Love and Hate Read online

  Love and Hate: In Nazi Germany

  Ryan Armstrong

  Published by LM Vintage Publishers, 2018.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  LOVE AND HATE: IN NAZI GERMANY

  First edition. May 6, 2018.

  Copyright © 2018 Ryan Armstrong.

  ISBN: 978-1386741831

  Written by Ryan Armstrong.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Love and Hate: In Nazi Germany

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Review

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  To my lovely wife who put up with all of my time away from her on the weekends and evenings. She helped me while I plotted out my dream novel even helping me with the best plot twist. Thank you Cara Mia, I love you.

  I have endeavored to talk about this subject with respect for the victims of the Nazis, especially the Jewish people.

  Acknowledgments and Special Thanks to:

  My talented friend and filmmaker Jonny Knowles - and his cast and crew. He made the fantastic cinematic book trailer for this novel.

  Watch the cinematic book trailer here:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi47YG-eHeo

  My editors - Thalia Suzuma for her helping to shave off the rough edges and Allister Thompson for his attention to detail and for polishing this novel.

  Wonderful beta readers and friends for their invaluable input on my rough draft: Max McClure, Stevenson Moore, Jacqueline Crider, Irma Perez and Don Muchow.

  Chapter 1

  I had blood on my hands. And underneath my fingernails. I had it in my soul. I was bleeding there, and it wouldn't stop.

  When you watch someone kill a man, it changes you. When you've killed a man, you lose a little of yourself. As he enters the land of shadows, he takes a little of your light with him to guide the way home. When you've killed many men, your soul bleeds, and the more you kill, the more blood pours out of you, until you are a pale, washed-out thing. Not a man, or even an animal. Animals kill to eat, humans kill for sport.

  In our case we kill to eradicate. Vermin. That is what Jews are, we are told. Rats, thieves, and a subhuman race. I kept telling myself this; it is what had been injected into my head, and they tried to insert it into my heart. Everyone around me believed it. These beliefs were like a virus. Even if you didn't believe it to start with, there was no inoculation to stop the spread of hate. Hate, visceral hate. I scream ‘Fuck!’ and ‘I hate you, you fucking Jew, I hate you!’ with everyone else. I feel it in my marrow for just a second. I know hate, and it is the Jew, I tell myself. The Jew is what makes us hate. It is where we can put all of our hate. On him. Around him and his little Jew nose, crooked as it is.

  But I didn't believe this, any of this. I didn't hate Jewish people or believe the lies that Hitler told.

  I was guarding people from the ghetto's Third Ward. I had been assigned the post the previous week. It was the part of the ghetto where Jews were sent upon arrival from all over Bavaria. It was surrounded by squat brown apartment buildings crowded together. Barbed wire surrounded the exterior, and I was stationed by the entrance to the ward, where prisoners were processed. This world’s color palette consisted only of the color of dirty ice and snow.

  It was cold outside, and the wind was biting. It blew right through me. It hit hard. It made the prisoners in the ghetto freezing cold and their outlook bleaker. But the cold turned the other guards rabid, like dogs being bitten. They barked their orders at the Jewish prisoners. Prisoners who had committed no real crimes.

  Gerhard had been beating one elderly man because he hadn't kneeled fast enough when ordered to.

  “You kneel, boy, when you are told to. I warned you that you weren't bringing the soldiers’ lunch fast enough, and now you don't even kneel when I offer you mercy?” he said, sneering.

  “Sir, I, I am sorry,” the man stuttered. “I was moving as fast as I could...”

  But Gerhard didn't want to hear more. You could hear the smack of his rifle against the old man’s skull. He fell to the ground. He was bleeding, and his eyes were rolled back in his head. He was shaking, like he was having a seizure.

  Gerhard told him not to shake.

  He did not stop shaking.

  I sat there feeling awful, but I'd been here before, and I knew what came next. What could I do? I wasn't a man in power; I was just a guard under Gerhard's command.

  Gerhard raised his rifle again to smash the man's skull against the concrete ground covered in snow and ice. The ground was already flecked with the man’s blood, crimson pepper-colored. Like a preface of the inevitable conclusion to come.

  A woman shouted, “No! You mustn't!”

  She threw herself protectively over the man, covering his body with hers, like a mother shielding her child. He was too old to be her child and her too young to be his mother.

  I heard her whisper, “Papa,” into the man's ear.

  I now understood. I watched Gerhard’s strong arms to see what would come next.

  He hadn't heard her, so he temporarily put down his rifle. Not because he had a moment of sympathy, but because he was curious as to why this young woman would risk her life for this old man, and because he liked to watch terror in his victim’s eyes.

  Why would she give herself up as an offering? As a sacrifice. Couldn't she know? Didn't she understand? This would doom both of them.

  She was brave. I respected her. She hadn't even looked at Gerhard. She knew the consequences. She didn't care, and she would not beg. But she wouldn't let him go alone.

