American Reich

by Pliss, Todd

  Roll call officer Stepp, who was one of the few SS men who would crack a rare genuine smile at least once a week, picked up a handy bucket of cold water and poured its contents on the passed out prisoner. Wayne remained unconscious. Stepp removed a wad of smelling salt from his pouch and waved it underneath Wayne’s nostrils. That was sufficient enough to revive him.

  Kammler put his face up to Wayne’s face and, breathing heavily, demanded to know, “Who were you gambling with?” He received no response. Kammler slapped Wayne strong across the left cheek, leaving his large hand imprint behind. “ANSWER ME.”

  Wayne got out a meek, “Nobody.” The last thing Wayne wanted to be known as was a camp rat. He knew that the punishment that was being administered to him would end shortly, or so he had hoped, but he also knew that if he had squealed on his bunkmates, they could and probably would make his life a living hell for him.

  “You lying son-of-a-bitch,” Kammler angrily said and, breathing heavier than before, almost, Wayne observed, like an asthmatic, continued whipping Wayne with an unbridled passion.

  It was a moonless, pitch-black night as Wayne laid awake on his bunk in agony. He had gotten into the habit of clutching his thin pillow against his torso and pretending that it was Lauren’s warm arm with her soft body next to his as he struggled to fall asleep each night. It served as a wholly inadequate substitute, but it did help him drift off. On numerous occasions, as he had awoken, in a temporary daze, to the blare of the reveille horns at the crack of dawn, Wayne would open his eyelids, and, for a split second, forgetting where he had been residing at, would expect to see Lauren asleep in his arms. On that dark night, though, Wayne was hurting too much to grasp his small pillow. Wayne heard somebody slither up to his bunk. He had a good feeling of who it would be.

  “You all right, Wayne?” Samuel whispered.

  Wayne was in no mood to talk to anyone, least of all one of the men whom had left him holding the bag during the card game. He answered Samuel anyway, hoping to quickly get rid of him. “I’ll let you know when my head stops throbbing and the pain goes away,” Wayne said in a soft tone.

  “I felt the same way after my first lashing,” Samuel said. “And my second. And my third, come to think of it. And my fourth, and-”

  “I get the idea.”

  “Hey, me and the boys really appreciate you not telling on us to Kammler. You’re an okay guy.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Wayne said sarcastically.

  Samuel continued in a whisper, “My brother Ari is the prisoner detail leader for the new armament plant. How’d you like to leave the quarry pit for a cushy job sitting down turning screws on an assembly line or some shit like that?”

  Wayne replied without hesitation, “Anything would be an improvement.”

  “Consider yourself in. Tomorrow’s gonna be your last day in that fuckin’ quarry pit,” Samuel proudly informed his hurting friend. He tapped Wayne on the knee and crawled away.

  Wayne knew from what he had observed since he had been at Hollenburg that Samuel was a man of his word. When Samuel said he was going to do something, he had always seemed to follow through. Wayne, who loathed the daily routine of working in the quarry, considered it a fair trade – twenty-five lashes of punishment in exchange to not have to break his back in the quarry anymore. No more frostbite. No more pains shooting through his bad back. No more blistery lips from the cold wind blowing. Wayne anticipated the start of his new job. He found himself full of hope again that his luck was changing for the better, but that faded fast as the reality set in that all that had really happened was that he had gotten an opportunity to leave the quarry. Wayne moans turned into snores.

  During his final day in the quarry, an incident occurred which only fanned the flames of abomination that Wayne had been feeling towards those who were in charge of running the camp.

  Two days prior, a fresh shipment of prisoners from the ghetto had been thrown into the already overcrowded camp. To Wayne, the new prisoners were indistinguishable from the ones that he had arrived with almost two months earlier. He noticed how the new inmates wore the same sad, defeated empty expressions on their faces as the people he had been on the train with had. Some of the new arrivals had been assigned to barracks 19. Since there were more men assigned to the barracks than there were bunks, most of the new slave laborers ended up sleeping on the cold wooden floor.

