WARNING: Graphic depictions of violence.
"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again." - Anne Frank.
Theresienstadt, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, autumn 1943:
When the main gates of the ghetto opened, none of its residents realized it, except for a few guard dogs who guarded the buildings of the main street, barking incessantly as they saw the soldiers in the SS vans crossing the streets, before getting off. It was past midnight and the starless sky threatened to rain, flooding the muddy streets and its ramshackle buildings. If there was something the Jews in the ghetto hated more than the German soldiers, was the second half of the year: the humidity and cold weather made the living conditions of all the residents unbearable, exposing them, in the worst of cases, to a sure death.
The Ackermans jumped off their beds when they heard the screams and barks outside their apartment. The whole place was a pandemonium and the Jews would be deported to East, to a place called Auschwitz. At least that's what they heard through the grapevine that had spread throughout the ghetto for weeks. But nobody wanted to go to the East; the ones who left, never came back.
"Mikasa! Mikasa, wake up! We have to leave ... " Samuel Ackerman exclaimed in a whisper, shaking his eighteen-year-old daughter, while his wife rushed to put in a small suitcase what was indispensable for a sudden escape. The yells of the SS soldiers and the Czechoslovakian Gestapo police body could be heard from the first floor, shooting, screaming, and throwing and breaking things. The Ackerman family lived on the third floor; They had a few minutes before the uniformed beasts reached them.
"Dad ... What's wrong?" The girl asked in a lazy voice when she awoke, rubbing her eyes. His father handed her a coat. "C'mon, hurry up. Wear this and don't forget the armband. We must leave. Now."
Mikasa soon heard the screams and reacted to the imminent danger. She put on her coat and the armband with the Star of David in her left arm, as she watched her mother hiding the family jewels in small pieces of bread.
"Mom ..." she called her, somewhat dizzy as if she wasn't totally awake. "What are you- ...?"
"Here," the woman said, putting one of the pieces of bread in her daughter's mouth before she could speak again. "Don't lose them. This will allow us to live when we get out of here." "Tamara, we must leave now," Samuel warned them, after looking through the slit of the half-open door to the stairs that led to the second floor of the building. They could already see the soldiers shadows, who lit their way with flashlights as they burst into the houses, kicking the doors, making those who lived inside to scream in fear.
"Mikasa, keep your identity card in your coat and don't lose it," Tamara said, grabbing the suitcase. The girl already had a couple of sheets of paper in her hand that she quickly put in the pocket of her coat.
"They're here," the father announced, walking away from the door. "Let's go already."
And so, the three of them left, taking care not to be seen, with mouths full of bread and a small suitcase as all their luggage. They had to get to the back of the building and reach the west wall without being seen by any soldiers, or they could end up getting killed easily. Samuel had agreed to deliver his mother's old diamond ring to the wall watcher in exchange for being let out of the ghetto with his family before being selected for deportation to Poland. That was his plan: to flee Theresienstadt, buy fake IDs with the help of their jewelry somewhere in Czechoslovakia; try to cross the border into Austria to end up in Switzerland, where the Germans had not been able to establish their regime of terror. They would start anew, him, his wife and his daughter; they were close to their destination. All that was left was to run a little more, a bribe to an SS member, and everything would be fine.
Perfectly fine.
They weren't going to die that night. Not in the midst of chaos, confusion, and fear. No.
Samuel Ackerman would keep his family safe.
The sound of machine guns and screams filled the streets. It was the first time Mikasa saw so many dead people in one place; Tamara could no longer cover her daughter's eyes to keep her from looking at the corpses as they fled, hiding as they could from the dangerous and threatening glares of the Schutz-Staffel soldiers, stopping here and there, heart in their throats and cold sweat running through their temples as soon as they heard a strange noise near them ...
"Halt!"
The three of them froze before the scream. When they looked to the right, a cold-eyed soldier with a steel helmet was pointing with a gun at them. The family raised their hands, letting him know that they were surrendering, as the Nazi demon beckoned one of his comrades for them to approach. The Ackermans could not see much: they were hidden between two walls, now deprived of any escape.
"Papers," the new soldier said, a tall, blond boy, the first one still threatening the family. For a moment, Samuel Ackerman thought he could reconcile with one of his countrymen, hearing that he had spoken in German, his native language.
"Sir, I think- "
"Give me the damn papers!" The uniformed man shouted, with an almost demonic rage, splashing his saliva on them. He had no need to say it twice; the three Jews in front of him handed him their ID cards in the blink of an eye.
The soldier's eyes slid over the photographs as his gaze went to the woman and her daughter, arching an eyebrow in a suspicious grimace. Tamara didn't own Aryan features at all, anyone could notice; she was short, with slanted dark oriental eyes, long black hair, and thin, delicate features. Mikasa looked like her, but her eyes were larger and almond-shaped, gray colored. From her father, she had only inherited the height and face shape.
"Are you of German descent?" the young soldier asked Tamara, as his comrade continued pointing at them with his machine gun. The woman shook her head.
"My father was Japanese," she answered, her voice almost inaudible. The blond soldier looked again at her ID and the girl's.
"Why are you here? Japanese are our allies, "he announced as if he had realized something. The next second, he gave the document back to her. "You can leave," he said, gesturing his partner to remove the woman from the trio. Tamara looked at her husband and daughter and they looked back at her, their eyes filled with panic. The other soldier pushed her to the side with the handle of his weapon.
