• EIN: Leere

    Kindheit

    Twice in his life, Erich saw his father cry.

    The first time was when he was six.

    His father was sitting at the kitchen table with the radio on. There was a great deal of singing and drums-and-trumpets fanfare, and the roar of a crowd like a lion. The announcer was very excited, exclaiming 'Hitler', 'chancellor', and 'german people' as if someone had won something.

    His father had his chin propped in his hand, tears flowing down his face. His eyes were closed. He shook as if he were he was cold. His mother stroked his father’s shoulders and kept saying hush, somebody might hear.

    Jungenvolk

    They sang. They did organized little routines in clumsy child formations. Erich always vaguely thought of them as a dance or a sport. He was too young to realize this Simon-says sort of game had anything to do with soldiers. Sometimes they stood in the warm sunlight fidgeting while a counselor or a visiting Hitler Youth boy talked to them about the Fatherland and their duty.

    Most of it went over Erich’s head. There were other kids his own age, some of whom even did him the courtesy of playing with him. The grownups were just something you had to wait through, before you could eat or have races with or swim.

    Once they went camping.

    An older boy pulled him close in the dark and kissed him on the lips. It had made his skin feel busy, his tongue feel funny. His heart pounded for a long time afterwards, like he’d been running.

    He was eight. All he understood, of any of it, of was that it was fun.

    He never told anyone about the kiss. Even then, there had been the sense that this was secret, that this could not be known.

    At first he was enough like the other boys to be mistaken as exactly like the other boys. He was only different from them when he was the one wound with skipping-ropes or imprisoned with wooden guns and tin swords. He was the smallest, and never got to be the general anyway. They found it useful that he didn’t seem to mind spending most of the game being pushed in and out of various imaginary jail cells.

    He never let anyone really harm him—his pathological general fear of all adults made him disgustingly perfectly well behaved in front of them, but when pushed among children he’d learned to fight as immediately and as viciously as he could. Most of them let him alone after a try or two proved more expensive than it looked.

    He found himself thinking of those prisoner games, later, while their rumors grew louder, remembered the strange hypnotic, stillness, of it, the quiet it seemed to give him to imagine so, loudly, that he was trapped and probably doomed and unable to do anything to save himself.

    He never told anyone. It had something to do with that same, secret, he was sure of it.

    He could not take his eyes off other boys’ hands, either, and it had very nearly gotten him in actual trouble in school, since it was indistinguishable from looking at the boy’s paper.

    His sterling record bought him off with a “Mind your own assignments, then!” that left him crimson for the rest of the class. He could count the times a teacher had shouted at him on one hand.

    The terror of adults had evolved, of course; he was still terrified, but he adapted by this obsessive obedience. And here he was, back to the prisoner game. Circles that cost him sleep, night after night, hands holding pencils, and the new men in black you saw on the street sometimes, the ones who seemed to travel in a cloud of winter, of all the faces behind desks that had ever meant you something, unpleasant. The danger of change, and usually for the worse.

    He collected the rumors of Gestapo and the more sinister prison camps. He didn’t believe them of course, nobody did, they’d never actually, do those things. It was only something to add to this loop of thoughts in the dark. Just for variety.

    There was something irresistible about it.

    There was the blazing flash and fanfare, of course. They went to several of the largest rallies and party events in the center of Berlin, and he remembered the first one, being small enough for his father to hold him on his shoulders, clinging and feeling much too big for this indignity and then the music and the thousands of feet shaking the earth in perfect time, so far away, an entire army gleaming in red and black and brown flawless. It went on and on past them, so loud that it seemed there was silence, a seamless blur of shoulder-boards and gleaming guns. That was irresistible the way anything boisterous and proud was, just for the sheer exuberance of it all.

    The camps were different. He thought of them the way he’d thought obsessively of the Inquisition, of the claustrophobic terror of an unstoppable army of Persons in Authority who had unlimited power. That was what Germany was fast becoming.

    He was proud. It seemed a brave and dangerous thing to be a German, suddenly instead of a vaguely shameful thing as it had been since The War.

    He wondered what these camps, the new dungeons must be like, and shuddered. Everyone whispered about it, for the same reason everyone looked at car accidents—but nobody seemed to know anything certain.


    die Erbsünde
    Berlin, 1942

    Erich graduated from school at fifteen, with all sorts of irritating honors. He endured a party with mostly extended family, received books and a billfold and money and clothes that didn’t suit him.

