Alive and Warm (WWII Kyman AU/Part I)

Alive and Warm


The last few days were treacherously warm.

Of course, at the time, I hadn’t known they were the last days in the ghetto, up until the final seventy-two hours. But I was certain none of the others knew the significance of November 15th like I did, and even then, I felt as if I’d cheated.

On what was to become the final day, I woke before dawn to the shrill echoes of a whistle from the streets below. It was so cold, and I felt the contrast from days past to the marrow of my bones. My dreams had been pitiless, and the memories wafting from this deep disremembered part of me became all the more impractical upon my waking in a room as dusty and hard as this. Everything smelt of brick, dust, and ice, and winter’s cold grip had begun its worst on this small corner of the world overnight.

The wailing of Hena’s baby began from the opposite side of the room, and from my spot compressed between those whose language was foreign to my own, I could overhear something from outside the window, a rushed set of movements followed by the bark of commands and a demand for order. Baby Sarah’s screams were piercing, almost as bad as the whistles, and as these movements refused to subside, so did the inevitability of forsaken dreaming. The eleven other occupants of the room also began to rise, mumbling incoherent curses and irritated moans, all too tragically unfamiliar as to what that whistle actually meant. I had opened my eyes when a noisy knock came from the door.

“Roundup, outside!” I didn’t recognise the man’s voice by any sort of distinction, but, then again, these soldiers had all managed to blend together in my mind into a faceless nonentity. “Everyone is to report to the entrance for final inspection and registration before the first cars depart. Leave all belongings behind with surnames written on them, they will be shipped behind you to make space, so do not bother carrying them with you.”

What struck me most after the officer had moved on to the next room was how rehearsed he had sounded. He had said these exact words already to countless others, and likely countless more would hear his message after us.

Bedsprings squeaked and tired sleepers groaned. In the damp dark of our room, Sarah continued to cry, her sharp voice echoing off the walls. Despite the creaking floors and chilling air, it took Hena less than a moment for her to rise from her spot next to her husband, Abraham, and pull her fussing daughter into her arms. As I myself sat up, I noticed the newlyweds huddling together around their baby girl, the loving sight of solidarity between family, before Abraham got up and began dressing. From the little I’d spoken to him, I understood that he’d been a musician before the roundup. I followed suit and got up, an ache descending from the veins in my lungs to the roots of my feet, and the truth became undeniable.

Workers; he’d told me not to believe the lie, that we Jews of Grodno were to be spared and used as slaves. We’d be the workers of war for the men who, once our usefulness faded, would kill us in droves. Lies to keep us discreet, compliant and calm. It both sickened and frightened me that these creatures in the luxurious uniforms had become so mighty that the people surrounding me, people who were willingly walking into their own graves, believed that they could continue breathing for at least a few minutes more, and all that was asked in return was submission. It was a trade most were willing to take, if not all, and everything fell into place. Salvation through work, was the phrase, and I heard it every day for the past year, as if it meant something. Salvation through work.

Even should I have remained ignorant of what was really happening, I’d have been far too prideful to obey such a loathsome command. The unfortunate consequence of being a son of Shelia Broflovski was that I’d gotten her temper, and this reluctance to go along with something I couldn’t stand behind or believe in. It has proved a difficult if not defining quirk in the past, and something natural I couldn’t shake. I was certain that, had our plan not called for self-restraint, had he not told me to lay low and keep my mouth shut – and had he not helped me – I’d have been dead long before this November 15th.

From her spot mere centimeters away, Hena distracted me from my current train of thought, and it felt soothing, almost reassuring. “Shh, little Sarah, shush,” the young mother cooed, lovely dark hair ragged and stringing in her eyelashes. “Don’t be frightened.”

I felt groggy and hungry with a vague but nagging pain in my side from the lumps in my straw-stuffed mattress, and I watched the scene of this nineteen-year-old girl comforting her daughter back into sleep, silently wondering if this was how my mother calmed me back when I was a child.

I shook my head, raking my fingers through the oily hairs that clung to my scalp. Too many memories of familiarity made me feel all the more horrible than I already did.

