One Child in Berlin (Stella Bled Book Three) Read online

  Contents

  Copyright for Smashwords

  Also By A.W. Hartoin

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  About the Author

  One Child in Berlin

  by A.W. Hartoin

  Copyright 2020 A.W. Hartoin

  Smashwords Edition

  “This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Also By A.W. Hartoin

  Historical Thriller

  The Paris Package (Stella Bled Book One)

  Strangers in Venice (Stella Bled Book Two)

  One Child in Berlin (Stella Bled Book Three)

  Young Adult fantasy

  Flare-up (Away From Whipplethorn Short)

  A Fairy's Guide To Disaster (Away From Whipplethorn Book One)

  Fierce Creatures (Away From Whipplethorn Book Two)

  A Monster’s Paradise (Away From Whipplethorn Book Three)

  A Wicked Chill (Away From Whipplethorn Book Four)

  To the Eternal (Away From Whipplethorn Book Five)

  Mercy Watts Mysteries

  Novels

  A Good Man Gone (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book One)

  Diver Down (A Mercy Watts Mystery Book Two)

  Double Black Diamond (Mercy Watts Mysteries BookThree)

  Drop Dead Red (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Four)

  In the Worst Way (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Five)

  The Wife of Riley (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Six)

  My Bad Grandad (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Seven)

  Brain Trust (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Eight)

  Down and Dirty (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Nine)

  Small Time Crime (Mercy Watts Mysteries Book Ten)

  Short stories

  Coke with a Twist

  Touch and Go

  Nowhere Fast

  Dry Spell

  A Sin and a Shame

  Paranormal

  It Started with a Whisper (Sons of Witches)

  For Joan and Herb, my favorite world travelers and earliest supporters

  PROLOGUE

  IT WAS A gift from God. A sign of his bountiful mercy and because of it they would survive the Dachau internment camp and go on to fight for the inevitable defeat of the Nazis. Michael Haas could find no other explanation and he believed it with all his heart. His friend, Adam Stolowicki, did not.

  Adam could not find God in Dachau and he had tried. He’d prayed for months, given service where he could, and looked for a sign that God knew he was there, that they were there. But after a year, he’d lost too much, including his name and profession along with his clothes, weight, and hair. Not to mention the friends, too many to count, who had died in ways he couldn’t bear to remember.

  There were days when he could not recall his real name and when he did, it seemed unimportant that he was Abel Herschmann, a historian and travel guide. He had become someone else entirely. If Michael had known, he would’ve said this was a gift, too. That the real Adam Stolowicki had died in that dirty, freezing boxcar so that Abel Herschmann might live to fulfill a purpose.

  That was certainly what Jakob thought. The old man gave him Adam’s name and instructed Abel on who he now was, a bricklayer from Warsaw and a communist. As far as Abel could tell, if God was in Dachau he took the form of an elderly man with gout and severe arthritis. It was Jakob who delivered the gift that Michael was so sure came from God.

  “Do you hear them?” whispered Michael.

  “No. Not yet,” said Abel.

  “Maybe we should start now.”

  “No. It will be suspicious if we go out early. They’ll ask questions.”

  Michael nodded, his head rubbing against Abel’s shoulder in the bunk they shared with three other men. The other men were recently arrived from Poland and were still sleeping, having talked late into the night about escape. They didn’t yet understand there would be no escape. The SS guards would see to that and, if they didn’t, their fellow prisoners would. An escapee left a death sentence for his fellows still in the barrack. Abel carried the scars of one man’s failed attempt on his legs and buttocks, but he survived the beating well enough. Others hadn’t.

  Michael, who had already been weak from an illness, had gotten an infection. His legs were swollen and weeping fluid. There were several doctors in the barracks and they’d done what they could, but Michael wasn’t improving and was so weak Abel had to support him while walking. Hiding that from the guards wasn’t easy. Abel lived in fear that Michael would be noticed or collapse during roll call and he’d be sent to the infirmary. Abel would sooner have him shot in the head.

  “God forgive me, but I miss Jakob,” said Michael.

  Abel smiled. “We all do. Hope left with him.”

  “Don’t say that. God is with us.” He patted the badge on his chest. “He gave us the best chance.”

  “Yes,” said Abel.

  “You must believe,” insisted Michael.

  A door banged open and the Kapo came in yelling and hitting their bunks with his truncheon. The Poles jolted awake and one fell off the bunk with a yelp, only to be given a swift kick and a torrent of screaming about being clumsy.

  Abel climbed off the bunk and looked over at Dr. Fleck, who quickly moved between Abel and the Kapo. He and several other men shielded Abel as he hauled Michael off the bunk.

  One of the Poles sneered and moved away. “What is wrong with him? Send him to the infirmary.”

