A/N: This was a project I did for school, to take a character from the novel and create a parallel plot (or basically, just their perspective in the novel) for them. The most important thing to me when writing this was doing this character if even just a tiny bit of justice, and after penning it down after more research, I felt the utmost guilt (and still do) for even attempting to try and capture the perspective of one at the hands of this human atrocity, and as Elie Wiesel said, "If you weren't there, don't write about it." But even as the author of this book reiterated the same thing, he also said that we are writers, and this is, naturally, our way of communicating. If I had all the time in the world, I don't know if I could have even finished this, but I tried the best I could...Thank you for reading-I very much appreciate it.
Pavel didn't dare let his shoulders slacken or his sunken brown eyes wander about the kitchen of the soldier's home. Boring meticulously into the harrowing task of carving heap after heap of potato skin atop a bed of yellow-tinged newspapers, he just about heaved with each toilsome breath that placed an awful strain on his lungs.
It seemed his mind, under the suffocating weight of the agonizing effort it required, had become helplessly accustomed to attempting to reel him far back under the grainy film of another world when he felt he couldn't breathe much more, and it may have been perhaps even more crucial he ceased himself from doing so.
Unable to help himself from drifting to the tiniest corner of a close-resembling light burrowed within the deep ragged crevices of his psyche, as the slightest falter on his part could accost him the consequences of those who disappeared into the burnt mahogany brick building on the other side of the brutish fence not too far away, never to be discovered upon site again, and despite having been tempted to deceive himself the peril of his fate, it was proven impossible he could refrain. And sometimes, if he was close enough, he could feel his name reverberating against the walls of his subconscious, a voice that rippled the hairs on the back of his neck with familiarity, but didn't quite reach him.
He was aware the Nazi soldiers of the SS Police Force stationed at Auschwitz tended not to keep those of his age, at least for long. He wasn't physically capable of the gruelingly exhausting grind of forced labor that men and women younger, and in some cases like his own, as old as him were forced to suffice, if not held at gun point or commanded to gather toward the way of the burnt mahogany building, or even yet, if not subjected to unspeakably atrocious acts of violence, humiliation and torture. Beside the terribly blatant fact the soldiers regularly engaged in relentless searches, scrimmages and scrutiny for the slightest excuse to spill one's blood upon the ground, he figured this punishment of him, made to sit there each and every day peeling vegetables at the end of the polished wooden table of which the family's maid, Maria, had soaked up it's dirt-clogged pores with a dripping rag, was a way to humiliate him and destroy his spirit with the degradation of insulting his intelligence and disregarding his respected field of work under a profoundly disgusting ideology that forbid him, a Jew, to practice, and so they pried from his hands a scalpel in turn for a cold dull-bladed knife and draped upon him a list of commands to be obeyed under unimaginably horrid consequences.
Pavel grimaced, and it was then that he found himself in the soldier's kitchen once more, peeling, cutting.
Maria called upon him one late afternoon not too long after making a polite enough introduction a few days prior. Their converse was often brisk and polite as it could be, but that afternoon she seemed almost troubled, the slight smile that curved the corner of her mouth gone and her eyes pitying him, more so than normally. Wiping the end of the kitchen table down for a second time after lunch had long since passed and the mother was taking an afternoon nap and the children were done with their studies and the young officer that persistently followed the father around was no where to be seen, she stopped for a moment, the rag clasped tight in her hands and her eyes adverted. She briefly hesitated, but decidedly continued after wringing the cloth beneath the rustle of the running faucet. "Do you...remember that night?"
And this, she had inquired in such a wilted tone, he wasn't sure whether it'd really been said or not. Startled, Pavel had tempted composure as the knife in his hand dreadfully trembled. He'd opened his mouth to say something, his throat parched unbearably dry.
In the mornings, he and the prisoners at most received only the smallest portion of a warm drink, that is, if the soldiers were in a questionably good mood, which tasted and smelled more repugnant than a pile of animal waste and weeks worth of garbage under the hottest sun. Sometimes they spit in their drinks before handing them off, muttering some of the ugliest words he'd ever heard and looking down upon them as though they were nothing more than the filth clinging to the bottom of their boots.
It was a long time before he answered Maria, his reddened dark eyes cast down under the strain of a dismal fatigue.
