Warnings: Non-graphic mentions of the Holocaust and related events
A/N: We're trying to treat this horrible event with some decency. But, for obvious reasons, these names are not going to be German names. Just go with the fact that these guys grew up in Germany, 'kay?
Summary: What if you threw the Glee characters into WWII-era Germany? What would happen to Rachel and Puck? To Kurt and Blaine?
.***.
"But how can you teach the Holocaust? How can the boys scribble down an answer however well put that doesn't demean the suffering involved? And putting it well demeans it as much as putting it badly." The History Boys
.***.
"Jesus, Puck. You can't be out here." Finn sat next to the Jewish boy his family had taken in so long ago. He and Puck had grown up together, and it had been the most rational thing in the world to hide Puck in their home when Germany started calling for deportation of all Jews. Puck's mother had left the country nearly a year before, gone from Germany to…somewhere. They hadn't heard from her in six months.
"I know," Puck looked up, his dark eyes troubled. So strange, how people used to mistake Finn and Puck for brothers – both with dark hair, and when their skin tanned in the summer they would strip off their shirts and run through the fire hydrants. Things like going to church or synagogue hadn't mattered so much back then. "I just wanted to see the sun rise."
"Have you heard from Rachel?" Puck asked when Finn went to sit next to him on the window ledge. Finn pulled a battered note out of his pocket and handed it to him, staring hard at the sun just visible over the grimy buildings.
Puck's eyes went wide as he read the note. "What? No! They can't do this!"
"They're liquefying most of the ghettos, Puck. She knows she's next. She just managed to give this to one of the kinder Goy. She passed it through the ghetto walls."
"Have you heard what happens in the camps?" Puck asked, aghast. But of course Finn knew. Finn used to have a crush on Rachel, on the way the girl could sing better than anyone else, Jew or Christian. She always spoke her mind, always had a stubborn streak of spirit that even being moved to the ghetto couldn't break. She'd smuggled letters to Finn for the past two years, always upbeat letters that described starvation and sickness with a touch of humor.
Puck drew his arms around himself. He would be grateful to Finn's family to his dying day for risking their own lives by hiding him, but sometimes when he read about his old friends, his old schoolmates, being sent to certain death...terrible deaths. Indecent, inhumane, undignified deaths…well, sometimes he wondered why he was even trying to cling to this desperate existence. His mother was gone, his father long gone. No siblings, now no friends in the world except for the family that had kept him hidden for years.
"You should go inside." Finn murmured. There were sounds of movement from down below. The city was awakening. Soon there would be soldiers on the streets (and how did Puck feel about soldiers exactly? He didn't know. Finn's father had been a Nazi in the early days of the regime, had died nearly a decade before when he spoke up in defense of the Jews. He knew decent people who became Nazi's because it was impossible to say no to the Fuhrer. He also knew cruel people who used their position as an excuse to pick on the weak and the friendless.) Soon…
"What will happen after the war?" Puck wondered. This was 1943. The war seemed like it would drag on until the end of time.
"We'll do what we've always been doing," Finn said. He'd avoided war thus far because of his age, but he would be seventeen in a month and the army was always needing new soldiers. "We survive."
.***.
Kurt smiled when Blaine walked into the shop, then got the nervous flutters he always felt when Blaine was surrounded by too many men in Nazi uniforms. His father's auto shop was now frequented by the army more than than by anyone else.
"Herr Hummel," Blaine said respectfully, putting the package on the counter in front of Kurt. "I believe your father ordered these books."
He'd done no such thing. Blaine brought Kurt books on an almost daily basis – he worked in one of the few remaining libraries in town. It was strictly under the State's control, of course, and books were banned in great numbers, but a book was a book and Kurt would read them hungrily. "Thank you, Herr Anderson. If you go to the back room you can get some cheese for your return journey. I know it is a long walk."
Kurt made an excuse to his father a minute later and rushed in the back to find Blaine sitting on the stairs. The two ran up them to the second floor where Kurt and his family lived. Up to the attic, where they could never be found.
"Puck," Kurt said, opening the door to the narrow room the Jew lived in. "Another book for you."
"Great." Puck said, "You can't get a soccer ball in here by any chance?" Puck had always been more into sport than learning, but he found that books could keep the insanity and boredom at bay.
"Sorry," Blaine said, locking the attic door behind him. "When the war is over…"
"Yeah, when the war is over everything's going to be right as rain. That's the biggest lie ever told."