  Ludwik, a usually quiet biologist, made a fist and said, “If Michael goes, so will you.”

  The Pole’s eyes narrowed, but he shut his mouth before he headed out into the icy morning air.

  “Thank you, my friend,” whispered Michael. “You’ll see. It won’t be long now.”

  Abel held him under the arm as casually as possible and helped him to the door. “You can do it.”

  “I will because I know that Jakob will find my family. Help is coming. I feel it.”

  “Yes. Now quiet. Save your strength.”

  “You must believe.”

  “I believe,” said Abel automatically as he helped Michael out of the door and down the block alley to the square. It was more crowded than ever since Germany invaded Poland. Abel had heard a guard complaining about the smell. He’d said that the camp should only have six thousand prisoners and it now had nineteen thousand. Abel could well believe it. Many of the men who had been arr
ested after Grynszpan killed the Nazi in Paris had been released, but the Germans always found more men to imprison. Czechs from the Sudetenland and then Czechoslovakia itself. Now Poland.

  “Who’s next?” Abel wondered aloud without much interest. He was where he was. A year in hell had taught him that nothing would change it.

  A guard came charging by, yelling, “Go on there, you stinking Jew!” He raised his baton and cracked a man on the shoulder with it. “What did you say? What did you say?”

  More guards came, passing Michael and Abel, and concentrating on the barracks that held the Jewish prisoners. Grief and guilt washed over Abel, making his heart feel like it was twisting in his chest and wringing out his soul.

  Michael squeezed his arm. “It is a gift from God.”

  Two Jewish prisoners went down and were savagely kicked as Michael and Abel shuffled by.

  “It’s unfair,” Abel whispered.

  “It is God’s will that we live.” Michael sounded strong. His eyes sparkled with fervent belief or perhaps it was the fever Abel could easily feel through the thin fabric of his ragged shirt. “It is.”

  Abel nodded, but he knew it was Jakob’s will that he and Michael lined up with the communists and not the Jews. How the old man had done it wasn’t clear, but Abel was sure that it was him.

  When the first wave of Czechs came into the camp, Jakob had been designated for release, but while he was waiting, the guards decided to make him useful and assigned him to help process the influx of prisoners. Thousands were flooding in and the system they’d so carefully designed was overwhelmed.

  Abel hardly saw his dear friend for the next few days, except for a glimpse of him bent over a desk, carefully filling out paperwork and another when he was being escorted out of his barracks with his meagre possessions. The Kapo, who wasn’t as harsh as the others, allowed him to shake Abel’s hand.

  “I will see you again, my Leopold,” said Jakob, referring to his son who had died at Dachau and in whose name Jakob had saved Abel.

  “I hope so,” said Abel.

  Jakob’s eyes sparkled under his shaggy brows. “I know so.”

  The Kapo forced him away before he could say more, but Abel had the strongest feeling that the old man was up to something and a few hours later he was proved right when his Kapo came to get him, yelling about mistakes and idiocy. He and Michael were hit and kicked all the way to the Shunt Room, where prisoners were processed when they arrived. It was the first place where Abel had been beaten without knowing why, and it wasn’t the last.

  After they’d gone inside and been shoved through a door to the long room where prisoners were stripped and cataloged, an SS screamed in their faces and waved paperwork around. Michael and Abel looked at each other in confusion, but all was revealed when the officer ran out of steam. He told them that they were not specific when they were brought in with the filthy Jews and had been cataloged incorrectly. He seemed to think this was a kind of crime, but exactly why wasn’t clear.

  The officer slashed at them with a razor and demanded that they remove their striped pants. They did, shaking so hard that the knocking of their bony knees was audible. Abel fully expected to be cut, possibly slashed to the bone, but, like a miracle, it didn’t happen. The officer flung the razor at him and ordered him to remove his badge from his pant leg.

  Utterly confused, he and Michael removed the red triangle stitched over the yellow triangle. When they tentatively placed them on the desk, the officer threw up his hands and yelled, “Dummkopf!”

  He pointed at a couple of punchcards on the table, screaming about “the machine” and then waving the handwritten paperwork in their faces.

  “Do you want to be a dirty Jew? Do you want to be with the scum?”

  Abel and Michael just stared at him, mute. There was no right answer, experience had taught them that, and there they were standing in front of a mad man with their genitals barely covered by their shirts.

  Another guard came over and Abel recognized him as Weiß, some sort of assistant to the camp commander. The tiniest sigh of relief escaped from Abel’s lips. Weiß could not be considered kind or just by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t irrational or unpredictable as many of the guards were.

  “What is this?” Weiß glanced with disdain at their shaking thighs and the yellow triangles on their pant legs, denoting them as Jews.