"But ... my family ..."
"The Jew stays. And so the girl," he pointed at Mikasa. "If the father is Jewish, she is Jewish too," The soldier stated bluntly. His speech was memorized and robotic, just as his movements. Samuel and his daughter opened their eyes wide, terrified, as did Tamara.
They were not going to move them apart. Death was even better than be apart from their loved ones.
"No ... I am Jewish by adoption, Sir-"
The soldiers didn't allow her to finish her sentence; they had burst out laughing before she said anything else as if that woman's fear of being separated from her family was the funniest joke they had ever heard.
One of the uniformed ones spat on the ground.
"Have you heard that shit, Hoover? The lady is proud to be Jewish scum!" both of them burst into laughter again. Mikasa was about to walk towards them and beat the shit out of these demons, but her father guessed her intentions and held her tightly, before she could move. "No, ma'am. We're not allowed to keep you here. The Führer's orders to protect our allies' countrymen. You leave here and tomorrow you'll be transferred to Berlin."
"No ..." Tamara Ackerman tried to go back to her family, but one of the soldiers threw her to the ground, pushing her mercilessly. Mikasa screamed, just like her father, but this only led them to a pointless struggle, where the strongest and cruelest of all had everything in their favor. Tamara struggled to stay with her family, and they joined her, causing the soldiers to point them with their machine guns again. But that wasn't enough to stop the Ackermans, much less the SS military, who fought to drive them away only because of an unhealthy desire to see them suffer and even beg for their lives. They couldn't kill the Jew and his daughter, though, for they were fit to be used as slave labor in the East. That was the order. However, the fight didn't last long; It had been less than a minute when there was a dry sound that stopped them all.
A gunshot.
Two more soldiers ran to the place, flashlights in hands, consciously ignoring the woman who bled on the floor, right after the bullet that went through her skull. A dark-haired girl screamed in pain, while her father held her tight, preventing her from being the next to die. The sky was dark and cloudy, and the storm threatened to fall upon them, flooding all Theresienstadt.
That night, thousands of families suffered the hell of seeing their loved ones being murdered. Hitler's followers were merciless, and they would stop at nothing.
"Hoover, Braun, to North tower!" Their superior barked as he arrived. He had bushy eyebrows, a superb blond hair, and a severe gaze. Mikasa ignored them; she just wanted to embrace her mother's lifeless body, as burning tears of hatred and desolation ran down her cheeks.
"Heil Hitler!" The two soldiers responded, raising their right arms straight to give the military salute before leaving.
"Jaeger, take this pair of scumbags to wagon 4B," said Sturmbannfuhrer Smith to his subordinate, the one next to him: a brown-haired boy no older than 20, with turquoise eyes and a haughty presence.
"Heil!" The boy roared hoarsely, raising his right arm. Smith turned his back to walk away, while the soldier pointed to the Jews with his machine gun once more.
How many times had they been about to die that night?
"Move!" He yelled at them angrily, as Samuel Ackerman tried to get his daughter up, holding the tears that wanted to come out of his eyes. He didn't want to leave his wife's corpse there; It was cruel, it was inhumane, heartless ...
But worse would be to let his daughter die before his eyes, when she was all he had now.
Mikasa looked up in the midst of her sorrow when her wet eyes met the boy's, the one dressed as a soldier. A twinge of physical pain shot through her head as thousands of memories went back to her brains...
The young soldier lowered the weapon, completely paralyzed.
"Mikasa..." he gasped, his voice almost imperceptible.
xxx
The Jaeger house was silent. Seriousness and apathy reigned over it. A bitter taste of loneliness and vague memories of joy that never came back, nor would ever return. The colorful walls couldn't move away from that grayish cloudiness, emanated from the stillness of its quiet corners. Neither the bright floors, nor the paintings hanging on the wall, nor the posters in that old room that once belonged to Grisha Jaeger's youngest child...
Nothing.
Once, that house had been filled with childish laughter and the steps of four small feet running around, here, there, up and downstairs. Anyone could hear the resounding laughter of two children who had been inseparable, just as milk and cookies; as a superhero and their sidekick; like two pieces of the same puzzle. That's how that couple of kids had been.
"Eren, come here," Carla ordered her little boy who, reluctantly, with languid steps, approached his mother.
"What?" He answered apathetically, with no interest shown.
"I told you to say 'yes, ma'am'," replied the brown-eyed woman. "Come here, there's someone I want you to meet."
His mother grabbed his shoulders to make him walk, step by step, to a person his height; a girl with a pink dress as delicate as a flower; stockings as white as the shoes she was wearing. A delicate girl holding a rag doll in her hands, her hair combed in two braids decorated with red bows. A girl.
"Introduce yourself, Eren. Be a gentleman," Carla ordered, pushing him lightly.
Eren ended up taking awkward steps towards the girl, avoiding her gaze. He was never a sociable child, on the contrary, he used to sit at some empty bench on the park, looking at the sky, looking for shapes in the white clouds that covered the sky. Lost in his imagination, always wondering what was beyond.
"I'm Eren," said the listless, flushed boy, a shy expression on his eyes as he turned his face away.
The girl blinked a couple of times to see her mother, who nodded, giving a slight nudge on her shoulders to bring her closer to the child.
"My name is Mikasa," she said, slightly ashamed, hiding behind her small doll.
xxx
"Eren..." she said, unable to believe that the cruel fate had brought them there.