I had been the only Broflovski sent to Grodno. My little brother, Isaac, had apparently managed to keep himself well-hidden from the regime, finding shelter beneath some helpful soul’s floorboards in Southern Germany. It made me cringed that I hadn’t known if my mother and father had been taken in, and hadn’t seen their faces in, if I had it right, a year and four months. Grandfather Malachi and Grandmother Chloe, the aunts and uncles and the few cousins I had; I’d yet to see any of them in this hellhole, and they lived so close by, before the war anyway...

Dressing with eleven others in a room built for two, I internally begged and pleaded with God that I had been the only of my family to get caught. Still, I couldn’t help doubting, wondering if I’d finally been abandoned by both blood and God altogether. Maybe then I wouldn’t be judged for my future trail of sins.

For not telling anyone.

A soft grip curved along my shoulder, and I turned my head; the red curls I’d inherited from my mother, once vibrant but now lying stiff against my cheekbones, followed the swift movement as well as they could. Hena appeared all the wearier up close, but there shone a brilliant kindness in her eyes and a smile graced her pale lips. “Don’t worry, dear, we’ll all be fine,” she hummed, as if she were making up for the lack of softness in our captors. “God is watching over us and guarding us, no matter what happens.”

This gentle humanity threw me off so greatly that I swore I felt the earth shake beneath me. It frightened me just a bit to know that this woman was only two years my senior, but she had treated me like a fragile child. Hena reminded me of my own mother, minus the temper, and I found the more she smiled at me, the worse I felt. In that moment, I thought about telling her, telling all of them, that this was a day to fear, a day where one had to look beyond God for salvation. The sensation nagged so vigorously in my lowest gut, and I forced myself to part my lips and-

Thought of what he’d told me.

“Shut up and listen to me, for once. You’ve never listened to me, but you need to now. Don’t tell anyone about November 15th, you’ll only cause worse trouble for both yourself and all the others. Only you are to know about it, alright?”

-I hesitated, I needed to say something. Just something, anything.

“Thank you, Hena,” was what I eventually managed, voice strained and almost lifeless. Hena seemed pleased with my answer, nevertheless, and placed another warming hand on my back before returning to her own family. I had never felt so alone in my life than I did at that moment.

The room had started to smell like mold. The entire complex did, really, with the snow soaking into the cheap wood. We’d all be breathing in nothing but recycled air if the walls weren’t so thin to begin with. Even the nights during the summer were bitter and cold, but with winter, things only worsened. And no one complained, since we were all aware that it could be worse.

I sat again on my cot as I watched the others prepare to leave wherever they would be sent. Everything but my shoes and a winter hat were now secured on my person, so I figured I’d spare myself a moment to relax and wait for everyone to be on their way.

Suitcases were pulled from under beds and mattresses, and all the others began storing away their possessions, the ones they hadn’t traded for food or gloves or jackets. I wondered if I should also pack up my things, but only for a second before I realised that I had been brought to this place with only what I had on me at the time of my capture. Chalk was passed between families and surnames were scribbled quickly on the tops of their brown leather luggage. None paid any heed to me in all this bustling process, not even Hena, whose sole focus lay on her daughter and her husband as she also rushed to pack their things together. Because of my position as being alone and German-speaking in a primarily Polish-native ghetto, I rarely ever talked to anyone here.

The aging Kozlow couple, who didn’t speak a word of German, were the first to leave, and Abraham and Hena soon followed after with little Sarah now snuggly sleeping in her mother’s arms. On their heels followed two other woman named Minka and Monika, whom I had assumed were siblings, adorned in their best mink-skin furs (their jewelry securely sewn into their underclothes a week or so back), then Adir Sokol, his wife, Meital and their two young children, Dvorah and Melech. It was far too soon that I had been left by myself.

And I remembered exactly what he’d wanted me to do. Our plan was finally to set into motion.

I’d been in these ghettos three months before I had begun to truly hate myself. Only once in my life other than this point did I twist into a suspension of perpetual self-loathing, and that had been my final night in Berlin. I had not done something wrong, per say, but it had been a bad parting, and now it was not just the imprisonment that kept me from the city I had once known as my home. From the ghetto, my conflict with myself arose not from this instilled belief that these people held against me, that I was predisposed to being wicked and deceitful. No, it was because I had lacked the foresight to keep myself hidden, and my own doing had been what got me caught and sent to this crowded hell in the first place.