"It's...vague," He quietly croaked, the imminent possibility surfacing of caving into the abyss, his heart burning out and his spirit sinking into the next world if he were to even manage putting into words the blurry images of SS officers armed with heavy artillery breaking down his front door that late evening and slamming the hard base of a the rifle into his knees when he tried to grab his medical bag, and the trains he among others were forced upon heading to the camp insufferably conditioned and so impossibly crowded he thought he would give out before it reached it's destination, and the barbaric selection process that followed, fluttering in his mind's eye suchlike gruesome black and white Polaroids that sucked him into a throttling void of darkness that engulfed him in his entirety and swallowed him whole, day and night.
Within the span of a few weeks, though Pavel grew wary of just how much confidentiality he could put into the maid about his most perilous secrets, he grew especially wary of the young, strenuously cold-blooded German soldier he had witnessed first-hand find satisfaction in battering some of the other prisoners to the point that their thin, wiry-framed bodies were black and purple, and broken, and some times, if the vein in his forehead throbbed, lifeless. And though it had never been in his nature to hate, the heinous young officer easily compelled Pavel to reconsider this, if all what had elapsed in the entirety of this bleak and solemnly depressive chapter in his life hadn't. Even so, it still wasn't quite in his nature. If he were ever able to somehow heal from the mental and physical damage that had numbed his entire being, he could register with the mass of sorrow and the unspeakable horror that left him and the rest of the prisoners clinging to what little life they could hold, and what little more time they could hold on.
Lieutenant Kotler was the type of man that cast stones in your path and waited for the fall, so he could kick the lights out of you.
The young soldier, almost always in a creased dark uniform bearing one of those utterly atrocious symbols, the swastika, patched around his arm suchlike the other officers, and muscled, bearing combed golden blond hair he parted on the side, began to extend a deluded amount of authority about the house when the father was gone, and Pavel noticed immediately. When the father was off and about his side of the electric barbed-wire fence making cruel commands, and the mother was off on a train for the day to scour a nearby city, Pavel happened to glimpse the bothersome sight of the daughter, Gretel, still just a child, seeming to glue herself beside the malicious officer.
And when he mentioned this to Maria, who passed through the kitchen that Saturday morning with the little boy, Bruno's, clean laundry folded in a weave basket tucked beneath her arm, though her eyes seemed to consider this, she only shook her head curtly and muttered that he should "Hush," before the officer saw him, and Pavel, certain that Kotler thrived off of waiting to evoke his demise, retreated from observing any more.
That particular morning, as Pavel was pitifully lugging a basket full of vegetables from the little garden outside for dinner that night, the soldier summoned him, bellowing,
"Hey, you!"
The basket almost slipped from his iron-clench grip that which his knuckles nearly bled when the young soldier added one of those brutally ugly words, seeming to frighten the children in the process. "Come over here, you-" The horrible word echoed in the air again, and Pavel set the basket down and lumbered over to the soldier as fast as his aching legs would carry him, adverting his eyes and transferring the white cap upon his head to his trembling hands, almost wringing it into a makeshift ball. His head was bowed.
Quite impertinently, as Kotler was young enough to be his grandson, he ordered him to take Bruno to the storage shed at the back of the main house, where lined up along a side wall were old tires of which the boy would select one, and Pavel was to carry it wherever he told him.
"And afterward, when you return to the kitchen, make sure you wash your hands before touching any of the food, you filthy-" Again, he spat that horrible word at him in the most passively inept manner, ignoring the fact there were children among them, though the soldiers tended to ignore a great deal of things.
And to say the least, despite the dull throbbing in his legs, all Pavel could think was to at least get the boy away from him as quickly as possible, as he looked greatly disturbed, glancing over his shoulder at Kotler and his sister the entire time they padded over to the storage shed.
He dragged one suitable enough to the large oak tree on the other side of the house and then observed the boy's poor, but successful attempts to latch a thick ring of rope around each side of the tire and up around a sturdy branch from the oak tree, climbing up and down the trunk to do so. His mother gone, and his sister and Maria upstairs somewhere, and Kotler nowhere to be found, Pavel made sure to keep an eye on the boy, realizing as soon as he'd fixed himself upon the swing and began to kick off at too high a speed, it was only a matter of time before he would find himself extending his practices upon an inevitable turn of events.
"It's not that bad," he told Bruno, his tone gently assuring. The boy's knee was propped upon a stool, resting from the treatment of a nasty cut across his knee. Not unlike other children, the immediate fast-acting effects of the green ointment applied to the small wound erupted a string of 'Ow's and whatnot. "Don't make it worse by thinking it's more painful than it actually is." Retrieving a bandage from the small first-aid box beside him, Pavel placed the gauze against the cut and taped it down. "There. All better, eh?"
The boy nodded, giving a sheepish "Thank you."
