Stellina

Hidden Stars

Gurs Internment Camp, 1940

The filth streaked his raw skin, all over his body this time. No black tears fell from his eyes, which had dried out long ago from all the horror and sorrow he witnessed daily. He was starving. He was broken beyond repair. They called him worthless, no better than a rat.

Luka Fuhrmann tossed and turned in his makeshift straw bed, his hand nearly slapping a fellow prisoner in the face. His throat burned, feeling as if it were closing up. He felt oddly cold, despite the blistering heat and the sixty other bodies that were nestled beside him in the tiny cabin. Quivering, he swiped the cold, beady sweat off his olive forehead, streaks of crimson mixing with salt. Beside him, a skeleton of a man hacked violently, blood dripping down his lips.

He gazed out the glassless window, a blanket of stars and blackness finally coating the camp. The blind man's prophetic murmurings drifted into his ears once again, just like they did every night. "An earthquake is coming," he'd murmur, his voice thin and distant, like that of a spirit. "Beware, an earthquake that will split the earth apart and swallow the evil whole."

Beside him, his bedmate tossed and turned as well, perhaps hoping to stave off the nightmares as long as possible. "Hope you see her tonight," he whispered in French, then in jumbled German.

A coughing fit of his own suddenly seized Luka, rattling what was left of his decaying bones. He rolled off the slat of straw into a puddle of water, chills seeping throughout his entire body. His eyes fluttered shut as he willed his body to fall into the sweet release of sleep, the only escape from the horrors of the camp he witnessed daily. The starvation. The dying children. The sobs that penetrated the soft fluttering of birds circling above.

Yet as the days progressed, not even sleep allowed Luka to escape. It almost haunted him more, the images of his past snaking into the blackness and creeping into his dreams each night.

First he saw the French police officer, saw the torrents of rain that slashed through the gray mist of the Marseilles air. How as soon as he'd returned to the beloved French city in search for Lina, he'd felt the jab of the butt of a rifle slamming into his back. How it had knocked him to the cobblestone, his blood trickling through the cracks of the street, how sparks of pain flashed through his vision as the rifle was slammed into his temple. He'd feel everything as acutely as the day it had happened, from the way his arms were yanked backward as he was handcuffed to when he was thrown onto the dusty floor of a prison cell.

But it was the words that sliced through him the most in his nightmare. They gnawed at his soul, a punch to his gut that sent tremors throughout his entire body.

"Madame Riviere sends her regards. So does Stellina Fontaine."

Luka could still picture the crooked smirk on the officer's cracked lips the words snarled from his mouth.

It wouldn't take long for the crooked smile to disappear, replaced by one much softer, much gentler, though perhaps twice as ominous.

Every night, she would creep into his dreams, a silent bird suddenly swooping down from out of nowhere. Her fiery auburn hair was the only flash of color that dared seep through the shades of gray, her freckles dotting her cheeks like the stars in the sky. "I love you," she'd say over and over again. And then she grasped his hand, an ominous smile spread across her lips as she led him through the barren countryside. His hand in hers, she led him to the austere, black gates with words burned into them that he'd never forget. Arbeit macht frei. The words of his fate.

He'd feel her hand slip from his, replaced by a rush of empty wind. And then, she shoved him, sending him sprawling through the gates. The words burned in his throat as he opened his cracked lips, desperately trying to cry out. Yet only silence dripped out as the scars carved their way on his heart. And like that, she disappeared, melting into one black shadow.