December 1944
Dachau, Germany
Roll call.
It took 15 minutes at best, 2 hours at its worst. The prisoners waited as the Gestapo called their numbers - their "names" - while standing in perfectly straight lines. It was silent; no coughing, sneezing, whispering. No one dared.
Max clenched his jaw. He tried not to focus on the cold wind, or the snow seeping into his shoes. They had already finished calling out everyone, but they needed to be dismissed. He didn't dare lift his arms to warm himself, not even sway.
Finally, the brutal shout of the overseer. "Gehen!" Go!
With the stiffness of an old man (he might as well have aged 50 years in the camp), he walked back to the barracks. Back to the hopelessness that waited there.
There was a dead man in the shower.
The men were marched to the main hall, where new arrivals were sorted. The showers were wide, occupying the space from one wall to another. No privacy. No one cared at this point. Columns held up the ceiling, plain rectangular ones. On each pillar there was a hook. On one hook, a man hung by his wrists.
His arms swung backward, causing the joints to dislocate. His head drooped down at an odd angle, suffocating. His face was blue. The man's feet hung above the ground.
Max stripped the dirty uniform from himself. He caught the sight of his skeletal frame. The year at Dachau stole what little weight he had gained at the Hubermann's. Muscle barely clung to his arms. He was a corpse.
Max looked back at the man. He, too, was clothed in the blue-and-white striped uniform. His cheekbones and jaw were skull-like. Briefly, Max wondered why the man was hung in the first place.
Just because the man was a Jew, wasn't it?
Cold water washed over him, blurring the image of the dead man.
The barrack reeked of vomit, blood, urine, and sweat. The prisoners barely noticed. They slept in small bunks, four or five to each. Each prisoner owned only one threadbare blanket.
Max dreamed of Liesel, her soft blonde curls hanging over her shoulders. Her nimble fingers scribbling words on the basement walls. And of Hans and Rosa. His accordion breathing in and out like the man himself. Rosa's conviction burning, blazing like the fireplace. They surrounded him with love and kindness. Then, the dream led to their demise, with the Fuehrer marching in through the doorway. He took them away from him. Liesel screamed his name, guards roughly pulled her from his grasp -
He woke up. One would think the Jewish Fist Fighter would cry. He did not. The tears had been beaten, starved, and tortured out him.
Max only lived to see the day they'd be reunited. He longed to see them again. Even when his fingers were numb and gnarled, when his back ached, when his stomach cramped in hunger, they brought solace.
"Ich muss leben," I must live ,he told himself. "I must see Liesel, and Hans, and Rosa..."
Another dream taunted him. Liesel stood in the cellar with him, tears streaking her cheeks. Her hands gripped his hands tightly. Her lips trembled as she said, "Why did you have to go? "
He could only say this: "Es tut mir leid. " I'm sorry.
Then he'd see his mother, and all the family he left. He sobbed into his mother's shoulder, begging her to forgive him for leaving. She'd disappear from his embrace. The rest of his family did, too. He searched the house, looking for them. A green truck rumbled away from his home. The sinking feeling of dread hung in his stomach.
They were dead.
He was dead.
There was no one left.
Five men were missing from the bunks in the morning. The prisoners could only guess where they were. It would be a long time before anyone found out.
Many of the men were clergy from all over Europe. They were rabbis, priests, ministers of all kinds. As far as Max could tell, some of them had lost faith. God was gone.
"If He were here," many thought, "surely this would end."
However, every morning, long before daybreak, a rabbi and a priest said prayers together. They always sat up, their heads bowed. Wisps of prayers escaped from their lips, clandestine and holy. Hebrew and Polish mixed together into one plea that God would to deliver them.
"To death, or to freedom?" Max wondered. His faith wavered, but a small scrap of it remained. He wondered how long it would last.
Three days later, the same men were missing from their bunks. Other arrivals filled in the empty space. Rumors spread that they had been caught practicing their faith.
They were dead.
Many years later, Max found out the prisoners were experimented on. Ice-cold water and hot heat froze and boiled them. High air pressure crushed their lungs. Dangerous drugs filled their stomachs.
"Du bist ein Arschloch, Hitler," Max said after learning. You are an asshole.
That was the least Max could say.