  Most of the new arrivals had been assigned to the quarry, as had been customary. It was the worst place in camp to work, and new inmates had no connections or voice in anything that might have affected their lives in camp.

  At some point during mid-morning, a boy, who Wayne figured could not have been more than fourteen years of age, innocently asked one of the SS guards, as he wiped his sweaty brow, “Sir, may I please sit down for a little bit. I do not feel well.” It had been the boy’s first day of labor and he obviously did not know any better.

  “Go ahead,” the SS pig told the boy and pointed to a spot roughly thirty meters from the edge of the pit.

  The boy, who reminded Wayne of himself, walked to the appointed spot. Before he could sit down, a bullet penetrated his heart. Death came instantly. The SS guard who had given the boy permission to sit down arrogantly reloaded another round into his shiny rifle.

  Wayne, having witnessed the incident from his vantage location, knew that the youngster had been deliberately instructed to cross the guard line. In doing so, the guard could explain the boy’s death as the result of stopping a prisoner “attempting to escape”. Wayne had seen other prisoners coerced into crossing the guard line on different pretexts only to be shot down, but never a boy. In his 1995, that boy would have been entering high school with his whole life ahead of him. The sickest thing about what had happened, Wayne found out that night through the grapevine back at the barracks, was that the SS pig that he would “stop an escape attempt” that day. That boy’s life had been worth nothing more than two beers to an SS man. Wayne, in the quarry on that day, wanted to shed a tear for the boy, but nothing came out. All of the death he had seen and all of the tears he had shed for the victims, and all of the evenings he had cried himself to sleep, and all of the tears he had shed for the baby who had been suffocated by her mother in the prisoner holding area, and all of the tears of helplessness had finally caused Wayne’s tear ducts to dry up and cease function. If he cried again, he might willfully cross the guard line himself. Wayne could not cry anymore.

  Pliss / Reich

  CHAPTER SIX

  Samuel had kept his promise. Wayne, without any explanation given by the prisoner detail leader, was transferred to the new munitions plant. Wayne and the other prisoners were bussed to the plant under heavy guard. He recognized four of the two-dozen silent men on the rickety bus from his barracks. He didn’t know their names, or ever really socialized with them, but they were familiar. There was an air of excitement throughout the bus. It felt great to Wayne to leave the camp for the first time since he had been interned there, even if it was just to travel to work.

  As the bus pulled up in front of the munitions factory, Wayne observed how dreary and depressing the new plant looked. The size of the windowless factory was enormous, measuring over twenty-seven thousand square meters. The munitions plant was one of seven new ones that the Reich had built because of escalating Japanese threats. Armaments were built in the munitions plants and stored in regional sites nearby military bases. The Germans carried out their weapons production and distribution with efficiency of a well-oiled machine.

  The laborers were led off the bus, through a metal detector, and into the vast building. Ari, the detail leader for the factory, was in charge of all work allocation for the prisoners. Inmates were shipped in six days a week from the large pool of men’s and women’s labor camps that were located within a hundred kilometer radius of the plant. Ari had lived most of his life as a concentration camp prisoner. He was a very hard worker, as well as honest, and had impressed his superiors enough so that he was steadily
promoted into important positions of responsibility, despite being a prisoner himself.

  Ari the new workers into the plant. As Wayne approached, he noticed something familiant about him.

  Ari put his hand out, “I’m Ari.”

  Wayne shook his hand and said, “Wayne. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  Ari said, “Samuel tells me that you’re a good, hard-working guy. Just be productive and nobody will bother you here. Come on, let me show you to your workstation.”

  As Ari led Wayne through the munitions factory, Wayne looked around the big building in awe. It seemed to go on forever. Everybody that Wayne passed by kept their eyes firmly on their work. The guards posted throughout the plant seemed watchful, but they didn’t seem to have the twisted, sadistic look on their faces like the guards back in Hollenburg. This was a new, better place Wayne would be spending his long days.

