Even though most of the prisoners had looked dead even before they'd been locked in the chambers, their naked bodies which were dragged away and heaved onto trucks, looked even more dead. They looked as if they'd never been alive, as if they were scare-crows made out of old potato sacks. Even the blood caused from the rough and careless way they were heaped onto each other looked more like bird seed; clumpy and a darker shade of red. The blood that had been coursing through their veins looked as if it had been dried up even whilst in them.
Luckily for Werner the small group of Sonderkommando men he had to look after knew what they were doing. He only had to raise his voice once in a while to scare them into working faster. When he'd say: Faster! they all cowered, reverting their gazes to the floor, picking the pace up by a considerable ammount, almost as if he'd yelled: I'll kill the lot of you if you don't work faster!
Werner wanted nothing more than to close his eyes to the sorry sight. But whichever direction he looked their were bodies being transported into the Crematorium. In about two hours a terrible stench would hang in the air. It was the kind of smell that Werner knew from the descriptions of history books. When it tickled his nostrils for the first time, curling into his nose and around his brain it queitly whispered; murderer, murderer. He became faint, not because of the illusion, hut because of the terrible emissions. The other SS men seemed unbothered by it, or if they were, they hid it well.
Werner was excused to lunch after having seen the last of the bodies go. The transportation to the Crematorium and the art of cremating did not fall under his responsibility. So he head off to lunch with all the rest of the more-or-less young nazis.
Nikolai had saved him a seat. Werner thanked him, but there was no intonation in his voice and his eyes looked almost as dead as those of the children he'd helped be murdered. He sat, picked his fork up and then just froze. From the outside it looked like he'd never seen a fork and was debating on how to use it, but on the inside his brain had simply refused to carry out an order. He was overwhelmed in every way. The empty void that replaced the spark in his eyes reminded Nikolai of his first time doing the same thing back when he was still employed in a different KZ. He rested his hand on Werners arm and gave it a squeeze. He knew that nothing he could say could make it alright. The weak smile the older military man gave the younger one reminded most everyone on the table of something. The table grew quiet for a second, the officers stoppd chatting, they looked at Nikolai and Werner, but at the same time they looked away, down at the food on their plates. Everyone at the table had participated in genocide. For that one and only humane moment Werner would ever experience from so many SS-Officers in Auschwitz, the whole table shared a few seconds of silence. Maybe all of them realized, once in a while when their imagination ceased to overpower reality and they realized that they were destroying familes, actual people, no matter what the propaganda said. They had family back home. They had lives. Just like the men locked up in Auschwitz. And then the conversation buzzed up again.
The rest of the day Werner lived as if he were in a dream. A nightmarish world, but still a dream. Everything seemed staged, the officer to the left was waving at him, why Werner didn't know. The way the two men across the street walked in Gleichschritt roused the suspicscion in Werner that maybe it was just faked, soldiers in real life couldn't be so coordinated. The sunken eyes and hollow-cheeks that made-up every single working face in the camp couldn't be real, they had to be make-uped, or maybe they were just puppets. People like that couldn't exist. It was impossible. But of course, Werner was just confused. He'd sunken into a dangerous coping method; his brain refused to accept that all of this was real, it pretended that everything wasn't real to make it less terrible. Because how would he be able to deal with the emotions that would hit him like a black wave of water that wouldn't simply leave him soaking and shivering but fill his lungs with polluted black liquid that would drown him from the inside. Werner didn't want to die. Not from the inside.
At night he stared at the back of the mattress. He could see the blue cushion through the wooden bars of the bunk bed. The man over him turned around, making the whole Gestell creak and moan under his weight. What if it broke, sending the man right into Werner's lap, crushing his ribs by force of gravity pulling the directed mass towards...the second coping mechanism was Werner losing himself in overthinking scenarios that were even just slightly possible. It distracted his brain from thinking about that day.
To his suprise he felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned his head to look at his visitor. It was Nikolai, who held out his left hand, using the right to press a finger against his lips. Werner coudn't recall having grabbed his friends hand, but he found his hand safe and sound in Nikolai's after a second. He pulled him up and out of bed and led him out of the bedroom. Some of the other soldiers mumbled at them to be quiet even though they'd tip-toed past the sleeping men, trying their hardest not to wake the sleeping lions.
Their midnight stroll started in silence. Nikolai's hands were shoved in his pockets and his cheeks had a reddisch tone from the cold weather.
"I'm sorry that you had to be one of the ones on chamber duty today." He said, breaking the silence in his typical straight-forward and honest way. "I'd hoped you'd be spared of it until at least a few weeks." Nikolai received no answer and no comment but he kept talking almost as if he'd known he'd be the one holding a monolog. "About a year ago I did what you did today, I couldn't sleep for days afterwards. Eventually I accepted it as part of my work and was able to sleep, but once in a while I just couldn't. And when it got too much for me I took a walk and let myself succumb to wishfull thinking. You don't know how many times I've dreamed of freeing everyone at this KZ..." Confessing to Werner, a man he didn't know well, about such anti-nazi thoughts, could easily get him killed but that was secondary to Nikolai. The young lad might rat him out in confusion, a concept he was fully aware of. But he needed to help his young friend get through this, there was nobody else who would. "I thought it had gotten easier...I was wrong. It hit me when I got off the train and my family was waiting to pick me up, I smiled at my three beautiful girls. My children ran to hug me, my wife leaned in to kiss me on the lips...and then I was suddenly scared that there was dust on me, dust from a cremated body, I was afraid there would be a trail of blood on my boots and that my children would see it. When I looked into my baby girls eyes I saw the face of every child I'd killed staring up at me. I'd taken a step backwards, staggering under the weight of my family. My wife saw the horror in my eyes and she, this is why Werner - a man needs to find a good woman, she lay with me under the stars that night and rested my head on her lap. She stroked my hair as I cried. And then she cried with me." Nikolai finished his story and looked over at Werner who was crying a bit, but the silent cry of someone who knows this isn't the place, someone who can't afford to get caught shedding a tear. Nikolai smiled softly and stopped, gathering the young man into his strong arms. "It's alright, Werner. You're going to be alright."
"But they aren't." Werner sobbed. He grabbed the collar of Nikolai's jacket and stared into his blue eyes. "They aren't alright Nikolai. They're dead, I killed all of them. All of them!"
"You're right, Werner. They aren't alright. All we can do is pray to God that this terror stops soon." He said soothingly.
"But it won't, it won't stop soon Nikolai, it won't stop until 1945 when the Soviets free Auschwitz." The rather confusing and almost crazy sentence that Werner bubbled made Nikolai's heart break a little. His young friend was losing it. But that was alright.
Sometimes we have to lose ourself to find ourself again.