"Dulce et decorum…" Blaine began, then stopped. What was the point anyway? All three in the room knew they could die at any moment. They were aberrations, after all. Less than human.
With that thought he turned to Kurt and kissed him. Puck made a noise in the back of his throat and threw himself onto the bed, very obviously putting up his book to hide the two young men from view. He may be a Jew, but at least he liked girls. Not that he had even so much as talked to a girl other than Finn's mother for two years…
Kurt and Blaine wrapped their arms around each other, shielding themselves from a world that demanded too much of people who just wanted to love who they loved.
.***.
Rachel stared at the dead baby. She'd held it in her arms for over a day, ignoring her aching muscles, her own hunger and fatigue, because she had to show this tiny baby that life was good. That it was worth living. Well, she'd failed at that, hadn't she? Sometime during the night, when Rachel had fallen to sleep on her feet, the baby had died of…something. It had been hungry, and Rachel had no milk. None of the women in the car did. And it was unbearably hot…
She prayed that the baby would find a more peaceful world than the one he'd been born into. She prayed that the train would stop soon. She prayed that her friends were safe, that the war would end, that people would stop hating.
She prayed because she was scared. She prayed because she sensed, as they all sensed as soon as they heard their ghetto in Warsaw was being liquidated, that the end was near.
.***.
"Herr Hummel…"
"Not another word, Puck."
"But Herr Hummel…"
"I won't hear of it! Turning you out in the streets. There's enough of the old guard around to remember you going to synagogue not three years ago. People are happy to turn in Jews."
"Herr Hummel, your family…what if your wife was arrested? Or your sons? I can't endanger them!"
"And I can't send a young man to die! You have always been as a son to me, Noah. I don't understand the Fuhrer and his hate, I think because I have known too many good Jews. Why should one man say that an entire race deserves to be slaughtered? Doesn't the Bible tell us to love our neighbor? No, Puck. You will stay, and if I die it will be because I stuck by my convictions, and that is an honorable death. What more can we hope for at this point than to die with dignity?"
"Herr Hummel…?" Puck shifted his weight, awkward in the presence of this big man. This big man with tears rolling down his cheeks.
"My sons has been called to fight in Hitler's army. What can we do? If they refuses they will be shot. If they go, they will die in battle, or come home broken men from the horrors of an unjust war."
"Herr Hummel…"
"Kurt and Finn both in one letter. You are the only son I have left."
.***.
Blaine didn't kiss Kurt that night. What could he do? Kurt and Finn were both sixteen, almost seventeen. And Blaine was just fifteen, and even in war-time a smallish just-fifteen-year-old wasn't taken for the army. "Let me join with you. At least you'll have someone to watch your back."
"I have Finn. I think a step-brother is as close to family as I'm going to need." Which meant something like if you join up early because of me, if you die, I will never forgive myself. Kurt held out his hands in a what-can-I-do gesture. "I'll be careful, Blaine. It could be worse."
Blaine didn't latch onto this. Of course it could be worse. They could have been caught in one of their moments of passion. A boy kissing a boy? That made you no better than a Jew, and not just in the eyes of the Fuhrer. Blaine sometimes woke up shaking, shivering uncontrollably at the thought of his father walking in on one of their romances. He could imagine his father - a tall, proud man who was behind the state and the Fuhrer all the way – turning his son into the authorities for the good of Germany.
And he'd heard about the camps: whispers that they weren't just holding cells for Jews, and since no one had ever seen someone who'd been sent to a camp again, he was inclined to believe the rumors about hangings, about medical experiments and beatings and people being shot all in a row, about smoke that filled the sky with the ashes of what had once been people.
Of course it could be worse. But couldn't it also be better? Blaine had often shared with Kurt a dream he had, of someplace where they could love each other and live together and be no different from a man and a woman doing the same. A place where they could kiss in public and not be murdered for it. Sounds nice, Kurt would say, pulling him in for another kiss, but Blaine could tell that his friend didn't think these were anything but fantasies.
They were, of course. The world would always deplore people like him, like Kurt. But he could dream.
.***.
A year passed.
Rachel, who had been sent to Auschwitz, worked with two dozen other women in a kitchen. They were beaten severely if the guards even suspected them of stealing food. She was constantly hungry, and sometimes couldn't even look at her hands as she chopped the food or stirred the pot. Fingers so thin! Skin so grey! But at least she was alive. Alive for now, and there were rumors, snatches of whispers, and the guards were sometimes so nervous…the war was ending. And Germany was not winning it.
