The Man In The Striped Pajamas [FICTOID]

“If you don’t take chances,” Mikel said, “you might as well not be alive.”

He and the other caps pushed the big, heavy, rusty cart away from the showers.  Despite the bright April sun, the day seemed dark and overcast due to the smoke belching from the crematorium.

“Take me, for instance,” Mikel said.  “I could have gone to the showers like these dumb schmucks, but I took a chance to curry favor with the guards.  I told them about that fat jeweler who smuggled diamonds shoved up his bunghole, hoping to bribe them into sparing him and his family.  Fool!  All he bought was my safety.  Him and his brats?  Poof, up in smoke.”

Mikel chuckled, only pretending to push the body laden cart along the gravel roadway.  The other kapos said nothing.  As their senior and guard’s favorite, Mikel could apply the least effort in their daily labors since one word from him put the others in the gas chamber faster than they could spit.

He’s not wearing a prison uniform, thought Alfonso, the youngest of the other kapos.  He’s a bourgeois boulevardier lounging around in striped pajamas.

They all wore prison uniforms, all expect the naked corpses in the cart.  Around them other prisoners, spared from the gas chambers to be worked to death, labored away at a thousand and one petty, degrading tasks.

Better than the showers, Alfonso thought.  Or is it?

Yellow armbands distinguished the kapos from the rest of the prisoners, men willing to do the most unpleasant tasks in the camp, such as hauling corpses from the packed showers after the giftgas cleared.  As such they enjoyed a few menial privileges, but Mikel took special delight in his status and used it to bully and terrorize common prisoners.

As they approached the crematorium, Alfonso noticed something from the corner of his eye and whispered to Herman, the kapo beside him.  “Where are the officers?  There are only sergeants and privates here.”

Even in their positions of relative safety within the camp, kapos dared not lift their eyes to the guards. Nonetheless, Herman glanced over at the knot of guards by the crematorium doors.  They clustered around a sergeant reading Der Stürmer. 

“Look at the thing he does with the newspaper,” Alfonso whispered.  “He only rolls it up tightly when there’s bad news.”

The other kapos nodded.  If Der Stürmer reported bad news, it must be very bad news indeed.

The explosion buffeted them all soundly, obliterating a nearby guard tower and causing the kapos to dive under the body cart for safety.  A staccato of heavy machine gun fire began, and like great growling dragons, a phalanx of Russian tanks crashed through the trees surrounding the camp.

The guards by the crematorium froze in terror, reaching for their weapons then realizing how futile resistance would be.  They held up their hands as Russian troops breached the camp gates and poured inside.

It was a race to see who would reach the guards first, the soldiers or the prisoners.

The prisoners won, and the soldiers died shrieking for mercy under a rain of wooden clogged feet and dull, rusty shovels.

Under the cart, the kapos observed the massacre and quickly tore their yellow armbands off, hoping to blend in with the other prisoners in the ensuing chaos.

Mikel climbed out from under the cart, hands raised, smiling at the approaching Russians.  “Tovarich!” he called.

Alfonso ran up and draped his own yellow armband over Mikel’s shoulder.  “Don’t listen to him!” he yelled.  “He’s one of them!”

The Russian soldiers paused.  Mikel spun to face Alfonso but as the younger kapo backed away, thousands of enraged prisoners came rushing towards him. 

Mikel sat down heavily on the gravel road, knowing flight would be impossible.

“What did I do wrong?” he wailed, tears forming in his eyes.

© Buzz Dixon