  Ari halted Wayne at a workstation, where half a dozen prisoners, male and female, were busy working on electronic gadgets. Wayne thought one of the women looked familiar to him. Where had he seen her before? Her short dark hair tugged at his memory. Wayne ran through a quick mental checklist. NYU? No. High school? No. Hometown? No. Summer job? No. Nothing registered. The woman was staring back at Wayne, too.

  “Do you two know each other?” Ari asked.

  The young, attractive woman answered, “I have never seen this guy before.”

  “Little Bear,” Ari called out.

  A tall, tough looking woman, dressed the same as the other prisoners in her blue worn out slacks, blue demin shirt, and dull black shoes walked over.

  “Little Bear,” Ari said, “this is Wayne.” He turned to Wayne and informed him, “Little Bear’s in charge of this work station. She’ll show you what to do. Take care.”

  As Ari strolled off to attend to his numerous daily tasks, Wayne called out to him, “Thank you, Ari.”

  Wayne felt extremely grateful to Ari for acting as his savior and rescuing him from the quarry. He was sure that if he had continued at the quarry, he would have quickly died one way or another.

  “And who the fuck did you know to get in here?” Little Bear asked in her gravelly tone.

  Wayne was taken aback by the question. Did she suspect something amiss? “Know? What do you mean?” he said.

  Wayne owed no explanations to this woman who looked like she could take on any man in a fistfight and hold her own. He also wondered where she got the name Little Bear. Was she an American Indian? Wayne could not detect any features on her that might have been Indian and he was not about to ask her about it.

  “What do you think I mean?” Little Bear snapped at Wayne. “I know you have a connection in order to work in here. Never mind. Let me show you what you got to do before I get sick of your ugly face. Sit your ass down.”

  Wayne sat down on an empty chair next to the familiar woman whose face he was still trying to place. He didn’t know what that Little Bear’s problem was, but he didn’t want to piss her off anymore.

  Little Bear grabbed one of the electronic components out of the large box of likewise components that was resting on the enormous table in front of the workers. “Your job is to take one of these,” she said and then picked up a different component out of another box, “and one of these and screw them together.” With a screwdriver, Little Bear screwed the two small electronic devices together. “Is that too hard for you?” she said slowly as if speaking to a child.

  “No.”

  “All of these parts are coded,” Little Bear continued in her harsh way, “so if something’s not done right, I’ll know where it came from and you’ll be back to the shithole that you came from.” She swaggered off.

  Wayne began to perform his assigned task. The other workers at his table were silently doing similar jobs to what he was performing, which consisted of attaching various electronic elements to one another. Some of the workers were busy using soldering irons to join wires from the electronic devices together.

  A number of times Wayne noticed as he worked on his menial task, out of the corner of his eye, that the woman who he was certain he knew from somewhere would be staring at him, but when he looked directly at her, she would turn away.

  Wayne was elated to have a job where he was allowed to sit down, out of the cold. He thought about how the painful blisters that had populated his feet and hands would finally go away. The work he was performing required no brainpower at all, so his thoughts easily drifted to other, better, times and places. He remembered hanging out with his friends back in New York when he was growing up, of visiting his late grandparents in Miami Beach, and, of course, there were so many special memories of Lauren. And, after an hour of fastening electronic gizmos together of which he had no idea of what their purpose was for, it hit him like a bolt of lightning during a spring thunderstorm that came crashing down out of the sky. The last time Wayne had seen her she possessed a beautiful head of long dark hair that ran down past her shoulders and not the standard-issue buzzcut that she was currently wearing. She had slept in his arms on that crowded train during that awful journey to Hollenburg. He had not thought of her since that wretched day which seemed to him so long ago.

  Wayne turned to her and said, “Linda, forgive me, my memory isn’t...”

  “Be quiet. Don’t talk now,” she interrupted.

  Wayne bit his tongue and looked around. No one was talking. That rule hadn’t changed from the quarry.