"You're welcome," Pavel replied. "Now you need to stay sitting there for a few minutes before you walk around on it again, all right? Let the wound relax. And don't go near that swing again today."
Bruno nodded, keeping his leg stretched out on the stool while Pavel went over to the sink and washed his hands carefully, scrubbing under his nails with a wire brush before drying them off and returning to the potatoes. The boy voiced his concern about whether or not his mother would be informed, but Pavel, in the absent-minded state of one beginning to drift away, pointed out how she'd clearly see for herself. Taking the carrots over to the table, he sat down opposite him, beginning to peel them onto a pile of newspapers.
"Perhaps she'll want to take me to a doctor," Bruno suggested, staring at him expectantly.
"I don't think so," Pavel quietly assured, his shoulders stiffening just slightly. His eyes burrowed even deeper into the task at his hands. He'd become greatly apprehensive of all things applicable to his life span, and as he expected this to come soon enough, such subjects tended to reach him in a place that seemed to be his only safe haven, if there were such a thing, as in the midst of a world sucked into the darkest holes time and time again, Pavel wasn't sure what was safe, what was comfort. As Bruno insisted the wound could "be worse than it seemed," Pavel felt himself slowly drifting even farther, reassuring the child it wasn't.
When this made Bruno irritably indignant about his wound, even after Pavel had known exactly what to do, rushing to his aid and tending to him with a very professional expertise, he snapped at the old man,
"Well, how do you know? You're not a doctor."
And to this, the dull-bladed knife stopped gliding down the carrot in Pavel's hand for a brief moment as the words struck him point-blank in the heart. Though his head hung low, his sunken eyes flicked up and caught the boy, who stared back at him as though this were something blatantly irrefutable. Pavel wasn't quite sure how to respond. How to tell a boy, though seemingly uneasily brainwashed by the Nazi regime his own father stood behind, that a man he'd only known to have peeled vegetables and waited on his family at supper, was in fact a Jewish doctor held prisoner at the camp under the watch of said father, not too far beyond his own bedroom window.
He sighed, considering the reality that Bruno was perhaps too young to comprehend what he was about to say, but deciding that it may very well have been something essential to his understanding.
"Yes I am."
And Pavel was certain Bruno, as young as he was, would be greatly confused. His round blue eyes staring back at him in surprise, his carefully immediate response was to discount the absurdity of what he'd just heard, insisting that the man before him was a waiter, and as he peeled vegetables for dinner, how could he possibly "be a doctor too?" To which Pavel calmly answered,
"I certainly am a doctor. Just because a man glances up at the sky at night does not make him an astronomer, you know."
Bruno eventually expressed after a pause of thought, "But I don't understand. If you're a doctor, then why are you waiting on tables? Why aren't you working at a hospital somewhere?"
He wasn't sure how to explain to the boy what he himself struggled to understand.
How was he to try and provide an answer for something utterly objective of humanity, and life, something that encompassed what he imagined-but didn't want to think-might be millions of spirits in darkness, suffocating them in the palm of inconceivable evil in the endless abyss of pain and suffering abounding upon them on the basis of his blood, and his beliefs. There were no words that could compensate for the raw images eternally etched into his mind every time his eyes shut, no words he could find that would illuminate the abysmal torment harboring his soul, the misery that consumed his entire being. How was he to tell a child the world beyond his back door was suchlike the river Styx in Grecian myths, when he might have seen, beyond his own window, children his own age inhabiting it's somber depths.
"Before I came here, I practiced as a doctor," he finally said, yet Bruno didn't seem to understand what he meant by 'practice', wondering if he was any good. And this, somehow, posed somewhat of an outlet for Pavel. "I was very good. I always wanted to be a doctor, you see. From the time I was a small boy. From the time I was your age." For a brief moment, they traded childhood aspirations, as Bruno claimed his desire to be an explorer and Pavel wished him luck. For just the slightest moment, the sliver of a second, Pavel was taken back about fifty years to a time which made his eyes faintly glisten. And as quick as it surfaced, it fluttered past him, when Bruno asked,
"When did you arrive at Out-With?"
And finding himself once again sitting within the soldier's kitchen, his hands began to tremble. Placing the carrot and the peeler down for a few moments, he thought about it.
"I think I've always been here."
A few months later, Pavel felt his health gradually diminishing beyond his control. His frame was just about withered from a severely dangerous case of malnourishment, his stature shrinking as the prisoners were given just a measly portion of soup once a day, if anything at all, and beside the fact that, such as the rest of the prisoners, nearly starved to the point he could collapse to his end at any moment, he'd began to suffice more beatings on a regular basis for making simple mistakes he couldn't help.
