You'll Be Surprised
Chapter Eight

While Eichhorst was occupied dredging his infallible strigoi memory for details of their Berlin…association, Sandra Edwards was doing some reminiscing of her own.

West Berlin - Fall 1989
Dr David Kaplan's Office, Law Department, Free University

Sandra and her fiancé Corey Henke had had sex a couple more times, showered, filled their boots at the breakfast buffet, cleaned their teeth and driven to Free University. They arrived mid-morning, several hours after sunrise, and Professor Setrakian berated them for tardiness until he became slightly breathless. He caught his breath and told them to be there first thing next morning.

'We're staying in the center of the city, Professor,' Sandra protested, with a hint of teenage whine. 'How can we get here any earlier?'

'We could stay nearer,' Corey offered. 'Perhaps we can get dorm rooms.'

'Not at the beginning of the semester,' said Setrakian definitely. 'I am here as a visiting professor and not even I could find accommodation at this time of year.' He pulled a screen aside to reveal the end of a camp bed along the back wall of the office.

'Oh, that looks uncomfortable,' remarked Sandra. 'Do you sleep okay?'

'I can't get to sleep for long at all recently, but it seems to be enough. Every night I lie awake listening to the city, campus rather, yet every morning I wake refreshed and ready to go nonetheless. Unlike you two!'

'We'll find a hotel a bit nearer the university for tonight,' Corey promised. Sandra nodded and added, 'We're sorry, Professor.'

Setrakian nodded, grunted and muttered again, 'First thing tomorrow, remember! Shall we continue where we left off?'

Corey wasn't sure about that. 'Um, we were talking about vampires…'

'…Strigoi,' Sandra corrected.

'…But I'd rather hear about the SS officers.'

'What would you like to know?' Setrakian asked, a little warily.

'Anything you can tell me about them,' said Corey. 'Like…when did you first meet them?'

'Mff…I don't know if you would call it "meeting them" but the first time I saw them both was when the train arrived at what looked like a normal platform at a normal station. Except for the barking dogs, the shouting and the armed guards pushing and beating us into different groups. We got separated almost immediately.'

'We?' Corey interrupted.

'I had been captured with my grandmother (who had raised me) and a friend, Jacob. Well, he was a distant cousin actually, also called Setrakian.' He smiled sadly. 'People said we looked so alike we could be brothers.' The smile faded rapidly; the head drooped. 'Some even mistook us for twins.' Setrakian's head snapped up again, proud to have known this cousin. 'He was a good man. He saved my life. Many times. Twice on that day alone.' He stopped with a lump in his throat.

Sandra advanced and touched his hand. 'Please, tell us all about it…if you can bear it.'

The head went up again, determined. 'I came all this way in order to tell you all about it, Miss Edwards.

'It had been bitterly cold on the train even though we were packed in like animals. Which, of course, is exactly what we were to the Nazis. I wasn't even twenty years old and I was stiff when we were pulled and struck and shouted out of the cattle truck. I can't imagine how my poor bubbeh felt. But the very overcrowding of the train had kept the worst of the cold away. Outside, it hit like a steel bar and bit like one of those guard dogs, even through our thick coats. The Germans banged on the side of the truck with crowbars, yelling and swearing and insulting us. They used the same crowbars on us, even the elderly, the sick and women and children too. Maybe more so on these people because they were of no value as workers. The dogs, too, caught the fever and started to nip, then they got stepped on in the confusion and went a little crazy too. Children began to scream, and I saw one little girl bitten on the thigh so badly she collapsed in a faint. Her mother yelled for help and her father, who had been funneled to one side with the other young men, ran to their aid, but they were both gunned down there and then, along with anyone else screaming or trying to help. Anyone nearby not holding their position silently, really.

'My bubbeh was herded away from me and I tried to save her, pushing Jacob and his protestations aside. I just wanted to keep her with me, perhaps for my sake as much as hers. A guard shouldered me away and she told me to leave her. I learned later that they were the group destined for the gas chambers that very day, but Jacob already realized that it was a death line and held me in my place, reasoning with me, telling me that if I tried to protect Bubbeh, I'd only die too - a pointless sacrifice and one she would not have wanted me to make.

'I can't remember much about what happened next, so steeped in guilt and misery was I. I think we young men were led or dragged away because the next thing I knew, we were virtually thrown at a young officer who demanded to know what skills we had.'

'But Eichhorst and Dreverhaven?' Corey reminded the old professor.

'Yes,' Setrakian continued. 'While all this brutality was going on, Eichhorst welcomed us. And with a straight face too. He made it sound as though, if we worked hard and kept our heads down, we would be treated fairly. He must have given that speech a hundred times while his underlings were yelling and beating and herding us to our deaths, but he still managed to inject a sense of honor and even hope into the words.'

The old man sounded as if he almost admired the Nazi.

'He addressed us from the balcony of a weather-beaten guard hut, built on stilts to raise it even higher than the bank of snow and frozen earth on which it stood. I remember the hut had been painted – many years previously - a bright, cheerful color - like a beach hut. It was a jarring juxtaposition with the ice and the cruelty. Eichhorst was wearing his uniform greatcoat and gloves and carrying his swagger stick. He, at least, must have been nice and warm… He said something about us being assigned suitable jobs and housing.

