Hermutt Kattz stared up at the grey leaden clouds.
He had stopped believing in reality a long time ago.
He couldn’t exactly remember when.
Perhaps it was when he was doing burial detail and he had come across the bodies of his wife and two children.
They looked nothing like he had remembered them.
His wife was beautiful and his children were mischevious but courteous and handsome.
What he buried that day were just husks of bodies that had once contained the souls of his loved ones.
Was that when he had stopped believing?
Or was it when he had been beaten so badly by a guard, that he could not eat the thin, watery gruel they called food for a whole week, because his mouth and neck were so swollen and the bleeding gums where some of his teeth had been pained him so much he couldn’t sleep.
He had once believed you know.
His faith had held him up through the nightmare but somewhere along the way his faith had deserted him.
One moment it was walking beside him and the next moment it was gone like a shadow disappearing in the sunlight.
Except here there was no sunlight.
Only death, death and more death.
Had it really been four years since he had been forced onto a train that had taken he and his family to the village of Rzuchow and the Chelmno concentration camp.
When the train had arrived, all the men were separated from the women and children.
Despite the tears and protests, Hermutt shouted to his wife and children to be brave, they would get out of this and be happy again.
The last thing he saw of them were the tears in their eyes but he chose not to accept the reality of their situation, instead he embraced the illusion of faith.
Faith that there had been a mistake.
They were germans after all.
Faith that the mistake would be noticed and they would be set free.
Faith that they would be rescued by the allied forces who had stood up to the evils of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi demons.
Through the four years he had endured at Chelmno extermination camp, his illusion of faith had held him up.
Now it was gone and all he had left was the reality of despair and lonliness.
It was towards the end of winter when spring whispered it’s breath through the air that the Germans had abandoned the camp.
The Red Army was two miles away, the war had been lost.
He had slept in and was sure he would be punished severely as he raced outside.
In his panic, it hadn’t occurred to him to notice the unusual silence.
There was no harsh barking from the guards, no notices being broadcast over the speaker system that had been placed throughout the camp.
Sometimes the Germans would broadcast the hateful ramblings of their Furher never stopping to question the sanity of what he said.
When he stepped out into pale sunlight, Helmutt didn’t notice his fellow inmates or hear their whispering, he just kept on walking.
He walked to the open gate where sharp razor wire that curled through its innards had held and crucified those who had been brave or foolish enough to attempt an escape.
Despite the fears of others, he walked through the gate and out of the camp.
He didn’t think about what he was doing, one foot kept falling in front of the other as he walked down the deserted road away from the sounds of fighting and shelling that announced the coming of the Red Army.
Helmutt felt as though he were in a dream now, not a nightmare.
A dream that would reunite him with his wife and children.
But there was something up ahead blocking the out the light that guided him.
It was a dark, formless mass that lay upon the ground.
As Helmutt got closer, the dark mass transformed into a person.
Gerdan Filsher had lain upon the road for the past two hours.
HIs legs were broken and the cut upon his forehead had finally stopped bleeding, when he saw in the distance, the figure of a man coming his way.
His hopes rose at the thought of help finally arriving.
The cause for his predicament was a stupid accident.
In the rush to load the trucks with secret files and stolen loot and escape from the approaching Russians, a heavy filing cabinet had not been secured properly and had fallen upon Gerdan’s legs, crushing them both as he fell into the darkness of unconsciousness.
His fellow soldiers knew he would be a burden because he needed medical assistance as soon as possible.
Taking him to a hospital would possibly cause them all to be captured, so they stopped and left him behind.
When he woke he found he had been left behind by the roadside.
His superior officer had left a note upon his chest stating that they would return with help as soon as it was safe.
Gerdan knew that that meant they would not return and he was now on his own, left to die by the side of a road.
He had been a loyal soldier to the Furher and had performed his duties with loyalty and zeal.
Some would say he went too far but he believed in the superiority of the German people over all other races and if the enemies of the Reich needed to be disposed of, who was he to question the superior intellect of his masters.
In the camp he had become known as “The Chelmno Butcher” for his brutal actions against the inmates.
He would be the first to admit he took great delight in murder, rape and torture.
It was his duty to eliminate the rodents that still infested the German Empire and threatened the racial superiority of the Arian race.
He knew his Furher would be proud of him.
Helmutt could see who it was but he didn’t want to.
He had been persecuted and terrorised by this man who now lay helpless before him.
He could see the smiling skull of death howling in the mans eyes and a dark blanket of wickedness lay all about him.
Gerdan saw the jew walk up and stand there before him, staring down at him with a blank look as though he were somewhere else.
“Help me Jew.” Gerdan ordered.
The jew just stood there, silently staring.
“Help me and I will see that your family are set free.”
Helmutt eyes began to focus and he saw the pleading look upon the German’s face.
It reminded him of something.
As he drew apart the mists of forgetfulness and self preservation, he saw the faces of his wife and children pleading not to be raped, tortured and murdered.
It was a horror Helmutt did not want to see.
One that he could not allow back into this mind, his world.
The memories reached out and grabbed him, circling him trying to drag him down into the bottomless pits of horror that screamed throughout the twisted valleys of his mind.
Helmutt began to kick at the suffocating darkness.
He kicked and he kicked with all the hatred and desire to survive that was left within him.
He was surprised at the amount of hatred that seemed to control his legs, that kept on lashing out at this evil demon of depravity that had tried to kill him, that had killed all he loved.
But he was weak from starvation and torture and his exhausted body eventually crumpled beneath him and he fell down unconscious, into a darkness that was of nothing, no memories, no death, no life.
It was a darkness that he welcomed.
His cocoon of darkness was dispersed by a shattering of light that woke him from his unconscious slumber.
A strange speaking voice was saying something to him.
As Helmutt opened his eyes, he saw a face to the voice.
It was Russian.
As the Red Army trundled down the dirt road towards the Chelmno concentration camp, they had come across two bodies lying by the side of the road.
One was of a live jew and the other was of a dead german soldier.
From what they could work out, the soldier had been kicked to death by the emaciated jew.
This act had inadvertently saved Helmutt’s life.
The Russian soldiers saw this as an act of courage and decided not to shoot him.
They fed Helmutt some of their rations and gave him some water and then left.
Once he had regained some of his pitiful strength, Helmutt wandered off down the road.
He didn’t know where he was going anymore because the dream had disappeared, leaving him alone, with no direction.
Helmutt Katzz lived the rest of his life in asylum for the insane.
He had been found wandering about the German countryside a year after the war, babbling incoherently about trying to find a dream he had lost, had anyone found his dream?
He knew he must find it if he was ever to see his wife and children again.
So much had happened to the reality of Helmutt Katzz, that he had become lost in the illusions that border the boundries of the thing we call reality.
It is a story that was lived by many, many people who were victims not of their own choosing but through the insane delusions of grandeur forced upon them by Adolf Hitler and his Nazi henchmen.
The realities of many people were destroyed, crushed and lost through the horrendous years of world war 2 and I wonder if even now, they have been able to mend the fence through which their concept of reality escaped over into the illusions that were needed for self preservation.
I wonder how many people there are like Helmutt, who have placed the little sanity that remained within them after the war into a box they have hidden and can no longer find.