END OF THE LINE

This month, we remember the courage and sacrifice of those who gave their lives for peace, freedom, and justice. Our Chapter of the Month recalls one of the reasons that sacrifice was so important, for while it is a work of fiction, it is based on very real, and truly terrible events that we must never forget.

End of the Line comes from Destiny of Souls, second instalment in The Souls Series, available to pre-order at: https://troubador.co.uk/bookshop/fantasy-and-horror/destiny-of-souls

Hannah’s legs were aching so badly, they felt like they were on fire. It was over two days since the train had left Amsterdam and begun its long journey east. She’d been one of the last into the truck, forced to stand in an awkward position, right in the middle. There was no room for anyone to sit, but some of the others could at least lean against the sides. She envied them. Funny how such a little thing could become so important when everything else had been taken from you.

Before the Nazis arrived, she’d been worried how she was going to tell her parents about Margarita. She smiled ironically to herself as she recalled thinking they would probably be more annoyed Margarita was a Catholic than they would be to find out their daughter was a lesbian. But Margarita had dropped her like a stone after the occupation began. She could understand her lover being afraid to consort with a Jewess, but the fact she refused to even speak to her, never even said goodbye, had broken her heart.

Her parents had been taken away a couple of years later. She hadn’t heard from them since. Now it was her turn, and her world had shrunk to this: where a better place to stand in an over-crowded cattle truck was her greatest concern. Still, her legs were really aching.

The truck lurched as the train driver applied the brakes. Some of the occupants peered through the gaps in the wooden sides and word started passing around they were arriving. The man standing next to her summed up what the people at the sides were saying, “It is a big factory complex, with worker’s huts, and a huge building in the middle with tall chimneys. We are pulling into a siding, there are soldiers waiting for us.”

She shivered in dread. She’d been beaten by the Nazi soldiers on several occasions, she expected no better now.

The train came to a halt and, a few minutes later, the door was pulled open. Some people fell out of the crowded truck, forcibly ejected by the pressure of the compressed mass of humanity behind them. The soldiers started beating them with their rifle butts, shouting at them to run and join the lines of prisoners at the head of the train.

Hannah and the others followed in turn. She gulped in the air. It tasted foul, there was an odour she couldn’t place, but it was better than the suffocating atmosphere in the truck. She blinked as she reached the sunlight, her eyes stinging with tears as they strained to cope with the sudden transition from darkness. Trying to run after the other prisoners, her aching legs only allowed her to hobble along behind them. “Schnell!” a guard shouted from behind, and she fell as he hammered his rifle butt into the small of her back. Glancing up, she saw him aiming the butt at her head. She quickly jumped up and somehow managed to run to the back of the women’s line.

The line shuffled forwards slowly, it was almost an hour before she entered the gates of the camp. All the time she tried to think of Margarita, her parents, the life they used to have… before the Nazis took it away. She wondered what kind of work she would have to do in the camp, it would probably be something awful, dirty, and hard, something the Germans didn’t want to do themselves. She used to work in an office before the invasion, she’d enjoyed it there, made lots of friends, it was where she’d met Margarita. But, after they were ordered to wear the yellow badge, the manager had called her into his room and told her she was dismissed. He never gave a reason, he couldn’t even look her in the eye, nor did any of her friends when she was escorted from the building: they weren’t her friends any more.

Looking ahead, she could see the lines of prisoners ended at a small clearing. As each person reached the front of their line, the guards made them run across the clearing to a white-coated official on the far side. The official examined the prisoner, pinching their arms, sometimes feeling their legs as well, or forcing their mouth open to check their teeth. When the examination was complete, the official waved the prisoner to the right or left, depending on his verdict. The whole procedure took place under the watchful eyes of the armed guards.

As she neared the front of the line, she could see the women sent to the right being taken to a nearby hut. Every minute or so, a woman would emerge from the hut with her head shaved, wearing a black and white striped dress, the prison uniform. But most of the women were sent to the left. The guards forced them to run across a long, open space, to the massive building at the centre of the compound, where they disappeared through a set of iron doors.

Her legs still ached terribly, there was a severe pain in her back where the soldier had struck her. When her turn came, she did her best to run across the clearing, but could only manage a pathetic stagger. The official waved her to the left without even bothering to examine her. She ran on as best she could towards the iron doors. The soldiers shouted threats and abuse all the way, she was terrified of getting another beating.

Finally reaching the doors, she stepped inside, blinking as her eyes adjusted to the dark interior. There were two armed soldiers chatting together in the corner, three women dressed in the black and white prisoners’ uniform stood in front of her. One of the women ordered, “Take off your clothes and put them on the pile,” indicating a large heap at the side of the room.