My parents had moved us from Berlin just weeks before I’d turned fifteen, Isaac barely even ten. We stayed for what felt like an eternity in Northern Germany, Schwedt, with a man my father had known in his college years studying law. This man who shook my hand once and did not again look at me, a man whose name I couldn’t even remember now, had been my father’s friend. And while he’d agreed to shelter us in the basement of his home, he’d looked at us as if we were not people, a family in need of shelter, but a responsibility that had been forced on him.

We weren’t sure who it had been, but someone alerted the police after seven months. When father’s friend descended the stairs with waving arms, rattling out that we needed to move somewhere, anywhere other than his home, the idea of blame seemed a stupid thing to care about. With such little notice, we did not go together, as if the notion of our staying together, the four of us, would be a dead giveaway, so father made it so that we would be off in threes; Isaac went to the widowed something or other of one of mother’s friends in Füssen, and my parents claimed they knew of a place in Brussels where they would be welcomed, although, as father told this to Isaac and I, his expression was such that he was lying through the skin of his teeth. Mother was wincing tears away, securing her hold around Isaac when I was told that they’d made arrangements for me not to stay with my brother or my parents, like I had predicted, but to travel to Pita. There, a small family father had worked with on one of his cases had agreed to shelter me, but only me. I recall hating my father for his weak reasoning, for his inability to keep the family together, like it should be, and I wished with all my being that he would just come out and say that my brother and I could not be together because I looked the part of a Jew while he did not. Isaac, merely adopted into Jewish blood, wouldn’t have to hide, but me… I was conspicuous, and I’d end up getting us both caught.

Father had enough sense not to admit this, however, and I loathed him all the more.

Seeing as how swiftly we needed to get moving, I got in few words of goodbye to my family. Mother practically knocked the air from my lungs with the squeeze she inflicted upon my middle, and in our last seconds together, she dropped something into my hands, demanding I keep it safe. I swept Isaac into a short but sentimental embrace, and, with little time left, I nodded at father and gave him the smallest of smiles before we were all off in separate directions.

Being that we all mutually agreed that it was partially their failure in our getting reported to the authorities, the wife of father’s friend offered to drive either Isaac or me off, and since my destination was closer, I was stationed on the floor of the backseat of their car, a blanket laid on me and shopping bags atop that. It proved unsuccessful, and after two hours of lying in continuous stillness, she was stopped and my cover was ripped from me. I was honestly amazed when the officers, two men with little pins adorned with the symbol of the Reich, did not shoot me on sight. They laughed cruelly at me, at a one point one of them forced my head down with a flat palm that he’d placed on my head, down far enough that I was close to toppling over, but otherwise they detained me into the back of their car. They never spoke a word to me on their way to Grodno, and at my arrival, I was all but immediately recorded and shoved into the grounds of ghetto one, left to fend for myself.

Everything happened so quickly that it blurred from my memory, and much of it had disappeared completely from my mind. Now, only broad details still remained in their absence. The fate of the woman who had been driving was still unknown to me, though it had occurred to me that her husband, a wealthy and influential lawyer, likely got her away clean. I do remember the embarrassment, however, that stood relevant beyond my clear feelings of dread. How idiotic I was, to have been caught so easily. We hadn’t even hit the border and I had been captured. I chalked this disgust up to my pride, the pride I’d obviously inherited from my mother, and even as I was sent to work in the factory with the other men, making hinges, bullet casings and assembly line guns used in the German effort, it hurt my ego greatly to have known that I was so simply caught.

It had been around this period of this internal struggle that it happened. Whether it had been salvation sent by God Himself or just a ghastly joke at my expense, I still am not sure.

Sitting there on my cot, November 15th finally upon me, I pulled on my footwear; brown leather business shoes from my father that clashed with my torn slacks and shirt grayed from months without wash. Without a second’s hesitation, I moved to the window, cheap white paint now chipping away from the pane, and unfastened the latch. The cold hit instantly, burning me and nipping at the skin of my face once I’d pulled the glass above my head. Whistles and shouts were erupting from the ground up, and somehow, the orders roared from down below took a more vicious tone from this safety point above ground. But they weren’t important, not at that moment; I looked down to see if he’d be there.