  Gerhard asked her, “Jude woman, why are you trying to save this old man?” He smirked.

  His smirk never ended. I shuddered.

  He turned to me. “Shoot her, shoot her in the head, Hans.”

  I looked at him and trembled inside.

  I trembled because though I'd killed men, I'd always done it on the battlefield. And never murder. I’d never murdered a woman.

  I thought for a moment, just a moment.

  I raised my rifle and delivered a straight shot.

  I was so close, the blood spattered on my face, and I could taste the metallic vinegar taste of blood. I could smell the stench of burning flesh. I could hear the gasp. I knew what I had done. It had to be done. What else was I supposed to do?

  Chapter 2

  Dead. They were dead. I had killed one of them. I was sick to my stomach, so sick that I felt my stomach lurch, and I threw up all over the snow. I heaved my fear and disgust out onto the snow. It felt acidic, mixed with a metallic taste as I wiped my mouth with my sleeve.

  I walked over to the body and leaned down to peer into eyes
that had faded away into the night of eternal sleep. A film covered them, and they were already turning into glass. Not human.

  Gerhard himself was not human any more. He was now in the land of shadows, and he had already taken a piece of me with him. He didn't take much, though, because he was a pig. That man was the animal, not the Jews. He had been even more cruel than the other supervising guards. And that was saying something. You didn't get to supervise guards unless you were inhumane.

  And that's the ironic part; they say the Jews are the inhuman ones. But then you had Gerhard, who killed at least one person a day. Usually the weak ones. He killed the old ones, usually men. He liked to pick on those ones; I don't know if he liked to see them suffer even more, or perhaps he got pleasure out of seeing them cower. The young ones didn't cower as much. I don't know why. Perhaps their youth made them believe they had more control than they did.

  I was staring into his eyes when the fear suddenly hit me. I was terrified. I felt like I was one of the Jews, trapped in a cage. I knew they would euthanize the animal I was.

  When they found out, they would treat me even worse than they did the Jews, because I was a traitor. I had abandoned my race. I was lower than the “vermin.”

  The fear felt like I was in a fast car headed toward a tree at eighty kilometers an hour. You had pushed the car as fast as it would go, and the road couldn't handle the speed, and you veered off. Suddenly you were about to hit the tree. You knew it was your last moment on Earth. You were sure that pain was coming and would cover you with the intensity of a bullet to your brain. You felt that feeling in the gut, a pain deep inside that hurts intensely and takes the wind out of you like ten sucker punches to your abdomen.

  That was what I was feeling. I stared around me, standing up, holding my arm protectively over my stomach.

  I would soon walk in the shadows, shadows that were superior to this place. I just didn't want to drive the car into the tree to get there.

  I stood up and looked at the dead winter sky. Snow was falling in my eyes, and I had to squint just to see. My eyes watered as the snowflakes melted into tears on my face. I looked up high to see if the prison guards had alerted the others. I wanted to hide, but my body wouldn’t move.

  We were alone in the yard. I looked around at the darkened doors of the ghettos, at the “residents’” windows. The Nazis had “their Jews,” those that they called pets. Those that for an extra meal and the guarantee of not being beaten or shot would betray their own people.

  What would come next? I stared at the old man. He had stopped shaking; he was just lying there. But his eyes had stopped rolling. He must be alive, I thought; his seizure was over. He lay there, still, and the woman started moving, as if awoken from a trance.

  She stared at me, covered in blood, with Gerhard dead like the stuck pig he was, his brain and fragments of his hair showing a deep crevice that broke open his face.

  She looked up at me and shouted, “What have you done! You've killed him, you monster!”

  I'd saved her life—I couldn't understand. Had Gerhard ordered me to kill her because she knew Gerhard had been raping Jewish girls at night? Had she been a victim of his? Why would she not want him dead? Did she want him to suffer humiliation that would come with such a revelation?

  It must be because she was in shock. I couldn't fathom any other answer.

  “Why didn't you just let us die, let us escape from here? A fucking bullet to the head is better than what they'll do to us now, to you too.”

  She was right. I knew they were watching. They could almost hear whispers.

  There were no secrets here, and that's why he wanted her dead quickly. He didn't want to risk her shouting something about his love for his hand-picked “vermin.” His pets—he never would've recovered from that embarrassment.

  I grabbed her suddenly by the hand, but she held on to the old man. I gritted my teeth, annoyed at her ingratitude, and forcibly stood her up.

  “But Papa,” she said. His eyes had now turned glassy, and he was haunting us already. He was in the shadowlands.

  I told her frankly, “He is dead, and we must leave—now.”

  And we did.

  She gave a cold, calculated stare into his eyes to affirm that he was gone. Before she left, she said some Jewish blessing, quickly and briefly.

  She shocked me as she took my hand, saying, “We must hide!”

