His wife

>time is running, so should you<

As he declares this I just stand there commentless. The small hairs on the back of my neck stand up straight while my stomach pulls itself together. And yet I just stand next to him wide-eyed, knowing he would even feel a thrill to pick out their death date.

Shortly afterwards he leaves for his work again while I lead the frightened children back to the barrack and try to calm them down. But that task is harder than any other because I don't know how to comfort scared souls which just escaped their death. At least for now.

_
That day I should have realized not only that Josef is more than rotten but also that those Nazis knew the end is near, or at least that they'll lose another huge chunk of land. The second they realized that the red army was getting closer and closer, they tried to save what needed to be saved and destroy most of the proof.

They simply don't want a lot their actions here to be known and they wish that none of the prisoners will survive to tell this story. Yet they don't kill all of them, at least not those of use. Recently they began to lead prisoners to different camps, they destroyed certain buildings, gassed people who couldn't be transferred and burned certain documents. At one point all the Zyklon B went out, people were therefore dragged out of the gas chamber again.

They had killed so many that all gas was done. All the gas was gone and their reserves were massive. They stopped the mass murdering only when they ran out of gas. They didn't stop because of any other reason, they stopped because they couldn't continue, even though they wanted to.

And I was just so glad that they had to stop because them being incapable of killing hundreds, saves exactly those lives. At least that was the case in Auschwitz, what happened at the other camps in the mean time was not known to me. Yet what I knew to be true is that the new fear which suddenly was present came from the people free from the barbed wire.

But still most repeated they the war will be won, Hitler would win the war and that the communists would never get any of their research. Nevertheless their loyalty, the fear in their faces could not be hidden. What surprised me though was that most seemed more afraid to lose the war than to be held accountable for their actions.

Though I think secretly all feared death the most because it already was so close. It had always been here. Usually the presence of death could be felt like a heavy blanket which weighed down on us, now though, the stress ripped this blanket off and ripped their system of death apart.

But I must admit that I was scared too, not for the same reasons as those criminals. Well maybe the exact same reason. If the red army found me and knew I had betrayed them, my blood would soak into this ground too. Or maybe Stalin would even have me travel back home to throw me into a gulag or torture me perhaps so that I'd admit my greatest sin.

Fact was that if they found me, I would not smile.

_
Josef could feel my anxiety but he just repeatedly told me ''Everything will be fine.'' He said it so often that I was not even sure he didn't say it for himself. Despite the fact that most left or tried to get away from here, he hid his nervousness behind his experiments. At that point he was even more obsessed with his documents and carefully sent folders and notes to institutions and people he trusted.

Yet despite all these distractions, he could not convince himself that everything would be fine. He was smart enough to know that his actions would eventually have their consequences.

Therefore one day when I sat in his office to take notes, he had invited a colleague over to show her some of his notes. Carefully he made sure that I wouldn't see anything while this woman looked disturbed as he turned more and more pages. Neatly I wrote down dates on his notes while I heard his enthusiastic talk and her swallowing as if she tried to keep herself from puking her guts out.