Author's Note: I studied the Holocaust. I read about Berga. So when I saw it in Call of Duty: WWII I was very excited. That they put my favorite character in Berga was amazing and sad. I had to know more about his experiences there and after. So despite the fact that I have 3 other stories I could be-and probably should be-writing, I am writing this. Please note: Despite what some YouTube comments would have you believe, Berga really happened. Zussman is the only fictional part of that. Oh, and if you think it was Metz that Daniels killed to save Zussman: Erwin Metz, was tried and convicted of murdering one POW. The survivors of Berga were not even called on to testify. He was sentenced to death. But that was commuted and eventually, Metz was a free man after serving just nine years.

I hope in this story, to mesh the real story of the POWs of Berga with the fictional account from Call of Duty: WWII. I hate research but I've done a bit of it and will probably reference what I can of it near the end. For example, I had to find a camp for the platoon to find to see the concentration camp victims with stars on their clothes in the picture in the voice-over before the action starts in the Epilogue. That shortened the timeline to a very difficult part. The game put the finding of Zussman on April 4th. There was only one concentration camp liberated by the Americans by that time. Actually on that date. Bad Orb was liberated a day or two before. In Berga, the order to evacuate was given on the 4th but the didn't leave the camp until the 6th. I've chosen to use the real timeline there and in just how long Zussman was in Berga. The game would have you believe that selection happened around 3pm on December 27th (12 hours after the 0300 raid on the trucks.) It happened on February 8th. Again, I'm gonna go with real history. I had to know how they treated recently liberated victims of concentration camps. And how much an Army medic could be expected to know and do for such a victim. I hate research in general, but the internet has made all this so much easier now. Just Google the question. The answer will come. The best source I found was the diary of a medic POW who was sent to Berga; Anthony Acevedo. He donated his diary and other artifacts to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. And you can read it yourself, page by page, on their site. It's chilling. Especially the record of the deaths near the end.

If, in the course of this story, I give action and voice to some of those other POWs in Berga, such as Acevedo, I do it only to serve the story, not to try and portray any knowledge of their actual personalities or experiences beyond what Acevedo's diary could tell me. I do not mean any disrespect or wish to take anything away from actual history on that account. I majored in History. I only minored in Creative Writing, so you can kind of see where my loyalties lie. BTW: I interned at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for my Master in Museum Studies.

I still need a title... Nothing has gelled yet, so feel free to offer suggestions.

Title to be Determined
by Philippe de la Matraque

Chapter One: Berga

What remained of Private Robert Zussman hurt when he was thrown to the ground. He was aware enough to know what was coming, but barely. He heard the shot and then figured he was dead. He vaguely felt someone lift him slightly off the ground. "Is it over?" he said, barely above a whisper. "I must be dreaming." He dreamt his platoon was there.

"What'd they do?" Dream Daniels asked. Yes, it had to a dream. Daniels had died the day he was captured.

And Pierson wasn't yelling. So it had to be a dream. "We got left behind," he tells Dream Pierson. "I thought I might die alone out here."

Dream Daniels said, "Drink some," and a canteen was placed against his lips, a bit of water poured into his mouth. It felt real. Almost choked him. "Easy now."

"Alright, alright. Come on," Pierson said, and he felt like he was lifted up. "Let's get him outta here. Into the jeep. Gentle, gentle, gentle." Definitely a dream. And they were moving. He tried to move his legs, stay in step with them. A dream shouldn't be so hard. But he just couldn't manage it. He fell behind. Again. No, not again. He didn't fall behind. He was left on purpose. To be shot. Metz didn't like him.

Maybe shouldn't have called him a piece of shit, he thought. Again. He'd thought that quite a bit over the last month and a half. The last of his strength left him. The dream started to go black. He was dead after all.

"Let's get him down," Pierson said urgently. "There by that tree."

Daniels nodded and moved toward the tree. He started to go down first, and pulled Zussman's body down to him. Pierson helped to prop the unconscious man against his chest. It was so easy. He had lost so much weight. What had they done? There was a Geneva Convention that was supposed to keep something like this from happening.

Two days earlier they had found Ohrdruff. Oh, they weren't the first. It was just the first camp they found. It had been liberated earlier in the day. It had shocked them all. Daniels wouldn't have imagined that even in a horror story. Piles of emaciated bodies in buildings, outside, everywhere. Walking skeletons of people with sunken eyes. All those reports, that they thought was propaganda, were proven true. The Nazis had committed horrible atrocities to the people of Europe, especially Jewish people. Ohrdruff wasn't the kind of camp they were looking for. But they were pointed toward a real POW camp in Bad Orb. Stalag IX-B.