    Mostly he was grateful to escape the gymnasium. School had been a bland Hell of classes that were much too easy and other boys that hated him instinctively. All the hiding this necessitated gave him plenty of time to study, and he spent the rest of it immersed in books, so many that his teachers noticed, and special credits in German and literature were noted on his record.

    His father arranged for him to apprentice in a print shop. He suggested first a newspaper, but Erich was wide-eyed and apprehensive about actually writing anything. He was at his best when whatever-it-was required an eye for symmetry and exactitude anyway. The printshop suggestion was given to him to ponder for a night or two, and he felt mostly pleased with the idea.

    His mother made disapproving faces, wanting him to be a tailor and carry on the family business, but she said nothing. His father was the passive one of the two, but he had never allowed her to lean on Erich as she’d wanted to. When he outvoted her, which was rare and always about the future of his son, he was not questioned. Dinner became considerably less edible for awhile, and his mother was still and uncommunicative in a way that would have gotten Erich accused of sulking.

    The job was a new terror. He slept for maybe one fitful hour the night before his first day. He would do everything wrong and his mother would make him work in his father’s boutique. He would spend eight hours sweeping, and at the mercy of boys like the ones he’d escaped for these few short vacation weeks. A dozen other tiny fears.

    To his delight he found that everyone seemed to use the manners his mother had drilled into him, more or less, and that once he demonstrated he could carry out a task he was left alone. Nobody shouted at him. He ate lunch by himself with a book spread open across his knees, absolutely luxuriating in the peace and quiet.

    So Erich spent his days learning to set type, running errands, coming home with ink ground into his hands.

    There was a boy there, who watched him with something like hunger.

    There had been no boys like that since that hazy distant kiss in the dark.
    He couldn’t help it. His traitor eyes wandered all by themselves, leaving his hands to fumble with letters, to stumble into inkpots, to hold a broom still with dust settling around him.

    He memorized this russet tangle of hair, and the most wonderful hands he had ever stolen in long stares—hands wider than his own, with long narrow fingers clever enough to set type small enough to confound some of the other printsetters. After awhile he could recognize the black whorls of fingerprints the boy left on tabletops.

    He thought of him far too often.

    His father brought home armloads of black and silver, and made SS uniforms far into the night, drinking coffee, his eyes rimmed in red, glasses gleaming. His father wore a swastika-pin edged in gold on his lapel, and when he put his overcoat on he took it off and put it that lapel, instead. So it was still visible.

    The money was very good for the first time since the war. They bought a second radio, and a phonograph player.

    Erich shook out the tunic of one of these uniforms, almost finished, bristling with pins at the collar. He held it in up to himself in the mirror, drawn by all these stark lines and dangerous glitter. He put it on, with careful gestures of his shoulders, straightened an imaginary tie. The arms hung nearly a foot past his hands.

    His mother screamed when she found him. She swung at him with the dustrag she was holding, shouting get it off!

    He flailed at himself in confusion, as if he were on fire. When he finally realized it was the uniform she meant he bent his arms back and let it drop to the floor. A pin dragged along the underneath of his jaw.

    She went to her knees, picking up the jacket, hands searching it for wounds.

    She didn’t speak to him for hours. It made him sick and sad. He wasn’t sure what he’d done so wrong.


    The boy was the print shop owner’s nephew. Emil.

    Learning his name had made it infinitely worse; before, he had been the boy, that boy, hardly a noun at all, a vague subject that preoccupied him when he was walking home, a shape and a set of scents that kept him awake at night.

    Emil and Erich often stayed late at the shop, after the fat squinting Muench and the counter-girl had left. Orders got quite far ahead of what they could possibly produce during business hours. So he and Emil stood for an hour or three, alone, printing poster after poster with a Nazi soldier in the bucket-style helmet, a Teutonic warrior in medieval halberd ghosted behind him. The money here too, was good.

    Erich was clipping these prints up to dry when Emil’s hands closed over his. The boy turned him around and kissed him. This was longer than that kiss in the dark, a strange hot melting, like their mouths were wounds that wanted to heal together. It still made his skin feel busy. He could not tell their tongues apart anymore, to know if his felt funny or not.

    He let it go on for much too long. A tiny noise happened in his throat. He heard his mother saying hush, somebody might hear.

    He ducked his head away, slid sideways with his back against the edge of the table. “I’m not like that.”

    He knew it was a lie, and that he was exactly like that.

