A Survivor's Guide to Eternity(68)

“Father? He’s your father is he, you fucking piece of shit. I’ve heard it all now. SHUT THE FUCK UP,” he yelled as he smacked me in the kidney as hard as he could with the butt of his rifle. It crippled me, doubling me up in two but luckily the people either side caught my arms and held me upright. One whispered in my ear in German mixed with Hungarian. ‘Don’t fall over, you’ll be dead. I managed to keep hold of myself with their help and by the time they had marched us over for selection, I was able to stand on my own. I had to walk past my father in the array of guards. I just looked ahead and ignored him.”

“I really have no idea how you survived this, Yedida.”

“It wasn’t easy. Anyway, soon I was in a big wooden hut and dressed in a revolting itchy, stripy uniform. It was disgusting. Every day we got up at the crack of dawn, marched for two hours, worked until dusk and then marched back. People were dying everywhere, all around at every point during the day. It was simply terrifying. These people had been stripped of every ounce of dignity. Everything eroded away at them, from the cold and cramped discomfort of the hut, the agonisingly humiliating open-plan toilets, the slave labour and the cruelty. It chipped away at one’s deepest psyche leaving only a shell, a zombie of death.”

“I cannot imagine all that, on such a grand scale as well,” replied Ed, looking down at his feet as they indented the fine grained red sand, one after the other. He glanced behind him to see them disappear into a perfectly smooth surface, just like he remembered from one of his previous communities. Yedida continued,

“It might have been on a grand scale but we all experienced it as individuals. People who I’ve met since tend to refer to the macro rather than the micro view. They refer to it like it was a school of fish or something. It’s much more horrific if you start to think about every single individual story. Everybody had their own very personal tale and they were all as heartbreaking as the next,” said Yedida emotionally.

“There was one middle-aged woman I met early on. She was quieter than the rest, very solitary and defensive. I never knew her name but she told me her story one day in the strictest confidence. She used to sit alone outside the hut on the uncomfortable ground for hours, staring into space like someone in a trance. Winter was coming in and it was starting to get much colder. One day I went over and sat beside her.

“It’s cold out here, you’re not helping yourself. Come inside, at least there’s a tiny bit of warmth from the stove and the other people.”

“She sat motionless, not even turning her head. I put my arm on her shoulder and reassuringly tried to lure her inside. She turned to look at me, her piercing eyes looking even more pronounced with her prominent malnourished cheek bones and shaved head.

“I don’t even deserve that. The hut is more than I am worth. You people are at least noble victims. Maybe you’ll get gassed finally, but at least you would be able to do that with innocence and pride.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, “We’re all equal now - we stand together in the face of this adversity. Come inside.”

“I can’t, really. I should be alone. If I told you my story you would agree,” she replied.

“What story?”

“I’ll tell you but you must promise that you’ll tell no one else. Please?” begged the frail individual.

“Okay, but only if you feel it’ll help you. I don’t want to know for knowing’s sake. I just want to help you.”

“Up until a few months ago I was a regular German woman. My husband was a war hero, killed at Stalingrad and my son, my beloved son, Jürgen was living his dream.”

“Your husband was a soldier, a German soldier?”

“Yes. Worse though, was my son. He was doing very well in the Hitler-Jugend and I was supporting his dream. I believed in the whole thing, his training and development as someone who could be a servant of the Fuhrer. I was as fanatical as him and Hitler was my hero, even though I was covering up the basic fact that I had a Jewish grandparent. We had framed photos of Hitler in every room and went to all the rallies and events. We were devout to the religion, seduced by the powerful illusion. Then Jürgen came home one day and told me he had been funnelled off into the Wafen SS. He told me how the authorities had identified him as a ‘big, tall, strong Aryan boy’ and complimented him on how ruthless he had been in his training. He was to report for duty at the end of the month. In the meantime he’d been given some time off to be with his family.

“I was so happy and yet so extraordinarily sad. I didn’t want him to join such a brutal section of the German army. I knew about the camps and what went on there from my husband’s gossip and really didn’t want to see Jürgen involved in all that. I burst into tears and didn’t know what to say to him. I hugged him with all my being, grabbed him by the shoulders, looked into his eyes and told him how much I loved him. He didn’t respond at all, totally cold and unemotional, not at all like he had been as a little boy years earlier. That training had changed him into a monster. It was ruthless and dehumanising. The stuff they had to do was unbelievable, from barbaric bare fist fights to competitions to see who could kill the most animals. They would put chickens and rabbits into an enclosure and send the boys in one by one. They each got a minute and the one who killed the most was the winner. Jürgen won every time, sometimes proudly bringing his blood stained shirt home to show me. That’s why we don’t stand a chance in here. That is how they are trained and we’re the chickens. They have had every vestige of emotion, compassion and fairness pounded out of them in their Fuhrer training. They are nothing more than heartless killers now.”