That was where they found their first real clue as to where Zussman was. His dog tags. The liberated POWs had filled them in on a strange selection that had taken place in February. The Germans started asking for Jewish prisoners. Most of the Americans didn't like that idea and resisted. Some of the Jewish prisoners 'lost' their tags so they couldn't be identified by that letter H on them. Still some were sorted out by their names. The Germans set an ultimatum. The Jews had to be identified the next day or they and anyone hiding them would be punished. The prisoner leadership had advised everyone not to turn themselves in. One hundred and fifty did. The Nazis lined up some likely subjects anyway. An SS sergeant came and started saying he wanted 'die Juden.' He pointed a pistol at one of them. When the soldier didn't answer, the sergeant shot him in the head. Zussman was standing next to that man. He'd dropped his tags. Others followed. He started speaking in German. The prisoners knew enough to know what 'scheiße' meant by now. The German didn't seem too insulted in being called a piece of shit. He seemed more content that Zuss spoke good German. He asked for 'die Juden' again. Zuss said what some thought was the equivalent of 'fuck you' but they couldn't be sure. The gun was put to his forehead.

He said, "We're Americans. Period." The sergeant pistol-whipped him and kicked him twice for good measure, then ordered all on the square into the waiting cattle cars. At first the other prisoners didn't know where those three hundred and fifty men were taken. They asked, but the Germans wouldn't tell them. Little by little they learned though. Because sometimes those guards would threaten them with being sent to Berga.

Berga. Three hours east. Quaint little village, horrible little concentration camp pretending to be a Stalag. The stench was terrible, nearly as bad as Ohrdruff. Especially in the barracks. The bodies there looked no different except they had American uniforms on. "These were our guys," Stiles had said. They were and they were reduced to extremely thin, lifeless corpses. There were more outside. Hung up with their arms behind their backs so their shoulders were nearly dislocated. Piled in the corner. Daniels had hoped he would find Zuss, but not see his face one of those corpses.

The tracks led into the woods and when he got the clearing, a prisoner was shot in the back. Another thrown to the ground and that German was going to shoot. So Daniels took the shot. The one thrown down had Zuss's face, thinner, gaunt even, but it was him. He was alive!

Now Daniels wished they'd taken a bit more time in Ohrdruff. What had the doctors done for those poor walking skeletons? He'd heard the stories that a few soldiers had tried to feed people, only to have those people pass out and die. What cruelty was it that starving people would die if they ate? Was Zuss so far gone? He weighed so little against his chest.

Zuss was mumbling, so quiet Daniels couldn't make out what he was saying. He offered more water. But Zussman choked a bit just after a sip. The mumbling stopped. Daniels got scared but his hand on Zuss's chest went up and down with the latter's shallow breaths. His chest felt warm to the touch and incredibly bony. He'd wasted away to almost nothing.

The others stood around them. Stiles stated the obvious. "He's gonna need a doctor. A hospital."

"We'll find him one," Aiello said. "We gotta help him ourselves until then. I could get the jeep and bring it here. Save him the steps."

"He's starved," Daniels said. His intuition warring with what he heard in Ohrdruff. "We should give him-"

Stiles cuts him off, "Gotta be careful. His stomach will have shrunk. He eats too much or the wrong thing and it kills him." Yeah, that was what he'd heard.

Pierson was thinking more clearly, "There was a platoon back at the camp entrance. Maybe they have a medic. They had a truck."

"I'm on it!" Aiello stated and he took off at a run.

"His breathing doesn't sound good," Stiles said. "Maybe I can find something in the camp that'll give us a clue what they did here."

Pierson looked down at them. "You got him?"

Daniels nodded.

"I'm going with Stiles. Keep your guard up. War's not over yet."

Daniels pulled out his pistol. He nodded again and Pierson took off after Stiles.

"I've got you, Zuss. You gotta hang on."

Stiles went into the Kommandant's office but Pierson went back to the burning pile of books and papers. If they were burning evidence, they wouldn't leave it in the office. A lot of papers were scattered around the flames, singed but not burnt. He sifted through them, stomping out some sparks here and there. It was then that he saw a map of some sort. It was just a section, but it seemed to show tunnels dug into a mountainside. Stiles joined him and the stomped out more flames and kept looking.

"Here!" Stiles held up a drawing. It was a schematic of an engine. Pierson found a list. Of people. Not by name. Just numbers of people, men, women, Jews. There were hundreds of workers. There was a list of rations. One grams of bread for five men. He didn't have to understand German to get the gist of that. One per week. No wonder they starved. This was a labor camp alright. A slave labor camp, Nazi style. The POWs were just part of the slave workforce.

"We need to get back," he tells Stiles.

"I think I understand," Stiles replies as they run back to where they left Daniels and Zussman. The truck was already there. There was a medic kneeling by Zussman. "If they worked in the tunnels, digging them, with no masks..."