I didn’t even have to wait. On the ground, whitened by a mid-winter snow, stood the thick stature of a Hitler Youth with large military boots and brunet hair. He outweighed and towered above the others youths present at the ghetto, which there weren’t very many to compare, but he was definitely recognizable the first second we laid eyes on one another, regardless of the inciting chaos surrounding us. Even in the thickened darkness of early morning, we could see each other clearly.

In the state I was in, tired and anxious, I couldn’t find it in me to grace him with a greeting.

For the majority of my life, I had been… something, with Eric Theodore Cartman. “Friend” was certainly not the right word to use, and “acquaintance” suggested that we didn’t know each other very well. On the contrary, by age nine, I knew more about Eric Cartman than I did about myself, and, despite being somewhat depressing, it was a truth I had become accustomed to.

We’d met at home, back in Berlin. While it had been normal for my family to live in a primarily Jewish neighbourhood, Eric Cartman, who lived opposite our yard and garden, was there because his family couldn’t afford a better home in a Lutheran or Catholic district. He’d been the first person I’d ended up meeting in our new home, and gave a rather unfortunate impression of the city in general. Isaac and I had been in the garden, exploring and playing, when a voice came from the opposite yard, and Eric popped his head around the hedges of the gate. He was a short, plump little boy with chocolate smeared on his face, three front teeth missing, and a sneer fit snuggly around his fat cheeks. He called out, “New Jews in the neighbourhood!”, and mentioned “going home to Israel” and “we don’t want you here.”

My temperament was worse when I was younger. I yelled for him to be quiet, to go home and I insulted him over his weight. He’d thrown a tiny tin car at my head, and in return, I’d climbed our railing and chased him around his yard, threatening to shove the car down his throat.

In spite of our less than friendly first meeting, Eric quickly became my closest companion, but that meant little in way of his less than charming personality. He’d tormented me from day one, mentally, physically, every way imaginable; he’d mocked my hair, my nose, my voice, my eyes, the way I walked, and often taunted me and demanded I fight him. He’d been especially fond of ridiculing my Jewish ancestry after a while, and he’d go days at a time without using my name, opting instead for my new nickname, “Jew”.

There were other friends that I’d met and become close to. Stanley Marsh attended Eric’s primary school; he had hair as black as deep ink, eyes a dulled blue and he had the most ridiculously hairy eyebrows. We met through Eric, who introduced me as “Jew”, and Stanley as “Scum”, and the bond between us was all but immediate. His father was a professor of some kind, a major alcoholic with what Stanley had referred to as “behavioural issues”, and his mother was a receptionist at some downtown clinic or some such. Stanley was quiet but self-driven, something of an egomaniac if I was being completely honest, and stopped playing games like frogs or jacks about grade four when he began talking less. He’d pinch the bridge of his nose if something exasperated him, which happened too many times to count. Whenever lost in thought, he’d stuff his hands deep into the pockets of his trousers and would remain silent and unmoving until something, a little thought of inconsequence to anyone else, satisfied him. If there’s one thing to remember about Stanley, especially in these years in which I hadn’t seen or heard anything from him, it’s that he had this weird affinity for animals; cows, dogs, goats, turkeys, anything but the snakes we’d find slithering about in our gardens he was fond of and cared more deeply for than he ever would another person. I thought of the strained relationship he had with his father, the girlfriend I never met, the mother and sister he never talked about. Really, it was no wonder he favoured animals over people.

Kenneth McCormick, a boy of mostly Scottish decent, was more the type I saw Eric Cartman taking up as a long-term friend. Content with grime and a life of poverty and hedonism, Kenneth representing everything my father hated in other people; he came from a background of drunks and thieves, and this, as he thought, made him both tough and proud. He was quiet, too, not in a thoughtful way like Stanley, but in a way that suggested that he was both meek and incredibly bored, but also observant. He had obsessions over things like death, resurrection and sex, which my parents despised more than anything, and I was forced to play with Kenneth in secret. Best thing about him was his endearing kindness, and his willingness to step in and help no matter what the problem or the person; usually, anyway. I’d like to think of him as becoming a police officer should he ever find the motivation. He’d be good at that.

