Beauty and the Beast

The First

A quick postscript: If you're not a fan of excessively dark topics and scenes depicting things like that, you're better off not reading this chapter...but you've been warned! :) Proceed with caution ;)

You were extremely sensitive regarding my monthly cycles. You made Anna monitor when I got it for the first few months I was at your chateau, and then you had her create a schedule of sorts with the approximated day I would start bleeding for each month. You would avoid me for the first three days before I actually got my period, but you compensated for being unable to put your hands on me by making me do other equally disgusting acts.
So the day I didn't bleed, I knew something was very, very wrong. Anna's charts and schedules were never wrong, and I had never not gotten my period the day I was supposed to get it.
That could only mean one thing.
In tears, I immediately told Anna, who confirmed what I knew all along: I was pregnant, carrying your child.
I wondered how you would react. I knew that Anna was under orders to report even the slightest deviation in my cycle to you, and that sooner or later you would find out. But the idea of having to bring a child into this world sired by a monster like you terrified me.
Never in my wildest dreams could I have ever imagined that your depraved cruelty could extend even to unborn children.
Anna held me in her arms for a good half hour straight while Axelina stood over us mutely, sharing our sorrow but unable to express it. They sent me back to my room, but on her way back down the hall, Axelina slipped a crumpled piece of paper into my hand. I stared at her receding back in confusion before shutting the door behind me.
Leaning against the door, I unwrapped the paper and squinted at the words scrawled on it in black ink.
Nenechte ho vyhrát.
Do not let him win.
Easier said than done, but at that moment, those words gave me courage. I told myself at that moment I would do my best to survive no matter what you did to me.
I laugh, as I sit here beside your grave and tell you this, because I remember how naive I was to think that I could ever be whole again after what you did to me that night. I can't believe I ever thought I stood a chance to you.
There, are you happy? I've admitted defeat and given you the pleasure of knowing that I never truly recovered from my stint with you. Do those words have the desired effect on you, down there?
You came to my room that night. The look on your face as you looked me up and down was one of pure disgust and hatred.
"Come here, you whore," you said coldly.
After it was over, you hurled insult after insult at me as you made your way to the door.
"Don't think that because you were fortunate enough to carry a child that is half racially pure that it makes you any better," you spat as you wrenched the door open. "You're nothing, do you hear?! You're nothing but a lowlife, filthy, Untermensch Czech bitch. You're a whore and a slut who can't spread anything other than her legs. Damn you!"
A week passed by;two;three. By the fifth week it was all too clear that I was pregnant. You were so repulsed by my stomach that you stopped showing up altogether. At first,
I was overjoyed, because it meant I got more time away from you. But as I would come to realize, you didn't intend to leave me alone for that long. Not in the slightest.
The first thing you targeted was my food supply. You knew that in order to sustain my unborn child I would have to eat more, so you had Anna split my meals in half—barely enough for me, which left nothing for the baby. I suppose you thought to starve the child to death like that, but to no avail. A week passed; two weeks, and my stomach continued to grow.
The next thing you did was try to make me miscarriage through hard physical labor. Every morning you would make Anna wake me up at first light and have her take me outside to the corpse of trees behind the chateau. She would leave me there every day, a heavy axe in hand, with instructions not to return until the sun was at its zenith and I had chopped down twenty trees. I thought this was it for the baby, but he—or she—was a surprisingly resilient child and by the end of February, I hadn't shown any signs of losing my child.
That was when you decided to take matters into your own hands—resulting in disastrous consequences for me.
That night, I had been sitting at the window cradling my slightly swollen stomach, watching the village sleep below. It had been so long since you last visited that I no longer braced myself for the knock on my door at exactly half past 12 that night. So when there was a loud knock on my door, it startled me thoroughly. I stared at the upright slab of wood, trepidation turning my blood to ice. What I didn't expect was to have two burly SS men, armed to the teeth, throw the door open so hard it slammed against the wall behind it and storm over to me, their faces stony and emotionless. They heaved me out of the chair I was sitting in like a sack of potatoes, spinning me around and shoving me out the door.
