Hey all! Don't worry, I am still working on Fallen despite publishing this now. I have arrived safely in India and am still adjusting a bit, but have been writing a lot! Just wanted to put out this one-shot which has been floating around in my head for a while.

Disclaimer: Character portrayals are based on Schindler's List, the film adaptation of Keneally's "Schindler's Ark", and I do not in any way intend offence or trivialisation of the real people mentioned herein.

PLEASE NOTE: This excerpt runs in accordance with history/the book/the film, so follows the real events, not the AU situation in Fallen. This has no relation to Fallen at all.

I expect that one day, people will ask me what it was like, working for him.

They will ask me how I managed to survive it, how I kept going through the long, dark nights and unbearably painful days. And I expect that their hands will fly to their mouths when I tell them of the unspeakable horrors I witnessed and the conditions and punishments I endured.

I am free now, am I not? I am free to tell people what I have experienced and how I felt throughout the whole thing, aren't I? I do not wake fearing for my life. It is a much preferable situation in anybody's view.

I do not have to answer to a man who holds my life in his hands, and I do not have to live in terror that one day my life will end on the whim of a man who does not know mercy or compassion.

So I will tell them.

I will tell them all about that day at the camp when I first saw him. I was so terrified, so cold, and the ironic thing is, I never thought it would be me. I was the only girl there with next to no domestic experience, and I didn't see the use in lying. I thought my inexperience would save me – I thought he would not want a maid with no experience. And yet he did.

I do not know why, even after all this time.

Although I suppose it was not that long, really. It felt much longer than it was, and I feel like I aged far more than I should have in the time I worked at the villa. I do not think it is so surprising though.

I will tell them about the time I helped young Lisiek with one of his jobs, only to hear, a few hours later, the gunshot which ended his life.

But there are some things I will not tell them.

I will not tell them how the Herr Kommandant often looked at me so strangely, as if he wanted to say something but couldn't quite make up his mind how to. Sometimes I would look up and feel his eyes on me before I saw him, and his eyes would always be cold, like shards of ice. I could never read what he was thinking, and much more often than not, I did not want to.

I will not tell them of the times I would pass him in the hallway and wince, tense with fear, not only for worry of punishment for a job inadequately done, but because his proximity reminded me just how vulnerable, how alone I was in this world. Sometimes it seemed that he and I were the only ones to exist in the moments when we were too close, too quiet.

They will already know, of course, of his trial, and his execution. A few might even know how he wrote to me to ask me to witness for him at the trial. They asked me to testify against him too. In the end, I didn't go at all. I couldn't bear to look across the courtroom and see his cold anger as I spoke against him, a look which had always promised retribution. I knew he could not hurt me in the court, of course, but it would make the threat no less visible.

Mostly, I hated him. But a part of me would not reconcile "murderer" and "war criminal" with the man who would reprimand officers who looked at me the wrong way for too long. Hypocrite. The man who ensured that I did not suffer as the prisoners in the camp did. But I had my own sufferings.

He was a bizarre contradiction. I will never understand who he was, this man who could talk about culture and music with so much light in his gaze and then curse my people, steely-eyed, in the same breath. He played the piano. He would play Bach and then strike me with the same pair of hands.

I will not tell them that twisted as he was, at times I had only him, and I was glad of it.

I live to tell my tale, but I carry my own guilt. I am sorry. There is so much I regret.

Please let me know what you thought! Stay tuned for another installment of Fallen, coming soon!

- the-valkyrie-writes