From 1930 until 1935, it was always the four of us, although since I lived in my own little district, it was easier to seek out Eric’s company more than Stanley or Kenneth, who were out of the way. My parents, brother and classmates thought it odd that I sought the companionship of almost entirely non-Jews, but in this I felt a sense of pride, like I’d accomplished something none of the other Jewish children had without even trying.

I was eight when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor, and, despite being so young, everything started changing for me; my non-Jewish friends weren’t allowed to come over anymore, and I was no longer permitted to be out by myself after school, especially if I was outside our Jewish district. I remember being confused by these new restrictions, so dreadfully confused over the importance of such a label as “Jew”. Up until that point, I’d been myself and that alone, not a small piece of a whole that every non-Jew now said was the start of the downfall of our – their –  society. My father would often talk when he was in his room with my mother, thinking themselves alone while Isaac and I huddled outside the door. They discussed certain threats and accusations made against him and his firm, certain stories from family and friends across Germany and Poland, who’d spoken of bloodshed and beatings and public executions. All from a label, and I still hadn’t understood.

Why they hated us so much.

I listened to the kids at school, who also had wretched things to say. Many whispered about family plans to flee to Israel or the Netherlands or Switzerland; others, like Ezer Wiesel, a close friend of mine, had families constructing safe houses, hidden from any unwelcomed eye, or had begun forming plans with non-Jewish friends for the security of a safe hideaway until “this all blew over” and normalcy could commence.

In all this confusion, in this time of inflicted fear and new regulation, Eric Cartman had become my last constant.

And here in Grodno, he’d become my only irregularity.

Standing ridged in the snow, Eric stared up at me. Beyond him, I could make out the rest of the ghetto’s gray buildings and beyond that, the gate. The dim early morning glow, however denied my anything further than that. My hands clutched at the window pane and I paused for a minute, as if I were making sure that it was really him. Of course it was. In the light of a nearby lamp, I could make out the smoke of his breath, the cold in his mouth and the hurry in the wrinkles of his eyebrows. Maybe he was analyzing my appearance the same way I was his, but the way I felt at that moment, I really didn’t want to think on that.

The gaze between us lingered for as long as it could before I initiated the plan. Gracelessly, I groped about my slack pocket, grasped what I was searching for, opened the window and tossed a crumpled scrap of paper down towards Eric. He snatched the paper before it fell into the snow, read its contents, and took his leave, flashing me a meaningful glance before going about his business.

I didn’t watch him go, but instead returned to my cot, the makeshift bed I’d made mine in the last two months, the slate I had traded a box of unused matches for. Beneath the springs, I pulled a clay mug of water staled by time and likely coated with a collection of dust, and sat, again reaching into my pocket to find the next step: Mother’s wedding ring, the gift she’d carefully handed me moments before I’d seen her last. She’d begged me to keep it close and hoped to hold it once again after we would reunite. Looking at it, I thought of it as nothing short of beautiful, a single diamond curved along an outline of fine tiny Mediterranean pearls. I’d loved this ring for so long that it hurt, worse than the abandonment and maybe even worse than the loneliness.

“I can’t lose this,” I whispered aloud, mostly to myself but maybe to God, too. I opened my jaws and placed the ring on my tongue, and with the last of my reservations now gone, I took one large gulp of water. Hiding the cup was a fantastic idea; the ring went down my throat so much easier with it than it would have without any kind of assistance. Now, no one could take the final piece of my mother away from me.

I crowned the hat Eric had given me onto my scalp, and with that, I bolted out the door. Along the way, I almost tripped on the stairs and shoved past a good deal of people, but I suddenly felt very motivated, and ignored the curses and angry shouts hurled at me by those I’d inconvenienced. I’d written a very simple response the night before and had at last delivered my final answer.

If we can both get on the train to Malines today, then yes.

Then came the worst part.

The Polish city of Grodno had three ghettos by the time I arrived after my arrest, split into sections shortly after someone realised that 15,000 people in-between Wilenska Street and Zamkowa Street was far too tight a fit. Ghetto two of this divided land had been built behind a set of railway tracks, next to an old army barracks and a corner from the market square. I’d been in ghetto one for a week when, along with thousands of others, I had been forcibly transferred from one to two with little time to prepare. We were herded, like sheep. I recalled the screams of panic, the separation of families and the scrambles to keep a hold on old family possessions that were surely all gone by now.