The thud of hammers filled the air. Wooden beams were hauled up, stuck in the mud. Swirls of blood and sweat mixed with the grime.
The Germans finally decided to build another barrack. The Jews, however, built it. Fitting for the animals to build their shelter.
A little under half of the enormous building was up. They worked on it through fall, through the bitterness of winter. Many lost their fingers because of frostbite. They did not stop until the soldiers told them to. Relentlessly, they drove on the Jews until late at night. Hours on end they worked outside.
Max's fingers became gnarled and numb. Splinters from the rough beams pierced his palms. Mud caked his pants and sleeves. He and two other men hauled another beam up, their feet sinking in the chilly mud. Sleet poured down.
They grunted, and other men joined to stable the piece of lumber. Finally, it settled into the ground. It loomed over them, a symbol of their oppression.
"Did our ancestors in Egypt feel the same way?" Max wondered. He remembered the Hebrews in Egypt, slaves for 400 years. Did Hitler plan the same?
He shook his head. It took 400 years for Moses to deliver the Hebrews.
April 29, 1945
Hours before liberation
In Stuttgart, springtime brought a sense of optimism. Max remembered admiring the small green buds on the trees. The little sprouts in his mother's garden. As a child, he'd always poke in the ground to look for worms, then cover the hole back up. Otherwise, his mother would scold him not to mess up the small plot of land. He remembered the smell of rain, the squelch of rain boots on the street. Now he longed to have those small things once more, before he died.
The SS had evacuated so many Jews, taking them to other camps. Some were marched. Another group rode a train to a different camp; some said in Poland.
Rumors were gold.
The number in Dachau dwindled. Max knew that at any time, he might be marched or gassed in a few days. Dead. His dreams of seeing the Hubermanns were gone like the prisoners. They were never to be seen again.
Before dawn, he pulled the sheets over his head and began to pray. He rarely prayed here, it meant death. He begged God to forgive. Forgive him for leaving his family; the one in Stuttgart and the one in Molching.
"Bitte! Watch over Liesel, bless her..." he whispered, the words garbled. His throat closed up with tears. No, no. They didn't come. He wondered if he'd ever cry again.
After a meager meal of a bread scraps, the remaining Jews lined up for roll call. Then the sounds of bullets ricocheted off the walls of the barracks. Foreign voices echoed off the buildings, clashing with familiar German in the fray. More shots. Max didn't duck. Better to be killed than to be left alive; he learned that through the past year. He welcomed them.
"Let them kill the Germans," he whispered.
A hand gripped his shoulder. He turned, startled and defensive. A soldier. He was about to pounce at him when the soldier held his hands up. This soldier wasn't a Nazi?
"Bitte. Ich bin ein amerikanisch Soldat," the man said, a foreign accent distorting the words. Please. I am an american soldier. "I am here to help."
Max looked at him. He relaxed, still cautious to trust him.
The soldier, too, lost tension. He nodded. "You Jews are free now. "
May 25, 1946
It is a year after. Max found the whereabouts of his family. All of them, gone. His mother, his young nieces, and his nephews the first to be gassed. His older brother and two brothers-in-law survived longer. Worked to death, his brothers-in-law perished after nine months. His older brother died while trying to escape, only two weeks before the camp's liberation.
He cried himself to sleep some nights. His tears finally returned after a brutal year. Nightmares would plague him every night, some about his family, some about Dachau. They haunted him in every thought, in every breath.
He remembered the Hubermanns. They were the last people he loved. "Where are they?" he asked himself one lonely night in his house in Stuttgart. He had just dreamed about Liesel again. They read by the fireplace, unafraid of Max being discovered. The light set her hair ablaze with gold. Her blue eyes swam with tears as they gazed at each other.
"Come back, Max," she whispered.
He awoke with a reply on his lips. "I will."
The next week he rode a train to Molching. As he stared out of the window, a sapphire blue sky looked down on him. How he missed the sight! The world was lush, but the towns scarred with bombed buildings. He saw Allied troops and workers helping rebuild Germany. The Nazis set out to destroy the Jews, and in the process destroyed the Reich they so wanted.