"My God!" the medic said as he went over to Daniels and Zussman. "They told me we might run into camps like this but when it looked deserted I thought maybe I got lucky. Not that I wanted them all dead. I just wasn't trained for this. Get your leg blown off, I got that. Take a knife to the gut, I'm your man. I don't see any bleeding wounds. I'm really good with bleeding wounds. Let's get him back to camp. We can get him cleaned up, take a better look, maybe get him to eat something."

"We have to be careful," Stiles repeated.

"Oh yeah, we definitely will have to be careful," the medic affirmed. "Let's get the stretcher."

"On it." Aiello left and returned quickly with the stretcher. Zuss was far too easy to transfer to the stretcher. He was limp and so awfully light.

"He's gotta be, what?" the medic said, "ninety, ninety-five pounds?"

"How does a man loose half his weight in month and a half?" Aiello asked as he helped lift the stretcher from the ground.

"Easy," the medic said. "Just don't let him eat. At least not much. Work him too hard at the same time and you have a recipe for a long, painful death. My question is, why's he wearing one of our uniforms."

"He is one of ours," Pierson said. "Specifically one of ours." He touched his insignia. "We lost him back in December. He and three hundred forty-nine other POWs were brought here from Stalag IX-B in Bad Orb back in February. The bigger question is where are the rest of them? There's maybe twenty dead in the camp there, four others back that way. Where are the others?"

Pierson told the others to wait outside as he helped the medic carry Zussman into the tent. They set the stretcher down on a cot and the medic brought over a lantern. "We gotta get these clothes off of him. There's a clean blanket over there." He indicated where with his head as he started cutting the coat off of Zussman. He seemed a bit surprised when he got down to the shirt. There were strips of cloth wrapped around his waist, one after another. Once Zussman's torso was clear, he pulled everything out from under him and dropped them on the ground. A cloud of dust wafted up and the medic sneezed. "That might explain the breathing."

"What explains all that bruising?" Pierson asked quietly. Zussman's entire torso below his sternum was splotchy and purple.

"Nazi bastards!" the medic said. "Bad enough they had to starve him, but they beat him as well."

"We think they had them digging tunnels in a mountain nearby," Pierson told him.

"Yeah I remember the other guy saying something about that." the medic replied. "That's the dust. If he's got that much in his clothes, he's got that much in lungs."

Pierson really wanted to hit someone but there were no Germans around.

"Get me some water," the medic said. "I want to clean him up a bit, check him over." He handed him a bucket.

Pierson nodded and left the tent. The others followed with questions but Pierson was too angry to answer. He walked up to one of the other soldiers and asked where he could get water. The soldier pointed him to a stream a few meters away. Stiles and Aiello hung back but Daniels followed up. "Is he?"

"He's as alive as we found him." Pierson filled the bucket with water and stood back up. "He's purple."

"Purple?"

"Bruises. They had to beat him constantly to look like that." Daniels walked back to the tent with him. Pierson let him carry the bucket inside.

Pierson was right. He was purple. From his chest down. There was a blanket covering the middle of Zussman, but the medic had all his clothes off. Zuss's legs looked like toothpicks with big, knobby knees. His arms were twigs, and his breaths came in soft wheezes.

The medic dipped a towel in the water and gently started washing some of the grime off Zuss's face, arms, and legs. He worked quickly though, then covered Zuss's legs and torso back up with the blanket.

"He's not bleeding," the medic said. "At least not externally. We need to get him to a hospital. But I want to try and get him eating some soup before that."

"Will he live?" Daniels asked.

The medic stood up and faced him. "In my opinion, he's camped solidly on death's doorstep. If I had other wounded, and had to triage, I'd have to let him go. But I don't have any so I'm gonna do my best. I can count five things working against him at this point. Any one of those five can tip him right over. Starvation, dehydration, pulmonary issues, exhaustion, and potential internal bleeding. And he's got a fever. Which means he's got something else to worry about. If you're the praying type, I'd get on that."

Daniels felt like he'd been punched in the gut himself. They'd found Zussman. But had it been just so he could die among friends? He nodded. He took the St. Michael medal out of his pocket and put it around Zussman's neck and then left the tent to tell the others. And to pray.

The medic was surprised to find his patient's eyes open. The guy had no dog tags. He didn't even know the soldier's name. "Hi," he said. "I'm Tom. Can you tell me your name?"

"Leave me," he said softly. His eyes were cloudy and unfocussed. "They'll shoot you, too."

"You're safe now," Tom told him. "No one's gonna shoot anyone. I'm gonna raise you up a little bit. I want you to eat some soup."