And there we remained for a year.

They came for the businessmen shortly before the last day, and transported them back to Ghetto one, leaving woman and children and unusable men back in two. The population, as far as Eric had told me, went down  to 4,000. There was crying those days, too, but it was much more dignified than it had been during the first move. I’d envied them, for having the energy to cry, for having a loved one still with them worth crying over.

Two was reserved for the less useful occupants, and naturally, that was the one where I’d been moved to. Men and women and children alike all worked tirelessly at the factory a few miles off, but at least no one starved to death. The food market going throughout the two ghettos kept all of us going, gave men jobs and domain over our German rule. There was sickness and pestilence, of course; rats ruled most of the lower rooms at ground level, the water was soiled and hazardous to drink in large amounts and people were becoming infected with so many different diseases but, still, no one starved.

The housing I’d been assigned to just so happened to be near the back of the ghetto, an estimated ten minute walk to the rear gate. The buildings and structure was far smaller than I had been used to, which I assumed rang true for most of the others that were holed up in this place with me. These were the ones that didn’t deport or escape when it was possible, the unlucky ones. It took me a good, long while before I realised how snuggly I too fit into that category. It was apparent to even me that the housing had been built in a rush, as everything creaked and bent awkwardly, angles and corners never seeming to meet. Surprisingly, none of the structures ever fell. An electric lamp once caught on fire in our building, but there was little damage done.

We weren’t allowed near the gate, those of us with symbols on our jacket arms, later patches on the left side of the coat, front and back. I’d seen a man, not much older than my father, get shot execution-style by an officer for standing at the fence with the intention of smoking the pipe he’d had smuggled in. Wasn’t the first time, either. People died daily here, by sickness and by public execution, but it was rare to witness, these deaths, as I later found. Men fourteen to sixty and women fourteen to forty-five were busy in the factory most of the day, with children left to their own, but rarely was there ever a shot that rang through the air and froze the blood of all who heard it; seldom did everyone have thoughts of who had died now, if we knew them, if we’d end our night in mourning. It was assumed that our ghetto was one of the lucky one, as we’d heard word from the Judenrat, Jewish men who’d taken control of the ghetto to make its living bearable, that others had it much worse. Their work was obviously not as valued, but ours was. People were shot here, yes, but not for nothing.

This changed thirteen days ago, November 2nd, when they killed twelve people after the ghetto was sealed off. Weise and Strebelow, Eric had called them, held up workers at the front. I’d been on my way up with the others from my housing when the first shots fired, and everyone scrambled away like frightened animals, fleeing for their lives from these men with guns, and I turned from the crowd and retreated back with literally thousands of others as a compressed sea of bodies around me. Screams everywhere, it was stupefying and confusing, but I ran in the mud and snow and saw all around me a panic that reminded me of livestock before the slaughter.

No one knew why twelve died at the gate, forty others shot and wounded, who would likely later succumb to these wounds, but we’d heard rumors. A German woman named Elsie who lived two floors down informed me that Jews from the other ghettos merely miles from us had a similar experience, sealed off without warning, mass murder with seemingly no meaning. These were awful stories telling of public executions and hangings, of children and mothers and fathers alike lying dead in the streets coated with crimson blood. I didn’t want to believe her.

But then it came true. A man was caught smuggling in bread for his wife and was hung in Batory Square. I stood far off to the side, but watched this condemned man with the greatest respect I’ve ever held for another human being. His chin was high and his face had been stiff with bravery, and he called out for the entire square to hear “Behatzlacha!” as a soldier kicked the stool from beneath him. I looked the other way as he fell, and his corpse was carried away. Others with similar “crimes” were shot on sight, those carrying bread or smoking or simply standing; it became routine for the Germans, commonplace and dull. No one was certain how many had died this past week or so, and to count the numbers would have been nothing short of ill-omened and heartbreaking.

The worst were the group murders, which happened in numbers I never thought possible. They’d stand men and women side-by-side, Jews wrapped up tight in dark winter clothing, and soldiers would take aim and never think of these as human beings as rounds were fired one-by-one into skulls. I never saw one of these personally, but they were happening. The worst was that no one was sure how they picked their targets and where the bodies were taken after the execution.

