People were crying, and the sounds of those cries echoed around me. They were suffering and scared, and I was walking out of the building freely. It was getting late and I knew I had a long night ahead. Most of that time would be spent staring at a wall, trying to remove the sights and sounds from my head.
"Charlie," a voice called from the distance. At first, I kept walking, not wanting to be bothered with conversation. Claude caught up to me, though, and placed his hand on my shoulder. "Charlie, I’m worried about you, brother."
Claude had been worried about me for the last seven years. I knew I shouldn’t have been his problem. Our friendship was still intact, but he had adapted better than I. It was hard to tell if he had accepted our fate or if he had gotten good at masking his feelings. "I’m all right," I lied.
"Nonsense. Let’s go down to the village for a beer, ja?"
I shrugged. A beer would not fix what had happened in the daylight. "I’m tired," I told him.
"You need a beer, and so do I. I need my friend right now, Charlie." I assumed Claude was saying what he thought might convince me to comply with his offer. He was right. If Claude needed to talk, I wouldn’t turn him down.
"Okay, one beer," I told him.
Claude slapped my shoulder twice and grinned. "Good man," he said.
Neither of us spoke much on our walk to town, and the silence highlighted the scene two blocks away from the pub we were heading toward. A door slammed, boots clomped, the clanking metal of pistols sounded loudly between the alleyway’s stone walls. "Halt!" The shouts were in German. Our people were chasing down more Jews.
Claude and I stopped walking to watch what was happening, but it was over just as fast as it began. Two gunshots, and I assume two more Jews were dead.
It was only a short minute before we watched the Jewish bodies tossed to the street from the building they had just infiltrated. The soldiers responsible for the deaths came out in a fit of laughter as if they felt joy after pulling a trigger two times.
"Let’s go, Charlie," Claude said, walking ahead.
Every time I saw another lifeless body, a part of me died with them. I couldn’t allow the acknowledgment to become a numbing feeling or I would be as heartless as those shooting the pistols. I didn’t move when Claude had, and when he noticed my frozen stance, he turned back for me and grabbed my arm to pull me along. "Tune it out, Charlie."
Claude was often telling me to tune it all out. "Don’t you feel anything?" I asked.
Claude pulled me away from the glow of the streetlamp and toward a wall of shops. He dropped his hands on my shoulders and lowered his head a couple of inches to look me in the eyes. "If a Jew was standing right here with a gun pointed to your head, would you let him shoot you, or would you shoot him first?"
At the point we were at, I would have let the man shoot me, but I couldn’t tell Claude how I felt. He wouldn’t understand. "The Jews don’t have weapons," I answered instead.
"We don’t know that," Claude replied.
The Jewish people were required to forfeit their weapons, along with any other valuables. These procedures were not new and had been in place for years. It was unlikely that a Jewish person would still have ownership over a weapon. Therefore, the playing field was not fair, and we were out to kill.
"You cannot think this way, Charlie. You’re going to land yourself in trouble one of these days, do you understand?"
"Why is this so easy for you?" I asked my best friend. Claude and I were no longer seeing eye to eye. It hurt to think I was alone with my thoughts, but I had seen it coming for years.
"You think this is easy for me?" he questioned as a spark of anger lit up his dark eyes.
"It just seems—"
"I am not a murderer, Charlie. Nor do I have plans to become one. However, if it is them or us, I choose us. It’s simple. We are in a time of war, and we cannot forget this."
Claude didn’t have much else to say as he spun on his heels and continued toward the pub. He didn’t seem to care if I was following this time. Though, I did follow in his footsteps as I didn’t want to see any more bodies tossed onto the worn cobblestone road.
We sat a small table off to the back corner of the pub staring at two steins of beer—one for each of us, both sweating with condensation. Neither Claude nor I spoke a word before he took the first swig. "This pains me," he said. "I wanted to be a businessman, you know." I didn’t know Claude had dreams of becoming a businessman. Our future goals didn’t mean much after we joined the German regiment. After eighteen years old, the military was our only future.
"I wanted to be a baker like Papa," I replied.
"It doesn’t matter now, and it hurts to think that way, so I choose not to think about it, Charlie."
"I understand." I did.
"You think it doesn’t pain me to see dead bodies? I had to lift a child out of a gutter last week. He was shot, Charlie. Someone shot a child. When he was in my arms, I thought about how I would feel ifhewas my son, and my heart—" Claude paused and pinched the bridge of his nose. He inhaled sharply. "Charlie, if I let the thoughts overwhelm me, they will kill my soul. I will give up. I will put a pistol to my head. However, I still have hope for the future, and I am doing what I must to see that future."Our futures might eat us alive after watching the world burn to dust, I thought to myself.
I had come to learn that Claude and I were, in fact, still on the same page. I wasn’t as alone as I thought. It was just that I wasn’t hiding my feelings as well as Claude.