    He thought of adding I’m sorry. His eyes fell on another poster, a thick round blonde-and-blue German woman, crowded close on every side with thick round blonde-and-blue German children. An apple-cheeked baby was cradled to her heavy breast.

    Emil stepped back, heels clicking angry on the floor. His eyes narrowed. He said nothing at all.

    The next day at work they didn’t look at each other.

    Everywhere there were constant whispers about the Police.

    The arrests had begun with Hitler, climbing from distant-city rumor to wide-eyed cautionary tales over tea. His mother’s bridge group spoke of nothing else, it seemed. A nephew arrested, staggering home two days later bankrupt and bruised. The first stories that started with you know I heard the Jews...and the nods, and nobody daring to disagree with any of it.

    Erich listened to these ghost stories, standing carefully out-of-notice range in the kitchen. Communists. He had sort of a vague, commercial idea of what that actually, meant. He knew a few Jews, shopkeepers and the jeweler his mother preferred to visit, but none very well. He had the same general impression of them he did of Bolsheviks—that there was something bad about them, though he could never see what.

    In public, people very carefully talked of nothing. Everyone was so, very, careful.

    ZWEI: Abstieg

    das A und O
    Berlin, 1942

    The knock on the door was what he had always expected, thudding through the house and springing his eyes open. He stood up weak as water and started getting dressed.

    Downstairs, his father opened the door with pins in his mouth, one arm draped with black and silver.

    There was none of the wanton destruction he had expected. It was all terrifyingly civil. The police sat at the dining room table. One of them smoked a cigarette, tapping ashes into an ashtray. They were graygreen and gleaming, all creases and polish. They stared at everything, the furniture, the paintings on the walls, and his mother’s curio cabinet with the little carved clocks.

    Papers were produced and signed.

    His mother stood stunned in her bathrobe staring into the middle distance. She offered coffee to no one in particular. Nobody answered her.

    His father managed to be coherent and correct, though he couldn’t speak in anything near as loud as even his normal mumble. He kept pushing up his glasses, even when they didn’t need it.

    The policeman with the clipboard had to lean inches from his mouth to hear him.

    Erich stood dressed, his coat on but unbuttoned, heart slamming so hard it was like the rest of the sound in the room was, underwater. It was a very long time before anyone seemed to notice him.

    They flanked him through the front door, and his mother made some kind of a sound, behind them, and that was all. They cuffed his hands behind his back with no particular animosity, and escorted him to a black car. One of them sat in the back seat beside him. The other started the car and backed out onto the street. One glimpse through the windowpane. It was his father standing on the front footsteps.

    That was the second time Erich ever saw his father cry, and the last time he ever saw him at all.

    On the ground floor it was still a police station—desks and typewriters and offices behind clear glass and offices behind blinds. There was a general sense of organized panic, like in a slaughterhouse. Erich sat on a long bench in a hallway with his hands still cuffed. They ignored him again for awhile. People walked back and forth carrying tea and coffee and paperwork and guns and uniform caps, some of them laughing, some furious.

    After a long time, a different policeman collected him and made him sit in front of one of a dozen desks in a long busy room. He gave his name, address, and place of employment. The policeman stood just behind him, just by his left shoulder, half-shouting questions that had become so by rote they were almost incomprehensible. A woman typed his answers out without ever raising her eyes from the keyboard.

    He shook continually, so terrified it was like the entire world had been moved ten feet farther from him, divided from him by a blinding sheet of white panic. You were supposed to hear about Them having the boy who used to work in the bakery, or your friend who moved the summer before, or a basement full of Bolshevik state-traitors.

    Not you. They were never supposed to have you.

    He wondered if anything his parents could do would do any good. He wondered if they would even try. He wondered if the same thing that kept his father’s swastika pin visible sent them back to bed.

    None of it was anything like he had imagined. That seemed, unfair, that he’d been forced to spend so many hours fearing this, and all that preparation was useless now. He kept listening for, screams, mostly from the floor, with the conviction that if there were such, rooms, they would be underground. He heard only typewriters, voices at polite office levels most of the time. Doors opening and closing.

    He didn’t wonder what he was guilty of. His attention kept wandering to that and the panic kept dragging him away from it.

    They brought him down a set of stairs, which made the edges of his vision creep in, but it was only to a slightly less official hallway, with bricks instead of plaster and one side lined in bars. There was plenty of light, and it was cleaner than his idea of a dungeon.

    There was still no screaming.