Andy returned from the cook with a bowl. "Watered down, like you asked. But still got plenty of chicken bits and some noodles."

"Thanks. I gotta think liquid and fairly bland is what he needs. Simple foods." He propped a couple pillows under the patient's head.

"Soup's not good," the man said. "Cats and rats. Bread cuts your mouth. Sawdust and sand and glass."

Tom thought that that would definitely lead to the emaciated state this former prisoner was in.

"This is good soup," he told the man. "Chicken. No cats, no rats."

"Erschieß sie nicht." The German was unexpected. But Tom understood something about shooting. "Erschieß mich. Daniels is dead. Ich auch. Lass sie mit den anderen gehen."

Daniels. Tom thought he saw that name on the corporal that brought the bucket in. He wasn't dead. Was it a different Daniels? He was getting nowhere with the patient but he had an idea. He stepped out of the tent and was not surprised to find all four of them waiting right there. Tom focused on the corporal. "Daniels."

"Yes."

"Unless he's talking about someone else, he thinks you're dead."

Daniels looked confused for a moment. Then it hit him. "Oh, no. He saw me get shot. From the truck after the wreck. I shot at the truck, but I got shot. He thinks I died."

"He's delirious," Tom told them. "He's talking like he's stuck in the camp or just before they shoot him. Maybe if you can convince him that you're not dead, he'll believe he's not dead and then maybe we can get some soup in him."

Daniels nodded. He followed Tom back into the tent. He sat down on the edge of the cot and took the patient's right hand in his left. "Zuss, it's me, Daniels."

Zuss weakly turned his head. "You're a dream. I saw you die."

"I didn't die, Zuss," Daniels said. He had a heavy Texan kind of accent. "I tried to get to you but I couldn't and they drove you away. Pierson came, and Stiles and Aiello. They carried me back. I was hurt, laid up for weeks. But I never forgot about you." He lifted Zuss's hand and set it against his own cheek.

Zuss's eyes seemed to focus on him. "You're real? I'm not dead?"

"I'm real and you're free," Daniels told him. "We found you. Pierson, Stiles, Aiello, they're just outside this tent. We all came to find you and we did. You're free."

Zuss let out a soft sob. But no tears. Too dehydrated for tears. They had to get this soup into him. "We need him to eat."

Daniels put Zuss's hand down and took off his helmet. "I know you're hungry," he told Zussman. "We have some soup for you."

"Good soup," Tom added. "Chicken."

Zuss turned his eyes to him. And Tom could tell he actually saw him this time. He took up the bowl and dipped the spoon in then held it to Zuss's lips. They parted and he let the soup pour in. Zuss swallowed it. So Tom continued. He almost made it to the last spoonful. What strength Zuss had had just melted away and his head lolled to the side, eyes closed. Daniels froze with a look of terror on his face. Tom reached for his neck. His pulse was there. His breaths were lightly wheezy but they were there, too. He removed the pillows and gently laid Zuss's head back on the stretcher.

"He's alive. He's unconscious. Let's get him to that hospital."

"They ate, they passed out, they died," Daniels said, staring intently at his friend. "Did we just kill him?"

"Who passed out and died?" Tom asked him.

"Ohrdruff, those poor people. Walking skeletons, starved people."

"The food was probably too rich," Tom explained. "This soup was watered down. It was mostly broth and water. Very simple. He's passed out. I think he's alright for now. I don't think the soup will kill him. All those other things will though, if we don't get him to a hospital."

Daniels took a breath then nodded. "Where?"

"Bad Orb."

He turned to look at Tom. "We came from Bad Orb."

"It was a POW camp. They had an infirmary. Army doctors moved in to treat the liberated POWs. It's his best chance."

Daniels nodded. So Tom tucked the blanket around Zuss's narrow legs and hips, and all the way to his chin. "Get his feet," he told the corporal.

They carried him back out of the tent and to the truck. "We're going back to Bad Orb," Daniels told the others. "They got an infirmary, with doctors."

"It'll be dark when we get there," the one with glasses said.

"So we'll wake them up," the tall, skinny one said. Heavy New York accent.

Tom went back to the tent and brought out a canteen and another towel. He handed them to Daniels. "He's got a fever. A little cool water on his head and neck. I hope he makes it." He took out a triage tag and started to write. "What's his name?"

The sergeant answered, "Private Robert Zussman."

Zuss was for short. He handed the finished tag to the guy with glasses, Stiles. "Give this to the doctor." Tom showed them where to check Zussman's pulse on his neck. "Listen for that wheezing. If he's wheezing he's breathing."

Daniel's nodded. Tom lifted the tailgate and latched it. Pierson, the sergeant, said, "Let's move."

"Thank you for your help," Stiles said as the truck pulled away.