(("How fortunate for leaders that men do not think." - Adolf Hitler))
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Chapter seven: Price Tags
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A nasty feeling prickled behind my eyes and made my stomach twist and turn. I wanted the ground to swallow me whole. I wanted to wipe myself off the face of the earth or alternatively, go back in time and make all of this undone.
But I couldn't.
'This is not happening, this is not happening to me.'
A lazy, satisfied smile was gracing Draco's rosy lips. His clothes were crumpled and his tousled hair stuck in every direction. My throat contracted as he rolled his shoulders. 'He did this to humiliate me, to degrade and corrupt me,' I reasoned, suddenly feeling slightly nauseous.
I felt dirty, stupid, gullible, and used. The sticky wetness in my pants made me feel disgusted with myself and I wanted to have a long, burning hot shower and scrub off all the evidence on my skin. I would use the shampoo and soap that the camp doctor gave me not long ago and wash off all these thoughts that Draco Malfoy had forced in my head.
Then he reached out and as his fingers touched my cheek, I jerked away from the touch, as if burnt. He lowered his hand and looked at me with a deep frown on his face. Those grey eyes suddenly turned less playful, all the mirth vanishing from Draco's face.
"I see how it is," he said darkly and looked away, jaw clenching.
I rose up while he still lay on the ground, propped up by his elbows, and I swallowed, as my throat felt dry as sandpaper. The moon's cold light cast dark, artistic shadows on his angular face. 'How could someone so beautiful be so deceitful? It's wrong.'
'Or then you're wrong. Given any thought to that possibility?'
'Shut up! I know I'm right.'
"What the fuck did you expect, then?"
"Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I've learned to expect nothing short of hatred from your lot."
Once again I wanted to let all my anger out and rant and kick and demand answers from someone wiser than me as I desperately wanted to know what was happening to me.
I knew I had options. I knew I could get rid of the problem itself by getting rid of the object of my desires. It would probably have been the logical and smart thing to do, after all. I would have been lying to myself had I claimed there was no turning back, of course, but something deep within me told me to hang on to this and see what Ms. Destiny had in store for him and me.
"You don't know a thing about me," I ground out.
I fished out a couple of food coins that I had found lying around in our room and had slid in my pocket. No one was going to miss them; I knew that for a fact. To us, the guards, they were worthless. I handed the three miserable, dirty coins to Draco whose mouth dropped open at the sight of them, as if they were made of gold and diamonds. To him they probably were more precious than any treasure on earth. His whole face lit up as he squeezed them in his hand, hardly believing they were actually there. The very same look of disbelief made his features glow the same way as when I had given him the ridiculous little piece of bread.
"Thank you," he whimpered, breathless. "I don't know why you're doing this, why you chose me, but thank you… God, I don't know what to make of you."
'Seeking absolution? Does it give you some sick pleasure to give him hope, when in fact there is none for his kind? Or do you want him to show you his gratitude like a good little whore should?'
"You're Jewish. How did they find out that you're a faggot as well?" I spat out the word 'faggot' like it was poison. He didn't seem affected by it, though, and I scowled.
"I don't see how that is any of your business," he said, but knew that it would be very unwise to not answer. "Someone thought they'd be able to save their own skin by revealing his acquaintances' names. He was wrong and died a week later anyway." Someone had betrayed him. A lover, it seemed. The mere idea was thoroughly appalling, but not at all surprising.
The camp was completely silent by then and the wind had stopped altogether. It was so cool that the air we exhaled turned into a white mist that disappeared into the air almost immediately. Everything around us felt black and blue and dark grey as the near-by lights had gone out hours ago already.
I looked at my golden pocket watch although I could barely see it. Its delicate hands showed it was twenty to midnight.
"Come on," I said and turned to go. He stood up to follow me and we made our way out of the bushes.
We walked in the shadows to avoid the watchful eyes of patrolling guards. I didn't want to start explaining what I was doing outside with a prisoner at such a late hour in the night, so as soon as we heard an SS man coming towards us, we ducked behind carts and hid behind corners until they had passed. Hurriedly, we made our way to Draco's block, where I let him inside as quietly as possible.