    He might just be, released, for whatever it was. Kept for a week or three and sent back home to be plagued by gossip, but that would be all.

    Both cells were identical. One was empty, except for benches lining each wall. The second had four men already in it. The guard opened the door, uncuffed Erich’s hands, and let him step inside. The door clanged shut behind him, locked with a clank that made him think of castles and dungeons.

    He sat down in the least-occupied section of bench, wrapped his arms around his legs and thought of nothing. One man still had on a tie. One still had on pajamas, with a suit coat buttoned crooked over it. Two were quietly talking, sitting with their backs to the bars. None of them seemed particularly dangerous. Thank God for that.

    The man in the tie was squinting at him. Finally he said, “Good evening,” and coughed a little.

    Erich dutifully said, “Good evening, sir,” and sat still staring out through the bars. He would be polite to everyone. He would do whatever he was told, and he would pray pray pray, and he might just be all right. That was the plan so far.

    “I think I know you, yes...you’re that tailor’s boy. I’m Schiffer, I taught third and fourth year at your school, but I never had you. Had your cousin I think...”

    He slid, just a little closer, two feet or so. He had kind eyes, the patient slow voice of a grandfather. A schoolteacher here in jail.

    There must have been a mistake.

    “Yes sir,” he said. His eyes stung. He closed them, scrubbed at his face with his hand. He remembered Herr Schiffer with less gray and more brown in his hair, guiding a hopping mess of eight or nine year olds through the school hallways.

    “You’ll be all right...these are Germans that have us, it’s not as if we were...the enemy.”

    Silence.

    “I’m sure there will be a judge, and this will all be cleared up.”

    He didn’t say yes sir again. He didn’t think he was capable of it.

    “Maybe we’ll pay a fine, or—“

    Then there was a scream from very far down the corridor, beyond invisible doors.

    They stopped talking.

    It climbed in frantic volume, broke off, and started again, less structured, softer, as though something essential had broken already.

    Erich could think of nothing but these twenty minutes of distant noise when the guards came to take him. They ushered him in the direction the screams had come from.

    Schiffer watched him with wet brown eyes, made a gesture with his hand, one fist tightening just a little. Maybe to wish him luck, maybe just a muscletwitch of relief, that it was Erich’s turn to go and not his own.

    They brought him into a far less modern office, this time. A heavy wooden desk with a policeman sitting behind it, and a second one standing behind him, just to his left, out of his sight.

    Erich sat where he was put, in a straight-backed wooden chair, hands cuffed behind him. There was no typewriter here. The man in front of him read through a folder and made notes with a fountain pen on a thick pad of forms. Scratch-of-pen and two men and one boy breathing. Boot heels, passing outside. Silence.

    The officer was a half-stone too thick in his stiff-pressed uniform, and he daubed at his mouth now and then, as if he wished for a drink or a cigarette. He never looked up, paging through documents with precise manicured fingers. His voice was heavy on nasal, very aristocratic to Erich’s ears. “You’ve been reported as a homosexual. What we will do, here, today, is take down a record of your testimony before any decisions are made. Now,” he said, more like a closing than a beginning, set down the papers with a tap and folded his hands on top of them.

    Erich could feel his eyes, but he didn’t look above the height of the fountain pen. “I...didn’t...”

    A cough, or maybe a laugh. “Well, you must have done, else you wouldn’t be here, mmm?”

    “But I didn’t do anything—“

    The guard behind him wandered closer.

    The officer sighed and chose one particular piece of paper. “You’ve been seen at establishments that only cater to this sort of thing. Your guilt is not the question—you are guilty, or you would be home in bed. The question is your willingness to reform, and your loyalty to the Fatherland.”

    He could hardly hear this man, now, after the very first sentence his heartbeat had become louder than anything else. “I can’t have been seen anywhere like that, I’ve never been to anywhere..like..that.”

    “No?” A flick at the paper he was holding. “Certainly you must have been somewhere. We have very reliable reports. Are we to believe solid German citizens—“ a rattle of paper at him—“or a homosexual? You’re all notorious liars.”

    He felt, terrifyingly close to tears, hot and sick. No one had ever called him a liar before. “There must be a mistake—“

    Both policemen laughed at that immediately. “Oh, of course. Every man in Dachau is there by mistake, just ask him,” said the man behind him.

    He could feel the tears collecting along his lower eyelids, Dachau making it much worse.
    The officer dropped his papers again. “You keep denying having been anywhere, but you don’t deny that you are a homosexual?”

