Omens, Pt. 2: Auschwitz

January 19, 1942

Photo by Frederick Wallace on Unsplash

Heinrich Tanzler watched grimly as the Juden spilled out of the train cars into the pouring rain. They winced as the freezing water instantly drenched them.

Rats, thought Tanzler. Like rats in the sewers.

As a child he had heard stories about the Juden. They were described as parasitic creatures that only changed to human form when they left their nests. Tanzler doubted this was true, but in the Hitler Youth it was encouraged to imagine what the Juden must look like beneath their human skins. Tanzler shrugged his ulster more tightly around his shoulders. How things had changed in a year. The day of his sixteenth birthday, his father had marched him to headquarters to enlist. We must be eager to serve the Führer.

It had been simpler in the Hitler Youth. All Tanzler had to do back then was say the right things, hate the right things and display manic enthusiasm when he Hail, Hitler’ed. Now he carried a Luger, saw thousands of Jews every day and knew how the parasites were dealt with.

Like rats.

Smoke was still rising from the crematorium behind him. It mixed with the rain and covered everything in a steamy, acrid mist. Tanzler was used to the smell.

A woman stepped off of the train and immediately slipped in the ankle-deep mud. She fell against the side of the train. Tanzler couldn’t hear it through the rain, but he saw the impact as the woman’s head hit the sliding door of the cattle car.

“Steh auf!”

A middle-aged officer stepped forward and yanked the woman to her feet. Rain mixed with blood as it ran down the hand she pressed to her head. She staggered and reached out blindly. “Klaudia. Klaudia! Moja córka!” She clung to the officer, struggling to find the words in his language. “Meine Tochter! Hilfe, bitte! Meine Tochter!”

Tanzler scanned the crowd of Juden at chest level, searching for a little girl. He heard her first, screaming. He found her a moment later, and saw what she was screaming at.

A wave of dread swept over Tanzler so suddenly that he staggered into the fence behind him. In the open gateway, not three meters away, a pale figure had appeared silently beneath the wrought-iron sign that read, “Arbeit macht frei.”

The little girl screamed and screamed and would not stop screaming.

The figure was in Nazi uniform. It looked like the dead men Tanzler had seen in piles when he opened the gas chambers. Blue lips, sunken cheeks. It appeared dwarfish and unhealthy. The arms, fingers and face were unnaturally long and thin. Its eyes seemed too big for its face and glowed with an amber light. The mouth stretched unnaturally wide, a toothless, gumless void. Its voice should have been muted by the rainfall, but Tanzler heard the raspy utterance as though it whispered directly into his ear.

“You must stop.”

Tanzler drew his Luger and emptied it wildly into the creature’s torso. When the shots stopped echoing, the ground beneath the gateway was empty.