The Family Behind the Walls

28. Leo

TWENTY-EIGHT

LEO

OCTOBER 9TH, 1943 – SOUTHERN POLAND

Twenty-five years ago, I would have pulled out my rifle and taken the two of them down without a second thought. The two of them—being the enemy, not an ally as they once were.

“I’m one of you,” I say through gritted teeth. The lie tears at my soul. I’ve never been one of them and I wish I had never served by their sides.

Two SS officers, neither old enough to say they were alive during the Great War, stand between the columns of horses with rifles pointed at my head.

“Who are you?” one of them demands. “Show us your papers.”

I slowly lower my right hand and pat down my pocket. “I’m a former German soldier, who fought in the Great War,” I say.

Every moment I continue standing here is another kilometer away from my children who might be injured.

“Show us your papers,” they demand again.

I pull them out of my pocket and hold it out in their direction, still holding my other hand in the air.

The officer who grabs my identification opens the booklet and stares at the information, narrows his eyes then holds it up to his comrade.

“You’re a Jew.”

“I’m a man who has served his country and yours,” I reply.

I can see the look in their eyes. Anything that once made them who they are is gone. They’re hollow people, trained to do what they’ve been bred to do.

If I reach back for the door, they’ll shoot.

“I’ll get off the train,” I offer.

The officer holding my papers reaches them back over to me. I snag them from his pinched fingers and shove them back into my pocket.

“Why are you back here?” he asks.

“I couldn’t afford a ticket,” I say, reason enough for any hobo to be sitting among equines on a train.

“We loaded the horses in ?ód?. No one was in here then, which means you sneaked on after we had secured them, and from ?ód?, nonetheless. Where do you live at the current moment?”

I’ve been a nomad for months, searching for my family through meager connections with former comrades who have either retired from the army or are no longer the person I knew. Through a hole in a wall, I received confirmation that Max had been imprisoned within the gates of ?ód? before he was deported to an unknown location, and that orphaned children had been taken to Przemys?owa Street, blocks away from the ?ód? ghetto.

“I don’t,” I say. “I’ll get off the train and out of your way.”

The officer nods and says, “Get out.”

I reach for the door and pull the lever, opening it against the fierce howling wind.

“He’s still a dirty Jew,” the other officer says. “A dirty Jew who caused our country to lose the first war. He’s nothing to us. He’s worse than a Jew. He’s a traitor and a Jew.”

The words are warning, giving me a fraction of a second to jump.

I loosen my tight grip on the sliding door and thrust myself out of the train.

A pop echoes against the interior walls, shattering down my spine. Then another pop follows as the wind slashes against me, stealing the air from my lungs and throwing me against the ground much faster and harder than imagined.

I can’t breathe. I can’t feel a thing.

With my head flat against the ground, a pool of blood spills out from beneath me in a straight line.

What was it all for? What was the lesson I was supposed to learn in this life? I thought I was supposed to find the answer before now.

God, I plead that you don’t let my babies find me here like this.

Their warrior; now nothing but another dead Jewish man.