Everyone tried to make sense of it, this sudden change of hostility worse than before, and these acts of murder that, while horribly explainable, were unprovoked. For the past year, food and tobacco and other goods were easily smuggled from outside to in, and never before had the Germans cared, so long as you were merely passing the time and not interfering. Personally, I’d given up on these men who shared my country, since I no longer saw them as human, and therefore incapable of reasoning. Every execution, every broken neck, I grew worse in my hatred, of myself for more reasons than before, and of everything else. My family, the soldiers, the guns and gunshots, the death and the strong feeling of hopelessness; everything piled around me so greatly that I began sinking in it, suffocating. I was a wretched person, truly.

My meeting Eric in Grodno, however, was perhaps both the best and worst possible thing to have ever happened to me.

I was taken from my job in the factory by a soldier sometime in February. He told me that my working pace was incompetent, and I got defensive. Words passed between me and this particular soldier, and a punch was thrown; I felt my nose bleed before anything, and before I could even pray for myself, assured that this would be what finally got me killed, he was there.

If I were being honest with myself, my immediate reaction to getting found by Eric Cartman, blood rupturing from my nose and mixing with the tears streaming down my cheeks, had at first been panic, outright fear. Maybe I’d recognised him, maybe I hadn’t, but everything moved so fast. Being pulled by my collar into a darkened alleyway after the soldier who had hit me fell unconscious to the ground, when I felt more than just vulnerable. It brought out the alarming realization that this is how I would die, never by some nameless underling for the Reich, but by a familiar face. I viewed the scene in my head, this monster with a gun and a face stolen from my memories giving me no explanation, no burdensome worrying or speaking. One hit of metal to my skull and I’d be done. I would die there.

But I didn’t.

Arms wrapped themselves tightly around my middle, not my throat the way I’d expected, and after crushing our bodies together, this person released me and punched me hard on the cheek. I stumbled backward from the unforeseen impact and took in a breath of a familiar scent that I hadn’t even thought about in years, and a voice sternly told me, “You fucking idiot.”

And it was him, little Eric Cartman all grown up and towering above me, face pinked and stern.

Seeing this old friend of mine in the uniform that I’d come to associate with oppression wasn’t necessarily frightening anymore. No, it was more nauseating than anything, really. Instead, I made a conscious effort to focus entirely on how Eric had changed, which he’d done in abundance, our three year separation made only all the more evident. The first impression I noticed was his height, staggering and far surpassing my now humbled 167 cm. At least 180 cm, although a great deal of that may have been in his military boots. His freckles were all but gone and, while it seemed he hadn’t lost any weight, his stature appeared to absorb some of the fat from his belly and rearranged it, making him less of a plump boy and more a sheer mass of enormity. His face was the same, however, brown eyes like coffee, thin lips, dark eyelashes and rounded ears; that was comforting.

“Eric?” I had eventually managed once the shock passed, my hand still clasped over where he’s struck me.

The expression painted across his face was a queer combination of relief and anger, and maybe something else that I couldn’t make out, but when I used his name, he exclaimed,

“Are you trying to kill me?”

Standing there, I became increasingly aware that, no, I was not dreaming, nor was I dead. Eric Cartman was here, in this greatest of hells with me, for how long I was unsure, and he’d pulled me from death. Was I trying to kill him? The question boggled my mind, and I was trapped in a state where answering, or doing anything really, was out of the question. I stared stupidly at him for minutes on end, until he sighed.

“Go back to work.” And he left me standing there, shaking in my shoes and face throbbing from two different blows. With little else to do, I obeyed him and returned to the factory, wiping the blood onto the sleeve of my jacket.

He stood aloofly by my side for those long months leading up to November, but I’d only see him around once every couple weeks, our conflicting roles as prisoner and jail warden trainee keeping us busy and separated for the most part. He’d return home, and I’d lay awake at night wondering if he’d see Stanley or Kenneth or if everything had remained the same after I’d left. If he could, he’d bring me food from the outside, cheeses or breads, but we would never talk about anything. I was always too afraid to ask him the obvious questions, which I fully recognised as idiotic, but it was true. Maybe it was the height, or this new sternness that never seemed to leave his face, but I never made small talk, never mentioned Berlin or Stanley and Kenneth or the night I left.

Then came the 12th of November.