Johann quickly put a finger to his lips, motioning his head towards the bunks, in which their roommates slept. Rudi, with his arm hanging off the top; Walter◦– with both hands under his cheek, his lips slightly parted.
He looked at Willi◦– pale, trembling, and dark-eyed, in the deceiving silver light◦– muttered a curse under his breath and climbed out from under the covers.
Making as little noise as possible, he quickly pulled on his uniform trousers, boots, shirt, and a jacket. Looking strangely grim, Willi waited for him patiently by the window. Johann threw another apprehensive look at him, hoping deep inside that it was merely yet another stupid practical joke of his and that he was some actor, finally thinking of a way to get that stupid bet’s money out of him. After all, Willi had promised with such confidence that he’d lure Johann to one of his clubs one way or another… Johann almost regretted telling Willi about Alf; who knew if the fiend decided to use it so callously as leverage. Not that Alf lived anywhere near, but… But Johann had run out of options, at last. And Willi still looked so very glum and sullen, holding the window open for him.
“If this lands me another record in my personal file,” he only grumbled, with a warning in his voice, as he climbed out onto the windowsill.
“There are more important things to worry about than your personal file, as of now,” Willi replied, in a voice suddenly harsh and somber and quickly made his way down the gutter.
They climbed onto the tree and over the wall; raced, invisible and breathless, along the night streets. The mist that gathered overnight concealed the amber glow at first. Johann came to an abrupt halt, catching Willi’s sleeve before he would lose him in the crowd. And a crowd it was; an angry, hatred-filled, ugly-faced mob, screaming their obscenities in the faces of their victims, with the SS troops watching them in silent amusement. The uniformed men, in tall black boots, had done their job it seemed; they dragged their targets out of their beds, threw them into the street at the feet of the mob, started with a couple of baton blows and let the good citizens of the Neues Deutsches Reich finish the job.
There was only one street in the small town of Schwechat, which had been incorporated into Vienna right after the Anschluss of Austria, where the local Jews lived and conducted their business; the street that had been transformed beyond recognition. Shards of shattered glass crunching under his boots, Johann followed Willi, as though hypnotized, closer and closer to the ghastly scene.
The synagogue was engulfed in flames. Smashed pieces of furniture and stained glass littered the ground around it, along with sacred rolls of the Torah. One of the Jungvolk boys, of Johann’s Harald’s age, picked one of the rolls and rubbed it over his behind causing a wave of maniacal laughter to erupt from the SS men standing nearby.
“That’s all they’re good for! Wiping one’s ass with them!” The boy shouted in great excitement over his stunt being received with such delight.
One of the SS men clapped his comrade on his back. “Your brother is a mad little fellow, Heinz!”
“That he is.” The one, whom they addressed as Heinz, straightened out with pride, his thumbs casually tucked in his belt with its holster. Johann regarded him in astounded silence as he imagined the thrashing he, Johann, would have administered to Harald firsthand if he ever pulled something of this sort.
An elderly man with a beard, stained with blood running down from his broken nose, navigated his way around the shambles, his hands trembling as he vainly hoped to locate at least one undamaged roll of the sacred text. The Jungvolk boy hurled a rock into his head, emboldened by his previous success with the troops. The man wiped the blood from his temple and looked up at the boy in utter confusion, as though unable to fully grasp how his fellow townsfolk had suddenly turned into violent murderers in the course of mere hours. And children? It read in his eyes. Not the children too...
Two drunken soldiers, bellowing one of the nationalistic hymns at the top of their lungs, dragged another family out of their house. A woman wailed in the hands of her assailants, scantily clothed, shielding a small girl with her body. Johann noticed that the child’s face was just as bloodied as the mother’s but unlike the woman, she didn’t cry, only stared into nothingness with her wide-open eyes. A shot was fired in the staircase; another SS man emerged, his gun still in hand and the woman suddenly went quiet, her eyes fastened onto the opaque darkness of the staircase with an awed expression about them. Only her mouth moved as she whispered the name of someone, who lay dead with a bullet in the back of his head, still clutching his daughter’s doll with one hand.
A hand suddenly clasped Johann’s forearm and for a fleeting moment, he was grateful for it, for he could finally shake that never-ending nightmare off himself.
“What are you two doing here?” The SS man’s eyes stared right into Johann’s. “Are you from the flying school?”
It was too late to lie. Their uniforms gave them away without any possibility of talking one’s way out of it.
Another trooper seized Willi’s elbow.
“Haven’t your instructors taught you to salute and stand at attention when a superior addresses you?” The grip on Johann’s forearm turned outright painful.
“You aren’t our superiors and we don’t have to salute you. Let go.” Johann couldn’t believe his eyes when Willi insolently yanked his arm out of the trooper’s hand. “And tell your kamerad to let my friend go. Now!”
Whether it was the alcohol that emboldened him to the suicidal, given the situation, extreme; or it was the sight of a screaming mother and her silent child that affected him so, but Willi’s tone had suddenly turned into steel, just like his eyes, right before Johann’s bewildered gaze.
The SS trooper stood at least a head taller than both boys. He was at least several years older and at least twice wider in the shoulders. He backhanded Willi with such natural ease as though he was training for it, just like the cadets were training in take-offs and landings. Johann, for some reason, saw a rock flying into Alf’s back some three years ago and experienced the same unrestrained rage rising inside of his chest and acted before he’d thought of the consequences◦– according to conscience, not logic like he always did. His fist connected with the trooper’s nose with a most satisfying crunch. The second blow landed the SS man onto the sidewalk, littered with the glass which he, himself, broke mere hours ago with his comrades. Willi was already dragging Johann away from the scene, shouting something into his ear, something that just didn’t register in his brain, pulling him into the safety of backstreets which he knew, by now, like the back of his hand, with the enraged SS stomping the cobbled streets with their tall boots, right on their heels.
Corner, another one; dark alley, dog barking, door opened by some lucky chance. Before Johann knew it, Willi was pressing him into the wall, holding him by his lapels so tightly, the material cut into his skin.
“What the fuck were you thinking?!”
“He hit you…”
“So what?!”
“No one hits my friends and gets away with it,” Johann concluded with a calmness which he hadn’t quite expected from himself.
Willi released him and stepped away. A grin appeared on his face right below a small cut on his cheek, lit up by the silver moon. “I didn’t think you were a fighter.”
“I am when the occasion calls for it.”