Bullets Rain

Suddenly I am being pulled by strong arms and military fatigues. And I can't help but keep screaming with all the regal and all the bravery that I, a girl of the Hitler Youth and an Artëm-raised, could muster.

My father stands there in the front of the tens of planks of tens of soldiers, in front of it all, so so calm, the eye of the storm, and I, behind him.

He turns to look at me in some kind of disappointment but he doesn't understand and he will never understand, but his stare is enough for me to keep my mouth shut. But for the love of everything, I will not relax in the grips of these Nazi soldiers because as they hold me, my skin itches because I think; How many guns must these hands have fired? How many innocent people perished because they put it upon their hands to do so?

My father is speaking German to the prisoners now, his breath coming out in spurts of steam, and I know that some, if not all of them, understand German because they were once within us, our nation, they were once us. Its funny how we outcast our own family just because they believe different things.

As I look at the faces of the almost-corpses lined up in the snow, that the nation I came from killed from the inside, the thing that devastates me the most isn't their nourish-deprived faces, not their sunken cheeks, bugged out eyes or their bony physique, its their hopeless looks. They're giving up and my head is screaming "No! Don't give up! You are important! You are worth everything in the world and under it! Please keep it together! There is still hope! We are just the same! We are no different! Please! Please! Please!"

But my father is speaking otherwise, he is speaking about how we, the Germans, are the gold and silver and the jewels of the world and how they are just the mere pebbles. It is a speech I have memorized because its what my father always says at the dinner table, at occasions, at hosting parties, and I suppose, at killing innocent people.
He says the five words we are taught and branded and entitled to our whole life.
"Wir sind die goldenen Rasse."

We are the golden race, he says.

He transitions to english and asks them then. "Who is the golden race?" And because they have tens of barrels of tens of guns held against their heads, so even though I don't want them to and even though they don't want to, despite themselves, they chorus back.

"You are the golden race."

The air is thick of mixed accents. My stomach folds in on itself and all I want to do is apologize, but then the Nazi soldiers laugh and smile and relax their rifles to the snow as if what was happening here was comical. I search for Oliver's eyes for some kind of help or relief that maybe, just maybe, he cares. I see them yet they are still blank and empty like they have always been, ever since after that day he came home from the concentration camps from Czechoslovakia. I feel the need to hurl but my stomach is empty so all I do is hack and cough.

I return my attention to my father who has gone back to German and I find it completely unbelievable because never, not once in my life have I seen my father like this. Because now, he seems like the perfect embodiment of a Nazi general, the kind they show in all those propaganda movies we watched as kids and as teens and then as adults.

And I hate it and I hate him because his kind eyes are gone but for the very wrong reason. The one he thinks who hit me wasn't Pierre because the one who hit me was his own right hand lieutenant. And to think that my father had already been warming up to the idea that Jews did not deserve this and that the right thing was to set them free, but after he saw that there were bruises littering my arms and he found that there was a Jew to blame, he turned a blind eye and a blind ear to everything I did or said.