'Jacob volunteered us as carpenters to the junior officer, despite the fact that I'd only served a few weeks as an apprentice. When I whispered this protest to him, he gave me what you would call a "reality check". By showing our usefulness to the Third Reich as skilled craftsmen, we made ourselves worthy of living a little longer.'

The old professor looked up and forced a smile. 'That was the second time that day my friend Jacob saved my life. If only I could have returned the favor…'

He lowered his gaze with a sniff and the youngsters at least showed enough sensitivity to allow him to get his emotions under control before Corey nudged him gently. 'When did you first encounter Dreverhaven?'

The shadow settled on Professor Setrakian's face again. Always when that name was mentioned, Sandra noticed. She paid even greater attention as the old man resumed his story.

'We were registered at the craftsmen's line; exchanged our names and humanity for numbers which were tattooed onto our arms and then we were marched to the shower block. We were told to leave all our belongings, including our clothes, in a large warehouse where skinny men with shaved heads and striped uniforms sorted them into piles. We realized later that these were other, more privileged, prisoners. As craftsmen, we too were privileged. We had extra rations (which meant we were just very thin rather than emaciated), a bunk for each inmate and we were exempt from the hard physical labor of some of the others.'

'Yes, yes, we have many witness accounts of those times, Professor, what about Dr Dreverhaven?' pressed Corey, impatient and tactless in his eagerness.

'After having our heads shaved, we were marched, naked and bleeding from the tattoo wounds (and sometimes the shaving too for these were not careful barbers), into the showers. We washed there all together, naked in front of each other and the SS guards. That was when I first met Dreverhaven.' There was a definite shudder, Sandra noted. 'He was standing in the middle of the floor watching us shower. Just watching... With a faint smile on his face. I heard him referred to as "Herr Doktor" and I wondered if he were performing a crude health screening but, as I say, he just watched us until we were dressed in our "new" uniforms, our numbers written in pen until we could sew them on. We tried not to catch each other's eyes, never mind those of the guards, but his stare was like a fishing hook. I glanced up once, my gaze seeking a blank piece of tiled wall to focus on, and I caught him surveying me and Jacob from top to, er… bottom with that disconcerting smile…'

His voice petered off and for a long time the old professor just sat and stared into the distance, seemingly enveloped in that Dreverhaven-induced shadow.

The unwanted memories had intruded on Abraham Setrakian and were hard to stop. Jacob's quick-thinking in volunteering them for carpentry detail had protected them from immediate selection by the sadistic camp doctor. He heard rumors later that the doctor was selecting twins for cruel live experiments. These sounded as though they were designed for the twisted pleasure of the vivisector rather than for the advancement of medical knowledge.

The doctor routinely observed the showering of the new intake, partly for voyeuristic pleasure and partly to intimidate them all. He became aware of the two young Setrakians in the shower and had apparently asked the registrar about them. They were neither twins nor unassigned prisoners free for the taking. They were "court Jews" and might be noticed missing. It didn't deter the persistent Dreverhaven though, just heightened his interest.

He would sneak up behind them at roll call or meal-times and murmur wetly in one ear or another that he would have them eventually. He would take the clippers from the barber and threaten to shave his initials into their heads or even carve it into a scalp. He'd pretend to hit their hands and threaten to do it next time so that they would be of no use as carpenters or at the very least would wind up in the infirmary and within Dreverhaven's power.

Worse, he would pop up in the communal changing room and towel them down after showering. In front of other prisoners and the laughing guards, Dreverhaven would either roughly grab and pull at them or tenderly rub and fondle. Abraham knew that resistance or protest would mean instant death so the only thing he could do was think of Bubbeh in a bathing suit in the hope that he wouldn't get visibly aroused by all the touching.

At the time, all this attention seemed to be leading to an inevitable assault. There was no sense that the Setrakian boys could avoid eventual, and probably prolonged, abuse by Dreverhaven and it was just a question of when the doctor would get tired of his twisted foreplay and haul them out of the barracks or the workshop. Would it be this roll call, this health inspection, this shower time interruption that the rape would happen? Would he even bother to drag them out of view of the others?

They didn't talk about it between them, preferring an unspoken pact not to allow the fear and anticipation to make it worse.

While Abraham did seem to be his favorite, Jacob bore his fair share of the pestering and it seemed that the idea of taking both together appealed to the doctor most of all. Unfortunately, when Setrakian lost Jacob to the Master one night, his grief did not have the salve of diminished interest from the Doctor.

So Abraham stole an offcut of wood and began to carve a protective amulet when he was sure he wasn't being observed. When the hamsa was completed, he smuggled it back to the sleeping quarters in his underwear. He told himself he'd done it solely to ward off the giant monster that had sucked Jacob's blood and snapped his neck, but evil came in human form also and part of him hoped the talisman might protect him from Dreverhaven as well.

In a way, he supposed it had, via a very unlikely angel…