Feuer

Dr. Ziegler sent Werner out to fetch one of the doctors who'd been called to one of the barracks on the other end of camp. Apparently some people had fallen ill with something the soldiers couldn't identify so it was up to the doctors to decide if it was contageious or not. If it was everyone in the barrack would be sent to the chambers. 

Werner was glad to leave the stuffy office. He didn't really enjoy walking though the KZ, it was ugly and plain, and every corner displayed a crime against humanity. It was more upsetting to walk through the camp than it was reviving.

Thanks to his many night-expeditions with Nikolai he knew most of the camp. He decided to take the shortest route to the barrack in question, not because of the time he'd save but because that route went behind the places the workers were so he'd probably spare himself some upsetting pictures.

On the main paths he always saw workers slave away as the commanding officers shouted and screamed at them. He almost always saw children, only fifteen or sixteen, working alongside men of ages thirty and up. They dragged and carried things too heavy for their frail bodies. Once he'd seen a child collapse under the sack he was carrying. Werner had waited for somebody to lift the sack off the child but no one had and after a few seconds his body had stopped twitching under the weight. But if Werner had used to think what he saw on walks was distrubing, then what he saw that day was too horrible to put in words. 

He turned a corner and immediatally stopped in his tracks. About fifteen men were lined up against the back wall of the building, they're hands behind their backs. A few meters behind them stood fifteen soldiers, guns raised and pointed at the back of their heads. Werner was rooted to the spot. He wanted to back up, he didn't want to see the shooting. But he was paralyzed. "Eins, zwei, drei, Feuer!" The man who paced behind the SS-Officers shouted. On Feuer fifteen bullets exploded out of the rifles and struck their victims. Right in the back of the head. The mens knees buckled and they collapsed onto the ground. Some staggered as they fell, others dropped dead on the spot and one man on the far right fell towards the front, hitting his head in the brick wall before slumping downwards and joining his comerades on the floor. The Germans reloaded their guns as the next row of Russians were brought out. Werner, though still shell-shocked, managed to start to move backwards. He swayed a little from left to right, his brain unable to send cooresponding signals to both legs. 

And then he recognized Nikolai. He was the twelfth soldier to the right. He was talking to the man next to him but Werner was too far away to hear what he was saying. Nikolai slapped the gun and apparantly made a joke because both of them broke out into laughter. The high-ranking officer gave the command to raise the guns. Nikolai grew quiet. Werner watched his friends face. It was focused, left eye shut. Werner had never seen Nikolai's face so expressionless. "Eins, zwei, drei, Feuer!" The soldiers simultaneously fired the next round, sending the poor souls in front of them to the ground. 

Werner finally regained control over himself and hurried away, back in the direction he'd come from, back around the other end of the building. He walked quickly, he didn't want to hear the next round of shots but he did. He picked up his pace. Nicht nochmal, nicht nochmal, bitte. (not again, not again, please)

Werner received some odd looks from passing officers but he didn't care. He couldn't bear to hear those guns go off again knowing that it was Nikolai firing one of them. But he heard them again and again. And he could have sworn that he could hear Nikolai laughing.

Maybe Nikolai was more of a Nazi than he'd assumed. He certainly wasn't just the sweet and loving father that Werner had come to know him as. Because how could a good person do something as terrible as that? But Werner realized that his hands too were covered in blood; he'd herded jews; men, women and children alike into the gas chambers.

There was not a single innocent or good man working in Auschwitz. All of them were Nazis. Every last one.