Auschwitz

The high fences reminded Werner of a prison-yard. But it was worse than prison. The men and women who walked around in circles, working, thinner than paper when they turned to the side, did not look like prisoners. They looked like corpses. Their striped clothes resembled a prison-like attire, but somehow the way they hung from their bones made them look more like sheets than clothes. The words over the entry spelled; Arbeit Macht Frei. 

Werner wanted to turn around. How could he be in a place like this? How could he bear to see people dressed in this fashion? He could almost swear that he saw a fly buzz into one of the men's ears and buzz out the other one. But turning back meant dying, and Werner didn't want to die. 

Not yet.

He followed the other men through the gates. The prisoners stared at them, but they kept working. Everyone in the whole camp knew the consequences of stopping their work.

Werner soon was relieved of the sight, he was brought into a cozy cabin, given a beer and a warm coffee which was a strange mix but suited him just fine and was asked to sit down at a table where the rules of the camp were discussed. But after he'd had a few sips of the hot beverage it suddenly grossed him out. The hands who'd served him had murdered others. 

He was in charge of getting the prisoners up in the morning and herding them in at night and once in a while, herding them towards the chimneys. 

To Werner, they were still "prisoners". It was too surreal for him to grasp the fact that these were the men with the Davidstern. Being in Auschwitz gave him the feeling that it couldn't be real.

How could a place as terrible as this even exist?

He was assigned to a hut a little ways away from the camp; the place he would sleep. To his relief Maihöfer wasn't in his group. He recognized none of the names he'd heard drop in conversations on the list. 

He was given a tour through the camp. It was a private tour, like all of them were. A senior officer took him and another young man who's jacket said "Dreist" through the barracks, over the field, past the striped men and down to where the chambers were. Werner's blood ran cold. He'd seen the chambers in history books. He didn't really look at them, he kept his focus on what the senior officer was explaining. But he could have sworn that he could smell the lingering stench of burning bodies, all over the camp.

"Kein Rauch heute (no smoke today)." The other young soldier said with a grin. Werner felt sick to the stomach. The senior officer laughed and they continued their Spaziergang. Was every man working at Auschwitz a monster? They were people too, weren't they? But how could people do things so terrible to other people? 

He was put to bed musing over how to get out and more importantly, trying to block out every image he'd seen that day. He tried to think of Marie, das hübsche Fräulein. He smiled a little bit but his skin felt too tight on his face, lifting the corners of his mouth hurt. 

Werner didn't want to wake up, not here. This place was nothing short from hell. But hell seemed to light a definiton for it. This place robbed your dreams away, like a sick version of the sandman, and then it gave them back but had injected them with venom, leaving the once beautiful dream a nightmare. But even the nightmare was dying. Nothing could remain anything here. People became shells of people and the other people, the people that he now belonged to, they became one with the symbol they stood under. 

Tommorow would start at 4.30am. Werner couldn't remember the last time he'd gotten up that early. He closed his eyes and blocked out the reality of his near future, droned out the snoring of his fellow soldiers and tried his hardest to think of nothing at all. Nice images invoked guilt, and old memories seemed false and distant. 

Werner didn't know that Marie was thinking of him as she laid the table for her grandfather; he lived a nocturnal lifestyle, one that suited his granddaughter but hardly anyone else in the family. When he asked her why she was smiling she responded that she'd met a very nice gentleman. A soldier? Of course Opa, he was a soldier. On his way to Auschwitz. 

The soldier in question, lying in the hut just out of the camp, his chest rising and falling as he slowly drifted off into sleep, was going to be spared nightmares that night. But his day tomorrow was a nightmare in itself.