Winfred

ii

Freidrich Von Steubon, Captain, SS

I am scaring myself.

I am the ideal German soldier. I have been promoted. I am a Captain now, rather than just a junior officer. I now run the prison camp. I used to imagine this sort of promotion, at night when I went to bed, and throughout the day when performing duties. I always imagined the pride and elation that I would feel, when my senior officer gave me the title.

What startled me the most was that I found that I did not care one way or the other.

I walk through the halls, and the men stare at me from their pitiful cells, where they are quartered practically on top of one another, without space to even lie down completely. I keep my eyes straight forward for the most part, but sometimes it is impossible not to notice the looks they give me. Some are of fear; some are of hatred. Some are just the faces of men who have given up. Some were soldiers, just like me, with the only thing making us any different being the flag which bore our loyalty. What was the worst about these encounters was the fact that I observed all of this with a detached curiosity, almost as if I were simply bored. This felt somehow wrong to me.

No emotions were attached to any of these thoughts, just a cold, detached interest in these bodies. For that was all they were to me at this point: bodies, some that would even be dead by the day's end.

One day, a new group of men were brought into the prison, and quartered in one of the cells that had just been emptied for an execution. None of the other prisoners said anything to the new prisoners about the others they were replacing, but they knew. Yes, they knew. Their expressions were even more subdued than was normal for new prisoners.

There was one man, a Jew. He was wearing the Star of David, pinned to his ratty old coat. Later, the coat would be stripped from him, to be replaced with the standard prison garb, but he would not lose the Star. It was meant to be demeaning. It singled the Jews out from every other person, labeling them, marking them as inferior. Labels are demeaning.

This man was fighting to the front of the overcrowded cell. He clenched his hands around the bars and called out, trying to get the soldiers' attentions. I stood to the side, detached from it all.

One of the guards began to close the cell door, locking the men in the cell. What this man did next could only be called crazy, at the least. At the worst, it was a death sentence.

He pushed himself forward and squeezed out between the closing doors, falling forward. Two guards grabbed him by the arms, and he fought against both of them, throwing punches and clawing desperately.

One of them clubbed him on the side of the head, and he fell backwards to the ground, breathing heavily, seemingly dazed. The guard stepped forward, raising his club once more, clearly about to make an example of the man. The other guard spit on the fallen man, mocking him.

"Halten!" I said, holding up a hand, halting the actions of the guards, and stepping forward to stand before this man.

"What is wrong with you, Jewish scum?" I demanded of him. "That you would attempt to attack German soldiers?"

The man spit a tooth from his mouth, and plenty of blood. He looked up, his eyes hopeless and sad. "My son. My wife. You...you heartless people may not comprehend love, but I...I do. And I want to see that they are alright. I want to know that you did not kill them."

One of the guards sneered. "Just for that, I'll put them on the list for the gas chambers myself."

The man looked panicked, his eyes going wide, and an unearthly groaning sound making its way from his mouth. He was whimpering now, tears streaming down his face. "Please. Please, no. I will do anything. I am sorry. I am so sorry. Please."

The guard simply grinned darkly. "Kiss my boot."

"B-but...I-I'm...Please don't...I can't..."

"Kiss...my...boot..." said the guard, once more, drawing out each syllable.

"I-If...I do this...this demeaning thing, will you please just spare my wife and my son. I will kiss your shoes every day, if it means they will live. I will...I will wipe the mud from your shoes every day with my hands if you will only spare them."

The guard shrugged. "Kiss it," he said, mockingly, holding his foot out and wiggling it from side to side, taunting the prisoner with his mud caked boot.

I was silent throughout this entire encounter. Some part of me was thinking about love, and what the man had said. Was he not right? I felt nothing anymore, least of all love. So if I felt nothing, why did I picture myself in his position, begging for Maddalyn's life? Or my aunt's? Or my uncle's? This man had loved so much that he had thrown himself into a situation that he knew could be a death sentence. He was literally willing to throw himself at the feet of the soldiers who had just beaten him, spit on him, and mocked him, for the sake of the ones he cared about. Had I once felt this way about anyone? I could not remember. I could not remember anything but the emptiness.

I was not going to say anything. I was simply going to hold my tongue, to remain detached and let my guards carry out a punishment. The benefit to being an officer is the maintenance of a sort of clinical detached-ness from it all.

But the man was sobbing now, and coughing, racking his weak body, and his eyes met mine. His eyes, full of desperation, sadness, and only the barest amount of hope, meeting my empty ones.

We held eye contact like that for a time, until the guard, a ruthless soldier named Dietrich, nudged the man in the chin with the toe of his boot.

The man broke eye contact with me, and, with desperation written all over his face, bent to kiss Dietrich's foot. As soon as his lips touched the disgusting shoe, Dietrich brought his boot up and cracked into the man's nose, jeering as the man fell backwards, hands going to his nose to try and stay the flow of blood.

The man's sad eyes, now devoid of hope, met mine once more, and the change in them was enough for me to notice the difference. He was quiet as the guards closed the cell door once more.

I broke eye contact with the man and turned, stepping to the side to avoid the puddle of blood formed from his broken nose and lost tooth, no emotion reading in my face as I skirted the pool as though dirtying my boots would be too much an inconvenience.

The sharp tack of jackboots on stone echoed down the now silent corridor as we exited, the door shutting behind us and closing us off from the prisoners.