Schatzi

39

As the months passed, Eli could feel the tensions in the air around them growing. The war was slowly coming to a close. There were still battles to be fought and lives to be lost but slowly Britain was gaining the upper hand. Slowly.

April. 1945.

It had been a bad year. Food rations had gradually grown smaller and smaller throughout the decade. There seemed to be shortages of everything nowadays, from food to makeup to clothes. Brigitte liked to complain about it to him, because in her tiny little mind that was all that mattered. There'd been an increase in bombings. It was terrifying for everyone in the country but for Eli and Rachel who couldn't leave the house in fear of being caught? It was terrifying. They had to listen to those god awful sirens and listen to the whizzing and crashes of bombs as they fell to earth and then caused the destruction they were designed to create.

Every day the fear of being caught grew. There had been talk of the allied forces beginning to invade. The war was ending, but not fast enough. The bombs were still dropped and people were still disappearing. There was still time for it to happen.

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The sudden arrival of thousands of new prisoners sent shockwaves through the camp. Most noticeably, the outbreak of Typhus. No one explained where the new prisoners had come from but they were unlike the usual groups that would arrive by train almost every day that Peter would document, copying names and numbers into the books in the administration room. These prisoners already had uniforms and numbers and they arrived on foot instead of by train. Peter didn't know how far they'd walked but most of them were half dead by the time they arrived.

One day, he'd seen one of the marches arrive and there was a man standing at the front of the snake like line of people, stretching out across the fields outside of the camp. The man had laid eyes on the chain link fences, the barbed wire and the watchtowers, and he'd stopped dead in his tracks. The guards leading the march pushed him forward, screaming in his face and beating him, but he wouldn't move. He wouldn't take a step closer towards the camp. Peter had been able to do nothing but watch as the guards pushed him to the ground and kicked him until he lay still and lifeless. From his position near the fence, Peter saw the thick, almost black blood that dripped from his lips and onto the ground. The line of people stepped over his body to walk closer towards him.

It was hard for him to comprehend quite how much the camp had grown in his little corner of the camp for the homosexuals but even they received some new inmates. Their numbers had been slowly dwindling until there was no more than 100 of them left and since there seemed to be no more gay prisoners coming into camp, the numbers of barracks they occupied had been decreased to two. So the building was back to how it was when Peter had arrived. Bustling and angry and cramped. No one had tried to pick a fight with anyone like Max had on that first day when he arrived. So no fights broke out and he didn't have to play the role Jens had played on that day.

The peacemaker.

The oldest resident. He'd lost track of the years. He didn't even know what year it was anymore. He'd been 25 when they brought him to Dachau. He supposed he must have turned 30 or at least be almost 30 by now.

If he wasn't 30 yet, he doubted he'd make it if his birthday was more than a couple of weeks away. The new cramped conditions, even more so than normal, had brought on waves of sickness and the camp was in the middle of a Typhus epidemic. It had started with a couple of people complaining of fevers and headaches, but then it had become ten people, and the headaches had become vomiting and rashes that covered the whole body and delirious screaming that filled the barracks day and night. Peter had tried to stay away from the infected men but they were in such a cramped space with no where else to go that it was virtually impossible to stay healthy.