AN: I originally planned to post both halves of this story when each was completed. I will now update this one story as chapters are finalized instead. The following chapter contains descriptions of World War II scenes. Discretion advised.

SECHZEHN

Ich grolle nicht

June, 1943

Auschwitz-Birkenau

A thin, gray-haired man stepped off a train car along with several hundred others. Affixed to the front of his gray shirt was a yellow six-pointed star, the same star that could be seen on at least half of the men and women who were now disembarking and walking toward a large brick building. The man had heard about this place before—he had heard people in the street refer to it as "the gates of hell", the kind of place where an exit isn't necessary, as nobody ever leaves once they go in—but he never thought he would actually wind up there. To Dietrich Sterlitz, the realities of what was happening around him over the past few years never sunk in until it was far too late. By the time he realized the horrible extent of all that had taken place, he was already being forced onto a train by a man with a gun and red-and-black armband.

As he sullenly walked toward the building in front of him, taking his place in a long line of men, Dietrich felt as if he were dying with every step. All around him were barbed-wire fences, men with rifles, windblown smoke and the stench of death and decay. The very people who populated this place seemed to be walking corpses; they had no facial expressions of any kind, no light behind their eyes or hope in their hearts. Even as a fresh plume of black smoke rose from a massive chimney, signaling the demise of the latest group of victims, those who could see the smoke took no notice. In their minds, they were already dead, already burning. They had come from all over Europe to this place, and represented every walk of life imaginable—businessmen, musicians, priests and rabbis, rich and poor, from Europe's North, South, East and West—but their reason for being here was horribly singular. If all went according to plan, the gate they had all walked through, crudely ornamented with the words ARBEIT MACHT FREI, would be a permanent one-way door. Dietrich occasionally heard the others speak about what was going to happened to them, and how it really wasn't as bad as he heard it would be. It was just a temporary holding facility, they said; in a few weeks, everyone would be relocated somewhere else, somewhere that didn't have two-front war on its hands and bombs falling out of the sky every five minutes. The rooms where huge numbers of people were executed every hour on the hour weren't really gas chambers, but shower rooms instead; this whole place was a "work camp"; the smoke was coming from the kitchen, not the crematoria. Dietrich Sterlitz never believed a word of it. He saw no use deluding himself, as he knew exactly what awaited him on the other side.

As he took one final look at the outside world, a desolate landscape covered in overcast cloud and wisps of acrid smoke, he saw something which temporarily stopped him in his tracks. He had caught the gaze of a soldier, a boy no older than eighteen, standing guard at another doorway. Like the other guards, he was wearing a red armband and carried a loaded Kar-98, but unlike the others, his cheeks were wet from an endless flow of tears, and the whites of his eyes had turned scarlet red. For a moment, condemner and condemned looked each other in the eye, and spoke words which neither would ever forget.

"Please…" the youngster said as he dropped down onto one knee and bowed his head, not caring in the least about what would happen if another guard saw him. "Forgive me!"

"I forgive you, child. I forgive you." With that, the last words he would ever speak, Dietrich Sterlitz walked through the door and left the world forever.

Present time

Kenya

Hermann had never thought much about his great-grandfather. He did not know the specifics of Dietrich Sterlitz's death; all he knew was that in 1943, he had been murdered along with millions of others in the concentration camps. Dietrich was an afterthought more often than not: as he had died several decades before Hermann's birth, and neither Hermann's father nor his grandfather had ever known him personally, most of what Hermann knew was based on years-old anecdotes of debatable veracity. Now, however, everything seemed quite different. As he paced back and forth in front of the cave, still trying to shake the images of his mentor's death out of his mind, Hermann couldn't help being drawn back to manufactured memories of a man he had never known. Thanks mostly to his little conversation with Markos, he could accept the fact that Friedrich Ross had died, but coming to terms with such a state of affairs was another matter entirely.

Hermann had never really intended to go off on such a morbid tangent that night when he and Kopa couldn't seem to get to sleep. In the trauma ward at Stuttgart, he had said many things to young patients in recovery, but how his family had suffered at the hands of a genocidal maniac was never among them. To him, there was nothing illogical about omitting that particular piece of personal history should a patient ask about who he was and what he did; after all, in an environment where positive thinking and outlook was all but required, most patients would probably not benefit from hearing it. Then again, none of his patients back in Germany had been Kopa. As much as he always tried to avoid the subject, Dietrich's story had jumped right to the front of his mind as soon as he heard Kopa talking about "bad people" that night, as if it had been waiting all along for a chance to be told. More than that, though, it was the similarities between Dietrich Sterlitz and Friedrich Ross that kept Hermann up at night…not in how they lived, but in how they had died. He told himself that everything would resolve itself in due time, that the grisly thoughts and images would fade away just as they had come, but never really believed such a statement to be true. And so it was that only a few nights after he had first brought up the matter of Dietrich Sterlitz under the star-covered African sky, Hermann found himself standing on the same rock, looking up at the same sky and the same stars, desperately in search of answers. Like that first night, he thought himself alone, but in yet another similarity, he wasn't correct in his thinking this time either.

