Author's Note: I know Liebgott's family moved to America way before the Holocaust began. But this is one of those instances of what if? I've been reading a lot of Holocaust material lately. A lot of memoirs, a lot of articles and essays...I suppose this is a reflection of a mind struggling to understand the concept of killing millions of people that never did a thing to deserve it. This is very AU...of what Liebgott would have been like, perhaps, if his family had not left Austria. If he had suffered the wrath of the Germans in the camps.
This is part one of a two part story. Please let me know what you think of it.
Disclaimer - I do not own Band of Brothers and this story is based on Joe Liebgott's fictional counterpart, played by Ross McCall.
If death is never ending, then this must be it. Death. The end of life. It seems so final, but it really isn't. To those who believe so ardently that their hearts fill their stomachs (with the bread of hope, not the scanty, molding crusts they are given for physical nourishment)…this is a place of middle ground. A medium. It separates them by a thin partition from their beloved after-home. This is an escape from Hell and the ascent to the gates of pearl. A throwing up of hands and bowing down of knees to the tyrants of this human cage. Heaven is close enough to touch for most.
But Joseph Liebgott, an exception, is a man that cannot graze the roots of Heaven with his bare fingertips. There is not a stitch of capitulation in his wiry bones. He may be on the brink of death, his emaciated body tipping over and over, but he is never falling because of that fire in his eyes. It often leaves him lying in the dirt, in the snow, he has forgotten how many seasons have passed since his first step into slavery. That fire, it earns him beatings with iron rods, with wooden clubs, with the butts of guns to the jaw, lashings with a whip embellished with pain (barbs on the ends that open him up like a ragdoll, bleeding reddened insides).
He will not surrender. He could not, even if he wished for it, for giving up. He doesn't know its face.
Less rations. More work. More beatings.
Still, he soldiers on.
Part of him wonders, when he lies in his bunk, counting the lice that skitter across the roofs of his being (a bunk, that is all he feels he owns in the world, and in his pocket, a rusting spoon). No, that isn't right. All of him wonders. He becomes an instrument of question. Why are they here? Why them? What crime against God have they committed for such torture?
Why hadn't he become a soldier?
This is the battle of inquisition that he fights tonight. He watches himself as if through another, a separate being from the body of Joseph Liebgott (a walking corpse, the living dead). He marches in time perfectly. He works his fingers to blood and bone (often, he leaves leave his work and bears 'home' the hands that draw a map of suffering, and yet he never complains, always fights harder still). If he were not so valuable a worker to the SS, to his greedy Kapo, he might have been shot already for his unspoken insolence. His will to live, his will to survive.
In this place, there is only the will to die faster, to quietly waste away into selection. Muselmen, they are called. Towers of bone and skin that stretch over the stark angles like windows into a broken-down soul (sometimes it sputters, an engine trying to restart itself, but there is no fuel left to engage the spark).
Liebgott is no muselman. Not in essence. He is a fighter. And he should have joined the army long ago. Perhaps he would have saved his family from suffering. From death. Perhaps they could have gone away to America, the land of promise, of save haven. When he imagines America, the picture of a beautiful white church in the middle of a vast and angry sea comes to the forefront of his mind. It remains there, a citadel of hope perhaps, if the fire ever dwindles, ever feels too weak to earn more beatings and less rations and more work. If he ever feels like the muselmen, he digs for the citadel out of a box of memory…it is the only one that isn't falling apart (he has forgotten his mother's face carved of angels, his father's deep voice of nocturne, the touch of real warmth, not illusory pieces that he takes out of those caving in boxes).
Hope. Please, another day. These are words of passion now. Not poetry, not politics. Simple conjecture on living to see the birth of tomorrow, the first fiery breath of a new sun that overturns a world of grey ashes into fire again. Liebgott is always the first one out his bunk to see it. The beacon. It caresses his gaunt face as it sheds a little light on him, for him. Softly, so that no one may hear it (the guards, his Kapo, his dying brothers in misery), it imparts a little fire into his fighting soul, his soldier's heart, for another day. He keeps it always, in honor of the morning star, the eyes of God watching over his children of Israel.
Another morning means another inspection (form ranks of five outside the barrack, stand until the world ends, feel exhaustion and starvation creep up their legs like hungry vines). His Kapo doesn not like the fighter's heart that reflects its strength in his eyes. The German Jew tells him to kneel before his superior. Joseph remains silent, steadfast against the angry sea, lips morphing into a strong, cold line (hatred burned behind that quiet mouth, what fucking superior? You and I are the same in every way). Pig, I said kneel. The fighting Jew resists wordlessly, still standing like an equal, like a man, before oppression in the flesh infected with corruption. I will not bow.
You will not kneel? I will show you how, then. Stubborn pig, will you ever learn or is pain your only reason for living?
He may be spread out across the floor like a rug made of skin, his back aching with the blows, his head reeling with the pain, his entire being reaching out of itself to let the numbness invade a hollow shell. But he never bows. He never, not once, bends to his knees before the tyrants. They could have his body, torture him into reluctant existence, but they can never have his spirit. His will to live.
Another selection. He stands naked among the others. Shamed. Nothing but an animal behind their barbed-wire fence. He is starving, his stomach screaming for another piece of bread, anything to crush the growing void. He is exhausted, all strength gathering into small places where it doesn't feel so overwhelmed by an empty body. He is bruised, wounded. But never breaking. Never. He runs before his tormentors and tells them that they cannot have him, their ovens cannot take him into their mouths of hell and taste the bitterness of his heart. He runs, he sprints, he dashes through the mud that paints his ankles in their filth, and he shows them that their efforts are in vain. If they want him, they will have to kill him with their own hands.
But that they cannot do, not yet. There is value left in the störrisch schwein yet.