    “I’ve never really done anything—“

    There must have been a signal, but Erich never saw it.

    The man behind him shoved his head down, and something heavy slammed into his back, unbelievably hard, emptying him of breath and thought. The pain seemed to come in a reversing wave, the blow pushing him forward and the spreading anguish pulling him back. He thought, my back will be, broken, and his lungs remembered how to expand and he drew in a great whooping breath. He was still mostly folded over. He didn’t want to try to sit up, for fear of finding he couldn’t move.

    “I didn’t ask you what you’ve done. I asked you what you are.”

    He didn’t realize he was supposed to answer. Another blow, straight across his kidneys, a third in exactly the same place. He screamed until his lungs were empty. When he caught his breath again he was sobbing. He moved to cover his face and his hands only dragged at the cuffs. It was worse than the beating. He was almost a grown man and these men could see him crying like a—

    “Are you—“.

    “Yes!” he cried out at them, to make them stop, to keep them from hammering at him with that word again, to save himself any more of those terrible blows.

    The guard stepped in front of Erich to show him the rubber nightstick. A shiny black thing, an unspeakable thing. But he put it away at his belt, and gripped Erich by shoulder and hair and set him upright again.

    The officer was writing something with neat precise little motions. “There, see, if you’ll be reasonable it won’t be so hard.”

    “Yes sir,” he said out of reflex, sounding like a child in his own ears. He sniffled, seized with the urge to plead with these men to uncuff his hands. He would have begged on his knees for a handkerchief if he’d thought either of them would give him one without hitting him again. It was all out of proportion, intolerable, unimaginable that he couldn’t just wipe his darned eyes. He tried to turn his face into his shoulder, but he could only smudge at his cheek and his jaw.

    “Well. You understand that this is very serious. It may not seem so to...” a glance at one of his files—“...boy your age, but the State is responsible for the State. A man’s duty is to marry a German wife and have many German children. A man who is so disordered he won’t do that is worse than useless to us—you’re a drain on society, passing on nothing, and you’re dangerous, because you can spread this disease to others.”

    Still this sense of, falling, of dreaming. “I know what you’re supposed to do, I was going to do all of that, I...”

    He trailed off, waiting for the blow.

    Was it true? Had he been going to marry and have children and work in an office and buy a house, all of that you were, supposed, to do?

    The officer said “Yes!” and nodded as if this outburst had pleased him. “Now, that’s the right kind of thinking. You see, you’re not even really a young man, yet. If you say you haven’t been involved in this, activity...”

    “No, sir...” He hadn’t, really, surely they didn’t mean two kisses six years apart?

    “Well, maybe then there is something we can do, if you want to do the right thing, we can rehabilitate you. Sometimes arrangements can be made. You know you’re lucky you were arrested so young. Boys with this disorder are generally hanged without much trouble over it.”

    It was delivered rather well, as if he were musing to himself. Erich was shocked into a stillness worse than the sobbing. He had never seen anyone hanged. He could imagine seeing the ground tilting dizzily under his feet, and a crack as loud as the world breaking in half.

    The officer left him alone to imagine it for awhile, before he added “I think it’s safe to say we can avoid that with further, documentation, of your sincerity.”

    “I don’t....” He didn’t have the energy for understand. It didn’t matter. He was exhausted. The only wish he had left was that whatever it was they wanted, he could give them quickly, and go back to his cell where Schiffer was and lie on one of the benches and sleep, and sleep.

    He knew that they were, bargaining over his life. He didn’t know what or what on Earth he might possibly have to bargain with. He’d been nodding for the past minute or three, or maybe since he’d been brought into this fear-drenched room. “I’ll do, whatever you say I should do, sir, just, don’t...”

    “All right then, good. Now.” He tapped the pen against his flawless teeth. “The, others, like yourself?”

    A blank pause. “I don’t know, any others...”

    One slam of the side of the officer’s fist against the desktop. “Come on, really, that’s what this disease is, isn’t it? That’s the only symptom. Of course you know others.”

    “...no, I...”

    “Don’t you have men that you do these things with?”

    They would make him confess it all, his pathetic little everything: “I’ve only ever been, kissed. Twice.”

    The guard who had beaten him laughed, but he stopped when the officer didn’t join him.

    “I suppose I shouldn’t say it, but I actually believe you. You poor kid.” He did laugh, just a little. He still had the pen, ready. “Names?”

    Stricken. “They...were....I was, eight, the first one, I don’t remember...”