Draco took hold of my arm, and my skin tingled where he touched me through my uniform. I turned to look at the perplexed young man.
"Why are you doing this? You're not supposed to."
It was very dark and I couldn't see his face very clearly. I did see how the clear surface of his eyes reflected what little light came from the moon through the doorway. I enjoyed watching as those eyes glinted like diamonds, the other man's focus shifting from one of my eyes to the other, searching for something that I was not willing to give away.
The corner of my mouth twitched upwards as something warm spread inside my stomach, burning like a shot of very strong liquor. "You didn't seem like the other inmates."
I stepped back, even though I didn't really want to, and swung the door shut as he still stood there, looking back at me confusedly. Outside I took a deep breath, almost tasting him on my lips as I closed my eyes. I headed for my barrack, feeling tired but not sleepy. That night I didn't even try not to think of Draco Malfoy as I lay in my bed for a long while before finally falling asleep.
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; 28th of June, 1944, Buchenwald
Yet another Tuesday dawned sooner than I had hoped. My bed was so warm and the fabrics felt good against my skin, making it very difficult for me to toss the covers off of me and go to the bathroom. Dragging my feet drowsily, I went to stand in front of a mirror and squinted.
I had a pimple on my forehead, close to my hairline.
'Oh fuck it, what's this? I'm too old for this,' I thought grumpily to myself and splashed water onto my face.
"Harry! Harry, have you heard the news?"
I towelled my face dry and turned to look at Blaise. "No, what's happened?"
"The Americans have captured Cherbourg, General von Schlieben surrendered! Do you know what this means?" He sounded very agitated. "They now have a brilliant spot for shipping all sort of material to their troops and whoever! It's not a surprise, but still, it has the shock factor in it, doesn't it? First the Normandy, and now this…"
"Where did you hear this from?"
"It was on the radio! I got it fixed this morning. I woke up at four to work on it and I heard the news just now."
"Calm down, Blaise. Just… shave your face." Whenever something happened, Blaise got very worked up and did his job more carelessly than usual. I hoped this carelessness didn't translate to using the razor carelessly as well. "You've got a job here; you're not of any help to those in France, especially if you let this affect your work effort."
"Yeah, of course," he breathed. "It's just hard to not think about it, you know? I thought Herr Führer had everything under control, that everything was going to turn out okay! I can't stand these setbacks."
I looked at him seriously in the eye, facing him fully. "He has," I said, "The Chancellor knows what he's doing, Blaise. Surely you don't seriously doubt that?" Blaise just blinked and I continued, " Germany cannot lose. War leaves none of the participants unscathed and our side is no exception. We've got the equipment, we've got the men, and we've got the morale! Everything will be alright."
'I certainly hope so,' I added, but for the sake of Blaise's wellbeing, I left this private notion of mine unsaid. He nodded but didn't say a word and went to fetch his razor.
"Bloody French," I muttered to the mirror as I brushed my teeth angrily. I could already see what the day was going to turn out like.
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; 3rd of July, 1944, Buchenwald
Soviet forces had captured Minsk.
My father had to go to Berlin for a few days, so my mother wanted me to come visit her. I ended up holding her as she cried against the front of my uniform, clenching it in her tiny white fists.
"Don't cry, Mother. There is no need for you to worry."
"Of course there is." She looked up at me, eyes puffy and shining with tears. "I'm a wife and a mother, Harry."
It took almost an hour until she collected herself again. I had never seen her like that before and it worried me.
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; 10th of July, 1944, Buchenwald
Ritter turned up the volume on the radio.
"The Allied forces have taken over Caen. Herr Heinrich Himmler has voiced his –"
Blaise stumbled at the doorway and hit his knee on the edge of a desk. He had clearly not grown unaffected by the news, but he, along with all the other roommates of ours, had made a silent agreement not to talk about the misfortunes of the war while inside the barrack. It made our everyday lives slightly more bearable, although not at all easy. We all had our worries, and while we never voiced them unless it all became simply too much for us, we had to try and not take our frustrations and anger and fear out on other SS men. The inmates were a lot more suitable for that part.