"I know what's wrong with you, Hermann." It was Kopa, who had crept up behind him as he stood, oblivious, gazing at the stars. "It's Friedrich, isn't it? Mom told me what happened back in Germany."

"Herr Friedrich is only part of it," Hermann replied. "Besides, it's nothing a cub such as you need worry himself with. You have to focus on getting better; I'll focus on myself."

"But I can't get better unless you're better…and you're not. I know I'm not a doctor…"

"No, you're not."

"But I can still see something's wrong. Just tell me, I won't let anyone else know. When I'm sad, I always talk to someone."

"Wie du möchtest," Hermann said with a heavy sigh. "As you wish. You remember what I told you about my great-grandfather, right?"

"Of course I remember. He was killed, and so was Markos's great-grandfather."

"Right…and you obviously know what happened last week, how my boss at the hospital was killed as well."

"Mom told me he died in an explosion. Is that right?"

"Technically, yes, but it wasn't an accident. The explosion came from a bomb…someone sent it to the hospital with the express intent of blowing it up and killing people. And that's what I can't stop thinking about: Dietrich Sterlitz, Friedrich Ross…both of them died too early, for no reason whatsoever, because another insane person decided to kill them. The other night, you said that there weren't any good people on this Earth; I told you otherwise, thinking that such a thought didn't make a bit of sense. But now I can see exactly where you were coming from. Of all the species on this planet, we're the only ones who would ever mail bombs to each others' houses, or murder millions at once in extermination camps. Every time something like this happens, I find myself losing more and more of my faith in humanity; I wonder just how far we're going to go before someone finally speaks up."

Kopa realized this discussion was getting far beyond his scope of knowledge—due to his youth, he was rather ill-equipped to speak about human nature and all its philosophical implications—but he was still determined regardless to help in some way. "You know," he said after thinking things over for a moment and deciding on the best approach to take, "sometimes when it's really late at night and everyone's asleep, I come out here and think about my grandparents. I didn't know them, just like you didn't know Dietrich; my grandfather died early as well. But every once and a while, I'll talk to them just the same. Why don't you try it?"

"Try what?"

"Talk to Dietrich. Tell him what's bothering you. I'll be back in a few minutes."

"OK," Hermann said halfheartedly, not sure if he was talking to Kopa or to a psychiatrist disguised as a lion cub. This is crazy, he thought once Kopa had gone back inside. I'm about to have the world's most ridiculous dialogue…with myself. But then he convinced himself to put his cynicism aside, if only temporarily—if he really was about to make a fool of himself, there was nobody else around to see the spectacle take place. What harm could it possibly do?

Dietrich? Herr Friedrich? You there?

When Hermann came walking back inside, his expression had changed from pensive to content. "So, was he there?" Kopa whispered, not wanting to wake anyone up.

"I don't know," Hermann said. "But regardless, I thought some things over, and I think I understand better now. I just needed someone to remind me that there's good in this world along with the bad…and I have you to thank for it. Danke vielmals."

"No, I should be thanking you. You saved my life, after all."

"In a way, you saved mine as well. If I hadn't been here, there's a good chance I would have died too."

"I know. I heard you say that to Markos the other night."

"You understood that much German?"

"Bits and pieces, yes. Are you as cold as I am?"

"I'm a little chilly, but…mein Gott, Kopa, you're shaking like a leaf! Let's get you to bed and warmed up, you shouldn't be getting that cold, and neither should I. It doesn't help my leg, that's for certain. Get into my sleeping bag and I'll be there in a second; you should stay with me tonight. We both need all the extra heat we can get."

Kopa walked over to where Hermann had laid out his things; Hermann went over to the suitcase and pulled out an extra blanket. He had never thought he'd need it in Africa of all places, and didn't quite remember how it had found its way into the suitcase to begin with, but he was glad nevertheless that it was there.

"Are you going to have to give me that shot again?" Kopa asked while Hermann still had his back turned. "I don't hurt that much…I don't think I need it anymore."

"Yes, but it won't be what you think it is," Hermann said as he walked back over to Kopa and sat down beside him. Just an antibiotic this time; no burn to it whatsoever. I doubt you'll even feel anything to begin with."

"OK, but can I still hold your hand?"

"If you want to, of course you can, but seeing as I've already done it, I'm not sure you'll want to now."

"Wait, what? That's impossible; how did you do it that fast? I saw your hands the whole time, and they didn't even move!"

"Correction, you saw one of my hands. What you didn't see was what I had hidden in the other one." Hermann flashed a wide, toothy grin, unashamedly proud of himself. Kopa, for his part, couldn't help switching back and forth between surprise and relief. Not only hadn't he felt a thing; more important than that, he knew he had his friend back, the real Hermann Wolfgang Sterlitz—wisecracks and all—whom he had known was there all along.

"Hermann?" Kopa said once both were settled in for the night, clad in their matching German soccer jerseys and wedged under as many heavy layers as Hermann had been able to find.

"Ja?"

"Anfangs wollt ich fast verzagen…"

I should have known this was coming, Hermann thought with a smile before taking up the second verse: "Und ich glaubt ich trüg es nie,"

"Und ich hab es doch getragen,"

"Aber fragt mich nur nicht, wie?"

"Nicht, wie?"