Kurt died on the battlefield (at least that's what the report said, but could he help it if the other men suspected something about his high voice, his childish appearence? Could he help the way he sounded, the way he looked, the way how sometimes men could sense these things the way a shark senses blood? And so he didn't die in battle after all. But his death was bloody. And it was painful. And he thought of Blaine.)
When Blaine heard about this he went straight to the Hummel house, went up to the attic and sat on the Jew's bed and cried, and Puck stared at him with pity before getting up and patting the younger boy on the back. Puck, a Jew, Puck, whose life had been deemed worthless by the state, was the only person in the world to know what Kurt and Blaine had actually been to each other.
Finn didn't die. Finn was part of a raid that arrested three Christians who were hiding a family of Jews in their attic. After putting the handcuffs on a Christian woman, another pair on a young Jewish boy, he excused himself and was sick in the bushes. The woman could have been his mother. The Jew could have been his best friend.
But what could he do? What could any of them do?
.***.
Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945. Rachel, who had been dying of infection ever since that cold day when she sliced her hand open with a rusty knife, had been left behind when the guards evacuated the camp days before. So she was there when the soldiers came in, with grim smiles, with bags of food, with candy, with tales of peace.
Rachel couldn't help herself. She cried in the arms of a Russian soldier who'd offered her the first whole loaf of bread she'd seen since the war began. He held her, rubbed her thin back, and promised her a better life existed outside of the high fences of the camp.
.***.
"What will you do now?"
"Go to America, I suppose." Puck sat on the same windowsill Finn had found him that morning years before. Finn had come back from the army, staggering slightly even with the cane. A bullet had found his leg a month before the end of the war. Finn figured it was what he deserved. "Look for a better life."
"You don't know anyone in America." Finn pointed out wearily. "Anything could happen to you."
"At least something can happen to me." The end of the war meant the collapse of the German state. It meant famine throughout Europe. It meant that Puck could no longer be killed because of something in his blood. "At least I can live a life."
There were so many words he wanted to say, so many thanks he wanted to give to Finn, to his father, to this family that had sheltered him for five years at their own expense. Finn had told him, that first night after he came home from the army, about arresting Jews. About putting them in trucks to be taken to concentration camps. Death camps. He sat on Puck's bed and cried tears of frustration. I kept imagining someone doing that to you.
And there were so many who no longer had a life to live. The war had devastated the world. Kurt had died. Blaine, the young boy who used to kiss Kurt in this very room, had been killed in the town square not many months before for passing food through to the Jewish ghetto. The numbers were uncomprehendingly high. Hundreds and thousands and millions. Millions dead.
Finn thought of his leg, of the Germany he no longer knew, no longer trusted. And he took out the letters he'd known he'd have to deliver ever since he walked into the room. "This one is from the French government." He said, showing it to Puck. "I don't know much French, but in German I think they're trying to say…Puck, they found your mother. Dead. She's been dead for quite a while."
Puck stared at the words he didn't understand. "I think I always knew that she was dead." Still, he'd had dreams of spotting his mother on the street, of hugging her, of knowing he had a mother. Now he was just an old orphan.
"Who's the other letter from?" Puck asked, already opening it, already scanning its brief contents. It had a foreign stamp, but the handwriting was achingly familiar. It contained a brief note, an address, a request.
"Rachel's alive?" Puck stared at Finn, who nodded, smiling tightly. "Did you see this, Finn! She's in America! She's asking if I would want to live with her. She has a house. A job. Finn!"
"I know. It's perfect." Finn sat with Puck on the windowsill. "We'll go together. Start a new life." What was there here but a broken country whose streets reminded him of the friends he'd lost. A broken house, whose halls reminded him of a step-brother he'd always cared for. Puck was his only true friend left in the world.
"Your father…"
"My father will be happy to know we're in a new country, starting new lives for ourselves." He grinned, "Although he will probably remind me that there are two of us and only one Rachel."
Puck laughed, such a foreign sound that Finn stared at him, then smiled. They looked at the letter again, looked out over the rooftops. From above, you'd never know how ravaged the world had been by this war. Dawn was peaking over the horizon. It was time for a new day.
.***.
we've had this chapter planned from the beginning (we're not dissing all ya'll requests. they're really good) we just happen to be studying wwii right now and this has been on our minds. yes, there's only five glee characters. we could have kept this story going forever if we'd included them all - hell, we could even do vj day with mike and tina - but we had to keep it a decent length.
like it? hate it? got more ideas? drop us a line...