25. Danner

TWENTY-FIVE

Dachau, Germany

Back and forth each day, pacing like a rat in a glass cage until I’m needed. Maybe the waiting, watching, and listening is part of their intended torture. It’s becoming harder to tell who is sick and who is waiting for their assignment per their so-called act of volunteering. No one looks well, including myself. We are surviving off little bread, coffee, and potato stew, and only if we’re released from this barrack at the end of the day. The rations are hardly enough to keep a body functioning. Still, it’s enough to sit here in this medical barrack, listening to men screaming out in pain, crying as if someone is tearing off their limbs, and moaning after they are left alone. A permanent chill writhes through my spine with the thought of the horror that exists on the other side of these walls. Yet, I remain here, returning like I’m supposed to each day as if it’s the only job left in this life. I don’t see people walking out of the rooms they are taken into, making it clear I’ve chosen to take part in a slow, violent death in exchange for a quick execution.

It’s been a couple of weeks since I began waiting in this room for someone to call my number. It was called once the second day I was here, but that was for another round of prisoner registrations where a Nazi jotted my name, birthdate, prisoner number, former profession, and health vitals onto an index card before shoving the paper into a box with thousands of others. It didn’t go unnoticed that they wrote in pencil, making their notes easily erasable. Like me, I’m also easily erasable.

Otto has walked past me twenty-three times this week, his eyes locked ahead as if he is wearing horse blinders. If he doesn’t see me sitting here, I must not be here. He’ll be entering the room again any minute now after having slept comfortably all night in a bed next to the woman he doesn’t deserve. Emilie will follow behind him with swollen eyes, red cheeks, and her hair a little less tidy than it was the day before. Each day she walks through this room, she’s losing a piece of herself.

Each day, she stops before me and smiles through her pain. She whispers words such as: “I can’t give you much, but I’m here…” It’s her warm smile that she’s truly giving me though. She’s also slipped me slices of cheese and bread, even a couple of notes with reminders of good memories we shared in the past. Anything she could do, she has done, and though I fear for the brief interaction each day, I live for the moment. Her last note struck a nerve, and despite her intention, it tossed me into a darker place than I’ve been since I arrived here.

Danner,

This note is dangerous and could get us both into trouble. It’s important you destroy it after reading.

I didn’t walk into Dachau knowing what was happening here. Herr Berger mentioned needing assistance with medical research taking place in a lab separate from the space being utilized by the political prisoners held here. I didn’t know there were innocent people, like you, here. Otto didn’t confess this truth after finding out the same way I had, and therefore, I walked in blindly like him. His uncle is tied up with high-ranking commanders, putting us both in jeopardy if we were to rebel.

Please know that what you see or hear here is something I’m desperately trying to stop. Whatever I can do to help you, save you, and protect you, please know, I won’t give up.

I’ll find a way. I must.

With love,

Emi

She was fooled into joining Otto and now she can’t find a way out. I want to take the blame. I told her she belonged with him. I see now I was wrong, utterly wrong. I never imagined her father-in-law being blindly led into this world, and then bringing his son along too. I’ll try to forgive myself for being ignorant once, thinking a friend was just that—a friend, nothing more and nothing less. It turns out, a friend is someone who knows you so well, they know exactly how to fool you into believing whatever they want you to believe—including that of being a friend at all.

It’s eight in the morning and the door opens, as I predicted. Otto walks in, his feet heavy from carrying so much evil on his shoulders. His blinders are in place, and he continues down toward the corridor fifteen steps ahead of his terrified wife. He must not notice she isn’t following directly behind him. Emilie has the same look in her eyes as she’s had every morning this week, but beyond her fear, I see my sweet, beautiful, innocent Emilie, the girl who scooped me up from too many silly falls when we were children, taking care of me with the most gentle hands until I was bandaged up, then later becoming the woman I wanted but could never have. My best friend, my forever friend, and yet, in this moment, we look nothing more than strangers.

Emilie’s footsteps are slow and light as she walks on her toes, her gaze darting in every direction, looking for whoever might be watching her. Otto has already turned the corner by the time she stops beside me to adjust the handbag dangling from her wrist. “Hi,” she mutters beneath her breath. “Are you still okay?”

“Yes,” I respond quietly. “Are you?” Our lives aren’t comparable, but I know she’s living in her own form of hell too.