"Where are you taking me?!" I struggled to keep my voice level and put on an outward facade of calm, but on the inside my heart was racing so hard it physically hurt. "I demand to know where I'm being taken!!"
Silence for a while. Then the soldier on my left jogged my shoulder so hard I thought he had torn it from its socket.
"You don't demand anything, Czech," he said. I was relieved. My words had been imperious enough to loosen the tongue of at least one of my two unceremonious escorts. If I kept acting like I was entitled to get answers from them, they could give me an idea of what I would encounter.
"Where are we going, then?" I asked.
The two soldiers screeched to a halt and the first one spun me around and backhanded me across the face so hard I saw stars.
"Shut your mouth," he hissed, shoving me forward. "And you shouldn't be worried about where you're going; it's what's going to happen to you when we get there that you should be thinking of."
Their hobnailed boots slammed purposefully on the tiled floor as they led me down a series of hallways and up and down small flights of stairs. The deeper we went into the chateau, the higher my panic rose. I had no idea what was going to happen to me when we got to our destination, nor did I know what I had done wrong.
We went down a flight of stairs, at the bottom of which was a heavy metal door. The two soldiers hustled me up to it and knocked sharply.
"Come in!"
I froze. I recognized that voice.
I was led into a room that was about the size of two storage closets put together, and eerily empty. You were leaning against the back wall, your arms crossed, your face stony and impassive, just like the soldiers as they presented themselves before you, standing a few feet away from you with me between them. I noticed they didn't let go of my arms.
"Hold her up," you said, pushing off the wall and walking over to us, stopping only when you were about a foot away from me. I stared up at you, words forming and dying on the tip of my tongue at the same time.
"It's time to take care of this little problem of yours," you said. It was then that I noticed you had your hand behind your back, and you were slowly drawing it out to reveal...
My first thought was that you planned to cave my skull in with the metal weight you had in your left fist. I assumed that it couldn't weigh more than fifteen pounds at most, and that it wouldn't do too much damage if I protected my vital spots, but I would soon learn that any weight swung by a man driven by rage and the intent to kill and destroy can do unspeakable damage.
Your eyes dropped to my stomach, your gaze cold and calculating, and in the blink of an eye, I understood.
The weight wasn't going to be used to kill me, it was going to be used to kill the child I carried. I didn't know why I hadn't realized it before. I also didn't understand why I suddenly had an urge to protect the tiny life inside my stomach, now moments away from a grisly death it certainly had done nothing to deserve.
"Reinhard," I began, my legs shaking so hard they threatened to give way beneath me. "Reinhard, don't do this—"
You blinked at me, most likely in shock at being referred to so familiarly. For a moment, a completely unreadable expression crossed your face before it rearranged itself into its usual stoic mask of indifference.
You cocked your arm back. The first punch hit me square in the middle of my stomach. I felt my abdominal muscles go completely slack as the breath whooshed out of me. I tried to bend at the waist, to bring my knees to my chest to suck in a lungful of air, but the SS men only tightened their hold on me.
You drew your arm back again and swung the weight in a sharp arc. It slammed into the left side of my stomach so hard I screamed bloody murder. Pain exploded through every inch of my body, the world momentarily going black before my eyes.
Why?? was the only thing I could say to myself thought the haze of agony. Why this? Why me??
The weight crashed into my right side. I heard the sickening thud of metal connecting with human flesh, heard the sound of animalistic, inhuman screaming, felt telltale fluid running down my legs.
Then there was just white-hot pain as you continued to hammer away at my abdomen, as if those two savage blows weren't enough to snuff out my child's life.
What drove you to do such a thing, Reinhard? Did you really abhor the idea of a child fathered by you having a Czech mother that much? What would it have hurt you to arrange for a proper and civilized abortion?
I still think about that child sometimes, and of the posthumous siblings it could have had. Was it a boy or a girl? What would I have called it? Did it have your platinum blonde hair or my dirty blonde locks? Did it have light blue eyes like yours or deep blue ones tinged with gray, like mine? What would its life have been like if you had let it live? Would you have carted it off to a concentration camp as a Mischling, a half-breed? Or would you have let me raise it as one of your own?
Maybe it had to be done, for the sake of sparing it a life of unhappiness and misery? Maybe my grief was unfounded after all. Could it be that the death of my first child was nothing more than a sacrifice for the greater good?