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; 15th of July, 1944, Buchenwald
All the milk in the camp had gone sour. Five guards became sick from drinking it the day before. At first Jerry had thought his pains were the result of anxiety or oversensitive stomach, but when he went to see the camp doctor he was diagnosed with food poisoning. Of course, it wasn't anything life threatening to a young, healthy person such as Jerry, but he still had to take a day off and drink a lot of water.
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; 21st of July, 1944, Buchenwald
Our room's 'agreement of silence' was broken after we heard of the assassination attempt on Herr Hitler. It felt like all the pent-up emotion had just burst out of us at the news and endless amounts of speculations, questions, cussing, and accusations erupted in the air thick with tension and uncertainty. Der Führer had been badly wounded and for a while it felt like we were all handicapped until we were told his injuries would not lead to death.
"Herr Hitler's right arm was severely injured in the explosion, but it has yet again been proven that an Aryan man is not defeated so easily. No physical injury, no scheme that our enemies could come up with is enough to make us crumble –"
Later that day I heard my mother had miscarried. The pregnancy had been at an early stage so I couldn't really feel a loss of any kind but Mother did, and as my father had to leave for a few weeks again she felt very lonely in the house, not being able to accompany my father.
During the first few days I went to visit her as often as I could, but my duties were piling up and I started… forgetting about the whole thing. There was just too much on my mind.
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; 23rd of July, 1944, Buchenwald
I saw Draco working by the barbwire fence with other inmates and apparently his hair had been cut shorter to avoid spreading lice. I wasn't supervising the prisoners, only passing through that area of the camp, so I couldn't go to talk to him. I don't even think he noticed I was there, as he was concentrating on his task.
I couldn't deny that I felt very relieved seeing him there.
'For as long as he's able to work, he's safe,' I thought. That evening I made an extra round during my shift of guarding the nocturnal camp, with an apple in my pocket that I told myself I had taken with me in case I became hungry. However, food was the last thing on my mind and I ended up throwing the fruit over the fence into the woods before returning to my barrack, feeling strangely disappointed.
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; 25th of July, 1944, Buchenwald
The whole camp was at turmoil. The past weeks had shown that the war had taken a new turn at some point and the enemies were growing more and more aggressive. My father had to attend yet another conference in Berlin as the latest news reached our camp.
The concentration camp of Majdanek had fallen into the hands of the Soviet troops in Poland. I'd heard rumours that the Soviets were planning on sending their own opponents there now that they had the camp captured. I truly hoped this was not the case, as the whole idea was simply unbelievable in all its insolence, but then again, what else were we to expect from those Slavic barbarians? (1)
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; 29th of July, 1944, in a forest near Buchenwald
'There ought to be more Saturdays in a week,' I thought as I tipped back my sixth beer and slammed the bottle onto the wooden table. Even though it was 11 pm already, it was still very warm outside in the forest where I and a dozen other SS men were getting sloshed once again. The beer was not exactly cold, but cool enough for us who needed to get away from all the serious and political shit in the camp. The pile of empty bottles was growing at an alarming rate as a bunch of fully grown men emptied the contents in their stomachs like there was no physical limit to the amount their bodies could take in.
"Thirty-eight days!" Blaise moaned loudly. "I'm practically a virgin again, it's been ages since the last time I –"
Blaise had never been exactly prudent about certain aspects of his life, but when pissed he became excessively melodramatic about everything. Ron tried to make him change the subject, probably trying to get his own mind out of the gutter by making Blaise stop talking about the thought-evoking, sore topic.
Ritter was talking to me about his future plans again. Not because he was self-centred, though, since I had been the one to ask him about them. This reminded me of how I didn't really have any plans at all.