Anger coursed through him. The Nazis had taken away everything he held dear. Tore him away from his family. From the Hubermanns. Destroyed his soul and body. Perhaps Germany deserved the destruction. Then he thought of the innocent, the ones who didn't mean for any of it to happen. The people who wanted to speak out, but couldn't. Did they deserve it too? He couldn't answer that question.
Night passed. The stars danced across the dark sky, winking. He slept, anxious to see his second family again.
He arrived at noon. The station was intact, and so were the buildings around it. He walked down to Himmel Street, remembering the first time he did so that night so long ago.
He gasped as he looked around Himmel Street. Most of the buildings were reduced to rubble, and the rest were just beginning to be rebuilt. Some shops were spared, including the tailor's. He walked slowly, trying to remember where the Hubermanns' house was. He came upon the remains of the house. Slumped, crumbling. All that was left was the mangled metal of the stair rail of the front steps. He shook his head, mouth agape, and knelt in the rubble. Max turned over a piece of the wall, the weight of his realization just as heavy.
They were dead. He felt a lump of tears come up his throat, threatening to choke him with sadness. They were gone. He was all alone. His dear Liesel, the sister he never had...
Something in his gut told him not to jump to conclusions. There were sirens for bomb raids, right? Perhaps they did survive...
He got up, scrubbed away the beginning of tears in his eyes. He asked a few soldiers, their bleary eyes and slumped shoulders saying they didn't know anything.
"The Allies never meant to bomb this area. They read the map wrong, and the sirens sounded too late for the people. Most of them died immediately," a young soldier explained to Max. Most? Max clung to the hope that the Hubermanns were part of the some that survived. If they didn't...
He was all alone. He couldn't bear that. Not another time, not when it was just a year after he endured the worst torture of his life. He asked another soldier again, wondering if he saw a blonde-haired girl in the destruction.
"There were too many bodies to count," another said. Max pursed his lips and moved on.
He decided that a place with people who actually survived the event would be better to ask. So he strolled to the tailor shop, noting the name above the door. Steiner. Rudy Steiner.
"Yes, it was his father's shop, wasn't it?" Max asked himself. "Liesel said something about it..." He walked through the threshold, the bell happily chiming as the door closed behind him.
Ahead, a middle-aged man with silvery blond hair organized piles of pants on a counter. Glasses hung on his nose, giving him a kindly look. He barely paid attention to Max as he walked up to the register.
Max cleared his throat. "Herr Steiner?"
Herr Steiner looked up, light glinting off of his lenses. Blue eyes regarded him with curiosity. "Yes? What can I do for you, young man?" he asked.
"... Do you know Hans and Rosa Hubermann?"
"Yes, I do."
"Do you know what happened to them when this street was bombed?"
Herr Steiner's face grew sad. "Ah, yes. They passed away immediately after the bombing. I learned of their... well, after I found out my entire family was killed," he said sadly.
Max felt his heart squeeze. If Hans and Rosa were dead, was Liesel as well? "And of Liesel Meminger? The girl they took in? What of her?"
Herr Steiner tilted his head. "You know the family as well?"
"It's a long story," Max replied with a nod.
Herr Steiner nodded. " Ah, you must be Max Vandenburg. She survived, my boy. Liesel's spoken much of you. In fact, she's - "
A girl emerged out of the back room behind the counter. Her blonde curls were held back in two victory curls, elegantly pinned behind her head. She wore a red blouse and matching skirt. Her blue eyes were filled with tears and... recognition? It dawned on Max who she was, How could have he forgotten?
"Max," she whispered, tears starting to fall down her cheeks. "Max!" Liesel threw herself at him, hugging Max as if she'd never let go. She cried his name over and over into his neck. Max stumbled under weight, overwhelmed. His Liesel was not a girl, she was a woman. How he missed her! He gripped her tight, still not sure if this was a dream. No, she was real. Max had found her. Tears formed in his eyes as he pressed his face into her hair.
"Liesel! Mein Schatz! My sweet!" he said between sobs.
Their knees buckled and they sank to the floor, drowning in tears and clinging to each other for dear life.
A/N: This is by far the longest one shot I've ever written. I actually visited Dachu Concentration Camp in the summer of 2014. I learned much in that sad place; I could feel the lives taken there. The descriptions of the dead man in the shower are accurate. You can actually see the pillars and hooks in the main building, and they are the first thing you see.