One of these mistakes occurred during supper one night, the particular night Lieutenant Kotler happened to find himself sitting among the soldier's family at the long wooden table Maria polished every morning. Pavel, as blatantly ill as he was, his cheeks sunken and drained of all color, waited on them promptly. The white jacket around his shoulders hung upon his physique suchlike a draped curtain, and around the table he plodded with a stack of fine-and quite expensive-plates in his hands, which trembled near violently under the weight of them. Though in physical form he was there, his mind teetered between consciousness every time he resumed his usual stance against the wall, his frame stiff and immobile. Each breath was a sharp dig into his ribs, and trying to exert what little energy he had into bearing the demands of supper time, his eyes, strained from sleep deprivation and a great weight of distress upon him, glistened. After setting the plates down, he placed a hand on the wall as he sunk back, trying to steady himself.
It was twice that the mother, dressed in a formal-as all of them were dressed formally, in the event that a guest sat among them-green dress, had to call Pavel for an extra helping of soup, in which he dragged himself to the table to ladle out another serving of the steaming beef and vegetables for her, barely able to hold the over-sized spoon. And as he poured the last of a bottle of wine into her glass, he helplessly sunk back against the wall, unable to muster the energy at that moment to pull the cork from another one.
"All he wants us to do is study history and geography," Bruno had said during the main course, "And I'm starting to hate history and geography." And such a statement, his father didn't take lightly. The exchange between them didn't quite reach Pavel, despite him being only ten feet away, but he could make some sense of the bits and pieces his mind allowed him. Bruno, unable to provide an answer to his detesting outlook on his school subjects other than that they bored him, compelled his father to embark on a brief speech that alone almost sent Pavel crumbling to the ground,
"A son of mine calling the study of history boring? Let me tell you this, Bruno," he had said, leaning forward and pointing his knife at the boy, "It's history that's got us here today. If it wasn't for history, none of us would be sitting around this table now. We'd be safely back at our table in our house in Berlin. We are correcting history here."
The children beginning to tease each other, the father tapped his knife against the table, silencing them. It was after this, after a prolonged silence that Kotler began to reminiscence about his fondness for history as a child, and how his father, a professor of literature, had left Germany some time ago. He had become quickly embarrassed-mortified-he'd brought up the subject at all, as the father began to interrogate him about said literature professor's whereabouts.
"I believe…I believe he is currently in Switzerland," the young officer confessed. "The last I heard he was teaching at a university in Berne."
Pavel felt his name, again, reverberating against the walls of his subconscious, but not quite reaching him.
"And what reason did he give, might I ask," the father asked, "For leaving Germany at the moment of her greatest glory and her most vital need, when it is incumbent upon all of us to play our part in the national revival? Was he tubercular?
"...Or perhaps he had… disagreements."
"Disagreements, Herr Commandant?"
"With government policy. One hears tales of men like this from time to time. Curious fellows, I imagine. Disturbed, some of them. Traitors, others. Cowards too. Of course you have informed your superiors of your father's views, Lieutenant Kotler?"
The young lieutenant, his eyes wide with anxiety and his shoulders slackened in shame, opened his mouth, but only swallowed, unable to answer the older man. Beneath this disgrace, he seethed.
"Never mind. Perhaps it is not an appropriate subject of conversation for the dinner table. We can discuss it in more depth at a later time," the father insisted cheerfully, yet when Kotler tried to amend the situation, the soldier sharply replied, "It is not an appropriate subject of conversation for the dinner table," silencing him at once.
"What's the matter with you tonight?" He asked Pavel not too long afterward, "This is the fourth time I've had to ask for more wine."
Pavel stumbled forward, managing to grab the bottle beside him and release the cork, despite his hands trembling terribly, without any accidents. Any mistakes.
The young German officer sat there with his hands clenched so tight his knuckles were white, his jaw shifting back and forth as he gritted his teeth and his cold blue eyes burned into silverware.
Pavel, barely able to move around the table, had filled the father's glass, and as he turned to refill Lieutenant Kotler's, his hands shaking, trembling so bad, his grip on the bottle was lost.
It fell, crashing, and spilling its contents out directly onto the young man's lap.
And it was after the lieutenant jumped from his seat, and he brandished more than a pair of livid eyes and a string of the brutally ugly words he spat at him suchlike tobacco, that it was for what seemed an eternity he endured an agony that racked him to his very soul, that left him sinking, and drifting under the heavy blanket of black weighing down upon his vision, of which Pavel saw a light peeking from the abyss.