He had Helen now, a child soon, the whole family. He had to take care of them. A man must look after his close relatives, keep them safe. To end in a camp for war prisoners, or even worse – in a concentration camp like the one in Cincinnati being tugged as the enemies of the state – was not an option. Helen might have survived that, the newly born baby wouldn’t. What remained thus was to join the winning side. Maybe if he was alone, if there weren’t people depending on him, he would made a different choice and died in the last hopeless attack or joined the Resistance… or maybe he only deceived himself, being too ambitious for that.
Therefore he had chosen the SS, the Einsatzgruppe for Special Purposes. As far as he could tell, they had prestige, but first and foremost, this decision had provided near-certainty that he would not be sent to the front line where he’d have to shoot to his former colleagues.
John could fight against the bad guys, with the people who were breaking the law; criminals existed in every regime. And so John got the assignment as a guard in the camp, to watch over the prisoners, the enemies of the fatherland. But Cincinnati went well beyond his expectations: a mass of people crowded together like cattle, worse than cattle even, in one place. People that were treated like animals, whose human dignity had been stripped from them alongside with the elementary means to live until they’ve become no better than the animals, fighting among themselves for the additional scraps of food, for the better place in the fragile camp prisoners’ hierarchy, in accordance with the eternal law of nature: only the strongest would live. In this place no one would live eventually but as long as there was a slim chance to last yet another day, to cling to the life at least a little longer than their companions in misery – they won’t shy away from any crime to achieve that. Bare survival instinct.
Maybe some of these people, these Jews, were political offenders, a threat to a public security; maybe most of them was even dangerous before they were broken when everything was taken from them, including the hope for further life. They were the enemies of the system, the opponents of the new order, they had to die. John could kill men in the name of Nazi ideals (he could kill grown up women also, so different from Helen, each of them skinny and most of dark complexion) while standing in a firing squad. Harder was looking into the trusting faces of newly comers when he told them to undress for a shower. They were fairly embarrassed and conscious of the number of people gathered in a room but eventually, more or less eagerly, they stripped from the clothes coated in sweat after the long journey in an overloaded train. Some thanked him. And then they went to the gas chamber. While he stood beside, watching everything, being an accomplice in the whole procedure: lying to them and then murdering them.
He understood it was simpler to manage them through deception than it would be to drag them all forcibly, but the awareness didn’t make it easier to stand.
John took another swig from the bottle but the amount of liquid that dropped to his throat was lower than it should have been. He glanced inside with one eye and saw the bottom of the glass. The former US officer threw it on the deck and prepare to make a jibe; the empty bottle was a sign he should head back home if he wanted to look moderately decent in the work the next day and, more importantly, if he wanted to gain Helen’s forgiveness in the morning for his yet another evening disappearance. A little wobbly he approached the sail knots, untied them more confidently, with practiced movements. Then he went back to the rudder, made a maneuver, secured the sail string, and let the wind bring him upstream.
The dirty job had to be made by someone and there weren’t so many volunteers to enlist, which made it quicker and easier to get a promotion. A shortage to the carrier. John hadn’t served in a German army from the beginning of the war or from Hitler’s coming to power as some soldiers had, so if he wanted to gain a position before the others overtook him, he had improvise.
For the status, for the carrier, and most importantly – for the family.