My eye caught Emerson talking to a bloke from the room next to ours. I think his name was Hans. I narrowed my eyes as I noticed how Emerson kept touching the other man fleetingly, in ways that an outsider might deem accidental or completely casual, but I knew better.
A care-free bark of laughter came from Emerson's mouth as Hans said something worth laughing over. I bet it wasn't even intended to be anything very amusing.
Emerson took a long swig of beer, still chuckling a little and again focused his eyes on the other man, a mischievous glint in his eyes and a coy smile on his lips that made a thousand promises and then he said something in return. Hans raised an eyebrow and offered Emerson a cigarette, who accepted it and the other man gestured for him to follow him to the woods.
Something caught in my throat. They said they were going a bit farther away for a smoke as Jerry was asthmatic and had been sitting right next to Hans.
In the past Emerson had always refused when people had offered him a cigarette.
"No thanks, I don't much fancy rotting my teeth," he had once said good-naturedly.
I restrained myself from standing up and following them. It was a hard thing to do but in a matter of half hour I was in a state where the action of standing up in the first place was as demanding as riding a unicycle uphill.
My vision was close to zero and all I could do was lean my cheek against the surface of the table, slowly drifting off as the others still kept drinking, laughing, ridiculing each other and playing card games. It was completely dark by the time I was woken up.
"Harreeeeh… Wk'up!" I could tell it was Blaise by the way he whined out my name, but I was simply too tired to regard him in any way. He shook my shoulder. "C'mon, now…"
Still no reaction.
"Ritter, 'e won' wake up!"
"Right, Harry-boy, it's time to go now. We can't leave you here to get eaten by moles and badgers, can we?"
"Mmm… kay…" I muttered against the wooden table as I stirred from my drunken slumber for a bit, not looking forward to fighting off rodents and the like on my own. However, the task of lifting my clammy face off the rough surface felt overpowering to me so I stayed as I was until I was pulled up by force. My head lolled to rest against someone's chest.
My other arm was draped over Ritter's shoulders and the other over someone's who I couldn't recognise or see. The world spun around me.
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The next morning I couldn't remember anything of the trip back so I must have passed out on my helpers. I lay on my bed, face down, and felt absolutely disgusting for the rest of the day. Jerry asked me how I was feeling and I gurgled something in response, so he gave up and tossed a towel on my head as I pressed my face further into my pillow.
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; 31st of July, 1944, Buchenwald
Someone high up in the skies must have seen it fit to make the weather match the atmosphere in the camp, and Germany in general. It had been raining cats and dogs the whole night through and it didn't seem very likely that the weather was going to become better anytime soon.
Fat droplets of water poured down on those having to go outside, drenching them in an instant. Small rivulets had quickly turned into brooks that swiped away sand and smaller stones as the water flowed down the hills like miniature rapids. Some prisoners were carrying sacks of sand to prevent water from getting into cellars and other underground rooms while others were digging trenches to control the flooding streams. The guards had to scream their throats raw in order to be heard over the pattering sounds of water.
"Faster, faster! We haven't got the whole day to wait until you're finished digging a simple water trench!"
"This weather's insane," I said as I and my partner, a man named Tobias, stood under a shelter, supervising the prisoners' work. He was from the room next to ours so I had chatted with him before as well. I didn't really know much about him.
Tobias, or Tobi, as he was called by his mates, was watching the dark grey clouds. "It is, and after these rains we'll probably have a big bunch of sick prisoners in our hands. I'm not really looking forward to that workload. The last thing this camp needs is an epidemic."
"Yeah, fluctuation between excruciating heat and excessive downpour is not a good combination."
"Blaise is one lucky sod," Tobi said. It seemed like Blaise was usually the first person other SS men got to know from our room. "His shift ended hours ago and back then it didn't even rain as hard as it does now. I wouldn't be surprised if he had bribed someone upstairs."
I smiled. "How I wish I wasn't out here right now. I'm not a bookworm but I'd really prefer just lying in my bunk with a book open in my lap," I said, and nodded for Tobi to come with me to take a closer look at how the prisoners were progressing out in the rain. In a matter of seconds there was water running down the ridge of my nose and my neck, soaking the collar of my shirt instantly.