  We could already hear the commotion coming toward us from the left. Shouting about the gunshot.

  She calmly reached for my other hand, took my rifle, placed it in her father's hands, and then she led me into the residential area of the ghetto.

  It was now night, and the cold numbed me. I didn't know what came next any more. But my heart was filled with hope. Maybe my soul could be redeemed, I prayed silently, hoping no one would see my thoughts as I exhaled them into the German winter air of 1940.

  We would be there soon, she said, as we entered the dimly lit alleyways of the ghetto buildings. I could hear the guards shouting outside as they saw Gerhard’s lifeless body. But we'd already entered the darkness, and we were hidden from their view.

  Chapter 3

  I was a boy when my mother died. Nine years old was too young to see your mother die.

  I remember her as she was, full of life. She was hardly a woman, having just been a girl when she had me. My dad said I had forced her to grow up. He resented me because she loved me more than him, I realize that now.

  My father was a mean drunk; he preferred the solitary company of a bottle to that of his wife and child.

  One night he came home drunk, roaring with anger. No one knew why he was angry, least of all himself. I liked it better when he stayed out all night drinking, but that night he came home.

  He stumbled into the house and fell. He yelled at my mother for not drying the floors well after cleaning.

  “But dear, you asked me to clean them, and I did dry them with a rag,” she said nervously.

  He slurred, “Ua fucking bitch, you’re not worthy of my affection.”

  She retorted angrily, “Well then, you clean the damn floors.”

  She knew she’d made a mistake as soon as she uttered the words, and she clasped her hand to her mouth. She had poured petrol onto his roaring fire. Her pupils widened like a flash of light had gone off in front of her. Like the bulb of a photographer, taking a photo of her terror.

  He knocked over the table that was set for dinner and grabbed the pot boiling with potatoes, bubbles percolating to the top with searing heat.

  I hate the rest. I hate it like a “good” German hates Jews. I hate it viscerally. In my gut. In my soul.

  He was standing over my mother, who was trembling, so frightened that she could not move. He sneered and smirked. He poured the water on my mother. But boiling as it was, it was no longer water but acid. I’ve heard screams before and since, but the sound that came out of her mouth now was a groaning shout. Guttural. Like an animal. I’ve seen Jews in the ghettos shot and men on the battlefield cry for their mothers, but this was different. It was pain, pure pain. She couldn’t cry or beg, because unlike a gunshot wound that killed you, she was alive, and unlike a gunshot wound that made your pain localized, her pain was everywhere.

  I knew what I had to do as her agonized shrieks turned to heaving sobs with no tears, because her eye ducts were burned. I went to the drawer in my parents’ room, where my father kept his pistol.

  I came out of the room and my father laughed at me holding it. I wasn’t shaking with fear. I knew even at nine years old that the man with the gun had nothing to fear from the man he was pointing it at.

  I didn’t think twice. It was like blinking your eyes. I squeezed the trigger twice, two bullets into his chest. He fell with a thud to the floor and moved no more.

  My mother was delirious and saying something that I didn’t understand. But in her pain and groaning, I understood that she was begging me. She used all of her remaining energy to point at herself, and
I knew she wanted me to shoot her.

  When I pointed the gun to the floor, her wails got more intense. In her own way, she was begging me.

  I started crying. “Oh no, Mamma we will get you help. I’ll call a doctor, Mamma.”

  She wailed louder.

  She was speaking an animal language to me that said, in her wails, “All I feel is pain. A doctor cannot fix this. I want to die. I cannot do it myself, please help me die, son. I love you.”

  I was beside myself with grief, bawling. My crying intermingled with her moan-wailing sounded like an animal before the slaughter. I loved her so much, so very much, and do to this day.

  I trembled as I raised the gun to her head, walking closer to get better aim. I heard my father groan a little as I walked closer. I didn’t want to miss; I wanted it to be quick. I tried to think only of that, helping her leave her pain, and not what I was about to do. I pointed it straight at her head. She stopped moaning.

  I know it took everything she had to stop that, everything that she ever was. She had to use every last piece of her energy to go through the searing pain—to make no sound—to hold it in. She was doing that to let me know that she loved me and that this was what she wanted.

  I put my shaking gun almost to her temple. She shocked me. She touched my hand and cried out for just a moment as she did so. She was saying that she loved me, the only way she knew how.

  I loved her too and told her so. I couldn’t hug her, because the pain would be unbearable for her.

  I pulled the trigger, and the bullet killed her instantly.

  I was sobbing but heard my dad begging me for help, slurring the words out. Now it was my turn to smirk. I kicked him in the chest, and he yelped like the dog he was. I squeezed the trigger three times into his head. Not out of sympathy, but out of hate and revenge.

  Chapter 4

  The polizei came and cleaned up the mess. I had to explain what had happened. We lived in a small town in Bavaria called Passau, on the border with Austria, where the Danube and other rivers meet.