  The morning slowly dragged on and Wayne began counting the seconds off till lunch. He looked around for a clock. There was none. His stomach growling told him that lunchtime had to be creeping up. Wayne estimated that he had been working for between four and five hours when a loud whistle came beaming through a loudspeaker. With it, the laborers, including Little Bear and Linda, stood up and began to quietly walk, single file, to a destination Wayne did not know, but he prayed that it was a meal.

  Wayne followed the members of his work detail to a small fenced in outdoor area that was located adjacent to the rear of the factory. It was a crush of people in too small an area, as the prisoner workers from all of the work details in the plant lined up for the common lunch of a soup and bread ration. Wayne was close to the end of the food line. He feared that the lunch rations would be depleted before the turn to receive his came up. Unlike the quarry, Wayne pleasantly found out, there would be enough meal rations available for every prisoner at the munitions plant. Maybe, the slave laborers at his new place of work were considered by the SS to be more indispensable than the lowly men whom worked with their primitive tools in the quarry.

  “Wayne,” Linda called out from where she sat on the concrete ground once she saw Wayne had his meal ration.

  Wayne walked through the mass of men and women quietly sitting on the ground eating their treasured daily lunches. Wayne sat down beside Linda. Linda hugged Wayne tightly and kept her arms wrapped around his upper body for a full two minutes. “It’s good to see you,” he told her, not really sure of what to say.

  “Wayne, I have thought about you so much,” Linda said as she released him from her arms. “I am so glad to see you.”

  “I’m sorry about this morning, Wayne,” Linda said. “If Ari or Little Bear found out we already knew each other, then you’d be put on a separate work detail from me. You have to be careful about talking at the work stations – they’re bugged.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Wayne said and started to ingest his inadequate amount of rations called a meal. “Where are you interred?”

  Linda answered, “Ravensbruck, a women’s camp not far from here. I asked some of the men here if they knew you, but they didn’t. I was curious as to what happened to you.”

  “I have been holed up at the lovely resort town known as Hollenburg,” Wayne said in a sarcastic tone. “No heat, no phones, no cable television, hell, no television at all. But, there’s no extra charge for the torture handed out and the supreme privilege to bust your butt slaving in a quarry from dawn to dusk eve
ry damn day. But, then again, what should I be moping about? I mean,” he chuckled, “after all, I did need to take off a couple of pounds.”

  “I see you haven’t lost your sense of humor,” Linda said.

  “Sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps me from losing my mind.” Wayne swallowed his lukewarm soup in one big gulp. “How’s life in the women’s camp? Is it any more civilized than Hollenburg?” he asked.

  “From what I hear, the same shit goes on in the camps, no matter if it’s a men’s camp or a women’s camp. How’d you end up here?”

  “It’s a long story,” Wayne replied.

  An identical loud whistle signaled the end of lunchtime for the prisoners. Wayne looked at the loudspeaker fastened high up on the side of the dreary brick building and thought about what a satisfying feeling it would be if he could snip the wire that attached it to the rest of the public address system at the plant. If he could snip the wires to the loudspeakers in Hollenburg too. The snakelike black wires that brought sound to the speakers that woke him so early from his much needed sleep each morning with the sun rising over the horizon. The same lurking wires that sometimes woke him and the other prisoners in camp in the middle of the night for senseless fatigue drills, which included carrying heavy sacks of sand, stone, manure, or soil around camp, doing endless pushups, and scrubbing down the outsides of the barracks in the bitter cold of a winter night.

  The workers marched single file, under the always-watchful eyes of the guards, back into the tremendous munitions factory. “By the way, do you know what those things are that I’ve been putting together all morning?” Wayne asked Linda, curious to know exactly what it was that he had been assembling.

  “Detonators for explosives,” Linda responded.

  “Great,” Wayne sighed to himself.

  Wayne continued his monotonous job throughout the afternoon hours. At six o’clock, the sky cloaked in darkness, the loud whistle blew again. Linda waved a goodbye to Wayne. With no unauthorized chatting of any kind allowed between the prisoners while in the plant, even saying a “goodbye” could bring about a disciplinary action on the offender.