“I’m fine.” She drops her handbag, and several items spill out onto the floor. She grumbles out loud, “Oh, good God.” Then kneels to pick up what has fallen, and I debate what to do because if I’m caught helping a civilized woman, I’ll be beaten. If I’m caught watching a civilized woman struggling to pick up belongings from a prison floor, I’ll be beaten. At the moment, there are only prisoners standing around me, so I bend down quickly and scoop up the remaining items, handing them to her. A cloth wrapped object falls into my palm and she stands back up, replacing her handbag over her wrist.

“Emi—” I whisper.

“Hush. Take this to the far-left corner and face the wall.” It takes me a moment to piece together her words with the air masking every other syllable, but the cloth wrapped object is cold and malleable. I believe it’s food and she doesn’t want me to be seen with it, hence the facing the wall in a corner. “There will be more to share.”

She leaves, her heels heavy, clacking against the wooden floor with each step as a warning to Otto that she’s still behind him, or at least I assume that is what she intends.

I rush to the empty corner, feeling eyes slant in my direction. I don’t think anyone saw the exchange, but they may be wondering why I’ve just moved so fast across the room just to face the corner. My hunger has taken control over my usual thought-out decisions.

The other corner has the metal bucket used to urinate in, so I move there to make myself less conspicuous. I unwrap the cloth, finding a large hunk of Swiss cheese. I break a piece off and shove it down my throat, barely tasting it as I consume it. I take another piece, and one more before staring down at the remnants. If my number is called today, I’ll hand it to whoever is beside me, but I need to take care of Hans first.

The cold cheese chills the inside of my stomach, making it known there isn’t much else in there, but there’s at least that.

There was one time in my life when we had too much cheese in the house. We didn’t know what to do with it all. I was only ten, but I remember that week as if it was yesterday. It was the beginning of the Great Depression when Papa bartered cases of honey for other produce. There was a misunderstanding with his request, and we ended up with three times as much cheese as any other item. It was too late by time he noticed so Mama made us eat cheese for days so it wouldn’t go to waste. I remember thinking I could never take another bite in my life. We went door to door offering all the neighbors a helping. I even brought some to the square and handed it out to the first people who approached me. We didn’t want it to go to waste in a time of so much need, despite our need for income.

Mama always told me the more good deeds we did, the better our lives would be. I’m not sure she predicted the world turning upside down years later though.

I haven’t seen another female in this barrack since the day I arrived, but all I can hear now are a woman’s heels clunking up and down a hallway. I know it’s Emilie. I can tell by the way she walks, the first heavy step, followed by three lighter ones. Then she’ll pivot and repeat. I wish I could walk around the corner and find out why she’s pacing and what has her so upset.

A door opens and closes, rather tersely, before I hear their voices.

“Did you report what happened to Dietrich?” Otto asks. “We have to report our findings.”

“No, Otto, I didn’t, and I won’t. You can go in there and tell him yourself.”

“Neither of us is watching this study. What’s he going to say if he walks out of his office right now? We need a replacement, Emilie. The data?—”

There’s silence and I can imagine a million reasons why but none of them will be true.

“The data is correct, Otto. Don’t question me.”

“They saw—” he continues. “You can’t change or undo that. Do you realize what will happen if you try?”

“Well, they saw incorrectly. It happens,” she replies, stomping her foot before walking off to wherever she’s going next.

Emilie is being Emilie, and it terrifies me. She’ll never give up, never back down, and never stop doing what’s right, which is the one thing we’re all expected to stop doing.

I’m taken aback when Otto turns the corner into the waiting area, facing my direction and the exiting door to this corridor. If I moved two steps to the right, I would be in his direct path. He would be forced to stop and look at me. We, the prisoners, know not to stand in the way of anyone with authority but I take one step to the right. He’ll have to brush shoulders with me if he continues forward.

Within steps of each other, he lowers his eyes, setting his glare toward the ground. “I know you see me,” I whisper.

“I can’t—Danner. I—I’m so—” he says in nothing more than a mutter disguised as a cough.

I’ve heard enough, so I move back to the left, allowing him out of the corridor he appears to be suffocating in. If he were starving and had nowhere to sleep, I might think he would understand how I felt, but even if we were living identical lives, Otto still wouldn’t see me as an equal, not like he did all those years ago.