Humanity of the Broken [ Band of Brothers ] 2

FORTY-SIX

June 16, 1945

Alice looked down at the papers shuffled her way. She stood in a room filled with other members of intelligence as well as three officers from the USSR. Sink and Strayer had gathered everyone together to do some discussion on what they felt would be a good way to maintain order in occupied Austria. She'd said her piece, reminding everyone of how the collapsed economy in Germany after the Great War had led to the Nazi regime. Not many had taken to that kindly, so she'd sat back and kept her mouth shut.

They didn't want her opinions, really. Least of all the three Soviets. Not that she could really blame them; her name was enough to tell them she was German. On the bright side, they hadn't been bothered by her sex. One of them had even mentioned a few women in the context of the Soviet military.

So as they droned on, Nixon currently talking to one of the three Soviet men with Sink, Alice just sorted papers. She grabbed a file from the table and moved off to the side. This one was in German with only loose English translations. Mostly the translations were Russian. As she half-listened to Strayer and another Soviet arguing over Berlin like dogs over table scraps, she flipped open the file.

A photo had been paperclipped to the dossier. Becker, Franz. Rank of Oberstleutnant. Dark hair, greying. Large build. Fifty-seven years old. Commandant.

She read through the German report. With each sentence, she felt herself trembling more and more. Commandant. The man had been in charge of a labor camp in southern Germany. A labor camp just like Kaufering. Her grip on the file tightened. A note in Russian had been scribbled at the bottom.

Glancing up, Alice caught sight of the last of the three Russians. He stood by the table, reading through other files. She picked her over.

"Could you translate this, please?" she asked him. "Unfortunately Russian is not one of the languages I'm familiar with."

As he turned towards her with a small smile, he looked from her face to the document. He nodded. "It's a location. About ten miles East of here, up the mountain, a small house. One of our informants believes it may be this man." He pointed to the picture. "We've not been able to confirm. But I believe it is true."

Alice stared from him, to the black and white photo on the page. When he pointed out the location on a map, Alice nodded. Ten miles east. A commandant of a camp that had been built to eradicate her people lived quietly in a cottage ten miles east. With all her willpower, Alice forced herself to stop visibly shaking. She thanked him.

She moved away. Shutting the folder, she lay it back down on the table. Sink stood to the side. With a grimace, Alice went over to him. "Sir?"

"What do you need, Lieutenant?" he asked.

She sighed. "Sir I'm feeling a bit under the weather. May I be excused from the rest of this meeting?"

Sink looked at her with pity. "Of course. Go find one of the docs."

"Thank you."

At the thought of the commandant living in peace while her sister wasted away from labor and disease and starvation for two years, Alice wanted to throw up. She couldn't decide what she felt more: anger, or disgust. When she grabbed her Ike jacket off the back of a chair, Nixon caught her eye. She couldn't even fake a smile. Instead, she just nodded to him and ducked out of the room through the glass-paned doors.

He didn't deserve the live. He didn't deserve to breathe while the men and women in his camp had been buried together as rotted corpses in mass graves, or burned until nothing remained to point to and identify. Fury coursed through her. She rushed out of the building.