  “These stupid fools can’t understand a simple order,” snapped the guard and then quickly stiffened when he saw Weiß’s irritation at his tone. “They were classified wrong and told no one.”

  “Impossible,” declared Weiß and he turned away.

  “But the cards,” said the guard. “My orders…”

  Weiß turned back and eyed the punch cards on the table. “What about the cards.”

  “They say they are Jews, but the papers say no.” The guard handed the paperwork over to Weiß, who glanced through it swiftly.

  “Who punched the cards?” he asked.

  The guard named several SS and hastily said, “It was a simple mistake, but these dogs did not tell us. These asshole communists let us put them with the Jews.” He sneered. “Maybe they like the smell.”

  Abel knew this was the time to speak, but he found he had no voice. Fear had taken it. But Michael, a man of both extraordinary courage and faith, said in a clear voice with no hesitation or tremor, “We are not Jews.” He sneered identical to the guard and said, “The smell is worse than you know.”

  “It says here you were arrested in Vienna on the tenth of November last year and brought in with Jews,” said Weiß.

  “Yes,” said Michael. “We were arrested while watching a synagogue burn. At first they thought we were Jews, but we had our identification.”

  “Why were you arrested?”

  Michael shrugged.

  “Why did you allow the yellow triangle to be sown on your pant leg?”

  “No one was interested in what we said.” He pointed at the punch cards. “They said the card was law.”

  Weiß nodded and tossed the paperwork on the table. “Remove the yellow and sew on the red, tip up.” To the guard, he said, “Double check all the other cards punched from their group and put them in the correct barrack.”

  Weiß walked away and the guard began yelling about how slow they were. His face went red and spittle hit their hands as they cut the threads that held their Jewishness fast to their fate, amazed that neither Nazi thought to take a look under the hem of their shirts.

  After they sewed on their red triangles, tip up, they put on their pants, careful to conceal themselves, and walked out into a spring day that was suddenly fresh and hopeful. They got their thin blankets and tin cups and took themselves to the new barrack on a different block away from the Jews, asocials, and criminals to the section where political prisoners were housed.

  No one questioned their inclusion. The badge was everything.

  Later that afternoon when they’d been assigned a new work detail out of the dreaded gravel pit to a painting crew, Abel found his voice. “How can we…”

  “Live?” asked Michael. “By the grace of God. It is his will.”

  “But to deny our faith,” said Abel.

  Michael gestured to a man lying next to the electrified fence. The body with its yellow triangle had been there for three days, shot a dozen times for wandering too close to the fence line. “Do you want to end up like him?”

  “We can still end up like him. We all can,” said Abel, thinking of his mother. She was a faithful woman, kind and proud of who she was. She’d taught her son to be the same. What would she say to her son with his red triangle? Would she be joyful at this small chance or ashamed? Abel honestly didn’t know.

  “It is a gift from God,” said Michael, his eyes lit with hope. “We will take his gift and find a way to get out of here. When the time comes we will make them pay for what they do and they will suffer as we have, as our people have.”

  “If you say so,” said Abel.


  “I don’t. He does. God has given us this chance. He changed our paperwork. He showed it to the guards. How else could this be? Once you are categorized, it is over. But not for us. God gave us this. How else could we go from being Jews and political prisoners to only political? Now we will get more food. We won’t be worked to death in the pit or beaten as much. They don’t shoot the red triangles as fast.” Michael grabbed Abel’s arm with tears in his eyes. “We’re going to live.”

  As Michael spoke of the paperwork, a memory sparked in Abel’s mind. Jakob’s face. His eyes. The old man’s certainty that they would see each other again. The use of his son’s name. Leopold was like a talisman to Jakob. He used it rarely and only in moments of hope and triumph. Jakob had been doing paperwork. He had done this for them.

  Abel felt nauseated when he realized it. His dear friend had been days or hours away from release, if he had been caught… The retribution didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Adam,” said Michael, “you will not deny the gift. He has done this for us.”

  “He has done this for us. I will not deny it.” Abel smiled. “God forbid.”

  “We can do it. We can get out. Being communists is easy. We are after all.”

  “Yes,” said Abel. “We are communists.”

  What was another lie on top of the first one, the big one, the one where he stole a dead man’s name and lived because of it? Clearly, he could lie. He always could, although he didn’t think it was lying exactly. As a Jewish boy among gentiles, Abel had learned early and well how to fit in and not make a fuss. His father called it being wallpaper. It was okay, he said. It meant you were still in the room. His parents worked hard for him to be in the room.

  “She would be joyful,” said Abel.

  “Who?” asked Michael. “Your girl? The American?”

  “What? No. My mother.”

  “You’re thinking of your mother?” Michael rolled his eyes. “I’m thinking of my wife and how she will reward me when I get out of here.”