    A sharp look that he felt more than saw. “Not a first name, nothing?”

    It was just, insanity, did it matter to the police who he had kissed when he was eight? “I really don’t, sir, we were in the Jungenvolk—“ He was thinking, furiously, ashamed of himself, every inch of him waiting to be pushed forward again. He would make up a name for this one, if they pushed him, but the problem, was, Emil...

    A disgusted sort of cough from the guard.

    The officer wrote down something. “The second?”

    He waited for something to save him. There was a prickling like nausea under his tongue. “Don’t, make...”

    A frown, the pen hesitating, those eyes on him again. “The second name?”

    He thought of Emil and could not remember his face, only his voice, explaining how to center text with amusing arrogance, as if he were more than just an apprentice himself. The name would send that boy into the back of a car with his parents crying behind him, send him out of his life and into a room like this.

    They already had him, he may as well blame this, kiss, on himself. “It was my fault, I gave him the wrong, impression....”

    “If you’re going to be the sort who would withhold information about criminal activities, there’s nothing we can do for you.”

    If I don’t give them a name.....A fake name? He fumbled through his thoughts for a story.

    “You’ll hang.”

    “Please—“ No good. The crying was hitching through him again. The man took out the baton again, and he screamed even before he was struck.

    After awhile, it stopped. He had lost count.

    The officer dropped something and said, “Take him outside—“ and the man with the nightstick took hold of his arm and half-lifted him.

    That was as brave as he could be, he found

    “Emil,” he said. “Emil Muench.”

    There. No more soul, now he had nothing to bargain with.

    They brought him back to the cell. He limped to the bench and sat down in a new stiff sort of way, kidneys hot with a dull spreading pain that made him feel too heavy. The only thing that had saved him from serious harm during that last rapid handful of blows was that the guard was almost flailing, without serious accuracy. One shot had gotten him across an elbow, and bending that joint was almost impossible. The rest had thudded into his shoulderblades and back, leaving bruises he was sure would last for weeks, but without breaking anything.

    Schiffer waited until the guard was gone and out of earshot, and came and sat beside him, fumbling at him trying to feel his head for fever, as if he had no idea what other kind of gesture one might use on someone sick. “They beat you?”

    He nodded, finding himself panting, as if he’d been running, and shaking in a new loose uncontrollable way. Aftermath.

    “What can you possibly have done?”

    He didn’t care anymore. “I kissed two boys.”

    “They beat you like this for kissing two boys?”

    He, nodded. Waited for the face he’d always imagined everyone making if they, knew.

    Silence, incredulous eyes blinking at him, and then the tobacco-rasp of a laugh. “I’m glad you didn’t kiss three.”


    Now there were four people who knew—two policemen, himself, and Schiffer. Probably more, tomorrow morning—secretaries and file clerks. He wondered if they would tell his parents. He tried to imagine what they would do, or think, and could not.

    Everyone would know, after a month or two of bridge games and whispers. He could see this fact, spreading from his one single yes, in widening ripples He tried to imagine, everyone, he knew, everyone he saw, knowing. He managed, a sense of endless time battered with stares, of exhaustion and suffocation and claustrophobia.

    There was nothing for it, now.

    He lay on the bench with his poor back against the cool of the wall and his head on his coat. Here was the reward he had promised himself, and all he could do was stare through the bars out into the corridor, hurting for all kinds of reasons, thinking, jail, and thinking, Emil.

    He cried a little, with the collar of his coat folded over his face. If he just, didn’t move, didn’t change his breathing, just let it happen, he discovered he could do it soundlessly.

    A different guard came and collected him, brought him to the same officer. He sat in the same chair, already shaking.

    “Well, we’ve done what we can. You’re to go to a labor camp.” A glance at the files. “You’ve got several skills listed here, I’m sure something will be found. You’ll be out in two years if you behave yourself.”

    Camp scared him quite a lot, and two years sounded endless when he tried to think of the entire span between Christmases, twice. Still, work didn’t sound so very, terrible. He could make a uniform in two days, and set type without errors as fast as anyone at the shop, really. He would just do, as he’d planned—polite and obedient—and he wouldn’t think about how long it was. He would think of what a trade up it was from hanging.

    The guard uncuffed him. He signed things he wasn’t invited to read.


    About a week later, the first guard came and took Erich from the cell. He was led outside, and put into a truck. Nine other men he didn’t know were already inside. They closed the back, and the truck drove away.