The other man walked beside me and wiped some water from his face. "At the moment, I would really love a nice, hot shower and after that, I'd have a cup of steaming hot tea with a spoonful of honey," he daydreamed. "And perhaps a couple of chocolate chip biscuits. I'd sit on my sofa, in the living room of my own house in the countryside, with my wife."
"You have a wife?" I asked.
"Well, not yet, but my girl and I are going to get married once I get out of here. I haven't seen her in a long time."
"What's her name?"
"Claudia," Tobi said with a voice that told just how much he really loved her. It was almost enviable. "She's a tiny little thing. I met her two and a half years ago in Florence and she's half French."
"Mm," was my eloquent reply as I let my eyes roam over the group of working inmates. Everything seemed to be pretty much in order, so after checking up on the prisoners' working pace, we hurried back under the shelter.
Everyone seemed to have so many plans, so many ideas about what do with themselves once this was all over. Tobi was going to marry his fiancée, Ritter would undoubtedly continue his studies, Blaise was going to keep on spending his father's money on whatever seemed appropriate, Beckenbauer would want to publish his book, as he was half-way through writing it already, and Ron had once told me he wanted to travel to Africa. Seeing lions in a zoo wasn't enough for him.
I did have plans, in a way. I had been told what my plans were, by my father.
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; 5th of December, 1941, Berlin
"You'll make an excellent politician one day, Harry. You just need to keep on doing well in your studies as you've done so far. Who knows how high you'll climb if you put your mind into it," Father had said one evening at the dinner table, between two mouthfuls of lamb.
I looked up from my food and set my utensils neatly on the plate next to a pile of peas. My parents were sitting at the other end of the table in our dining room. Our maid, Sandra, was pouring red wine into my father's glass.
"I don't want to become a politician," I answered curtly and dropped my gaze again.
The silence of the room was broken by the sound of a knife clattering on a plate. My mother plastered an apologetic smile on her painted lips. "Sorry, I'm so clumsy."
Father cleared his throat, and Sandra made her way out of the room with the bottle of wine in her hands.
His grip on the glass of red wine looked very firm. "You don't want to become a politician," he stated in a way that demanded further explanations. I didn't dare to look at him in the eye as I could sense what kind of look he was giving me.
I tried to gather up all the courage the seventeen-year-old me could muster. "I don't," I confirmed. "I want to become a professional athlete."
My father snorted. "You are not going to become a professional athlete, son," he informed me. "While it is important to be physically fit and let our opponents know how mighty German men and women are, let others bring the medals home. Sometimes brutal force is necessary, but real power, political power, gets you further than you could possibly imagine."
"In Hitler Youth we are told that academic knowledge is not as important as military training and exercise," I said back, confused by the contradictory messages.
"And that's exactly what they should be telling the youth. Harry, look at me when I'm talking to you."
"Yes, Father."
"You have been given the possibility to be better than the average German boy. While everyone has the chance to reach the highest positions, you are still very much privileged. I can help you on your way to become a high-ranking officer in the Third Reich. I have friends in posts worth dreaming of and one day they will step back and let the younger generation take over. I want to see you sitting in their chair."
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Over time I had imagined myself in various different kinds of professions. They had always been mere dreams, of course, as I had known just how big the shoes my father was expecting me to fill actually were.
I did want to make my mother and father proud, I truly did. I just wasn't sure whether I wanted them to accept and love me for being someone I was not.
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A/N: Thank you, you readers and reviewers, for your interest in this fic and a special thanks to my beta, BlueMonkeyz8, without whom I wouldn't dare to upload these chapters here for all people to see!
(1) Note to readers: I am not voicing my own opinion about the Slavs here (I could count as a Slav myself, I think), as I never am when I use degrading expressions concerning different groups in this story. I never intend these comments to be taken personally. No likie - no readie.
Please check the prologue for the new warnings. I need to make sure people know what they may encounter when reading this fic.