She stripped to her underwear, then stood waiting. “Everything,” shouted the woman. She glanced at the watching soldiers, eying the naked women passing through the room. Feeling deeply ashamed, she removed her underwear and added it to the pile, then tried to cover herself with her hands. The uniformed woman pushed her towards the door at the far side of the room, and she found herself queuing in a line once more. A few minutes later, she was standing before another woman in prison uniform. “Put your jewellery in there,” the woman ordered, gesturing at an iron bucket filled with bracelets, rings, lockets, and other trinkets.

“Please, this was my mother’s, it is all I have left of her,” Hannah fingered the thin gold chain she wore around her neck. “In the bucket,” the woman repeated. Hannah glanced over her shoulder and saw another soldier with his rifle at the ready. Stifling her tears, she removed the necklace her mother had given her on her sixteenth birthday, seven years ago, and placed it in the bucket with the countless other confiscated mementos and heirlooms, devastated to be parted from this last reminder of the normal, happy family life she had once had.

“Keep moving,” the woman snapped and Hannah stepped through the next door where she joined yet another line. Shuffling forwards, she grasped involuntarily at her hair as she realised what was to happen next. When she reached the front of the line, a uniformed woman made her kneel with her head bowed while a male prisoner shaved off her hair with a set of electric clippers. Her long, golden locks fell to the floor to join the piles of human hair a young boy was scooping up and stuffing into a sack. She couldn’t hold back her tears any longer, they dripped onto the concrete alongside her hair. She felt desolate, dehumanised, stripped of everything that made her who she was. She had never done anything wrong in her life, never harmed a soul, how could anyone treat people like this for no reason other than their race?

Once her head was shaved, the uniformed woman told her to get back to her feet, then pushed her towards the next doorway, “Down the corridor to the delousing showers.”

Clasping her hands in front of her to protect her modesty, she walked along the corridor with dozens of other naked prisoners, from little girls, three or four years old, to women of seventy or eighty. There were even babies, carried in their mothers’ arms.

The light from the overhead lamps glistened on the women’s freshly shaven scalps, there was a low chorus of moaning and sobbing. None of this made any sense, how could little children and old women be any use in a labour camp? And why weren’t they all sent to the same showers, why had the other women been separated off and sent somewhere else? A strong sense of foreboding gripped her, sending a shiver up her spine.

The corridor ended at an opening, two armed guards on either side, three male prisoners standing beside the heavy iron door. She looked at them, hoping for some sign that might tell her what was going on, why all this was happening, but their stony faces revealed nothing. “Into the showers, schnell,” shouted one of the guards.

Beyond the doorway, the room was already crowded, hundreds of women and girls packed in beneath the iron showerheads hanging from the ceiling. She didn’t think there could possibly be room for her and the others in the corridor, but the guards started to push them with their rifles, cramming the helpless women into the shower room. She was swept along and pushed inside, dozens more forced in behind her before the guards ordered the waiting male prisoners to shut the door.

Jammed in so tightly no-one could move, the moaning and sobbing continued as they waited for the showers to start. She heard the rattle of bolts and the sound of something dropping inside the pipes above their heads. There was a faint hissing and some of the women reached up, expecting water to spout from the showerheads.

Looking up, Hannah saw it was smoke, not water, coming from above. Many of the women began to cough and splutter, others started to scream. She looked around and saw the women’s faces turning red, tears streaming from their eyes. In a split-second it hit her like a hurricane: the ghastly truth. They weren’t here to work, they were here to be exterminated. She felt the urine running down her leg as, in desperation, she did the only thing she could think of: closed her eyes and held her breath.

Around her, the women were coughing, screaming, wailing in despair. The terrible, tormented cacophony grew louder and louder. It reached a crescendo then, after a few minutes, began to quieten down again. She felt herself being dragged down as the others slumped to the floor. Opening her eyes, but still holding her breath, she saw most of the women’s faces had turned an unnaturally bright, vivid shade of red. Some had green spots, many were foaming at the mouth, bleeding from the ears and nostrils. Their expressionless eyes stared lifelessly out of sunken sockets, their features frozen in unbearable agony.

A few, like her, were still holding their breath. They stared back with the same frantic terror in their eyes that she felt inside, each fighting to hang on somehow, but knowing they had only moments left to live. Gradually, one by one, each woman’s aching lungs forced her to breathe. As they drew in the poisoned air, they coughed and gagged, until their face turned that same, extraordinary, brilliant shade of red, and the life went out of their eyes.

She was pulled to the floor by the weight of the dead surrounding her. Finally, she too was compelled to open her mouth and breathe, letting in the deadly fumes. Her throat felt as though it was on fire. She gasped and choked, struggling against the inevitable, until at last she succumbed to the darkness.