The stories and character names are fictitious. No resemblance is intended in the character names to any living or deceased person.
by Rod Smith
"Nein! Nein!" Klaus Hartmann shouted in his sleep as the scene in Poland catapulted across
his mind, as it had since 1944. Again he heard sputtering gunfire as he signalled, and saw a
row of humanity toppling over as so many scarecrows, yet with red ugly stains on their shirts,
blouses, trousers. What was blonde hair now spattered with crimson. The silence of it all had
haunted him. He'd expected screams and pleas for mercy. Even the children had been mute.
Skohl had been smiling as the bullets hit him.
He woke, stretched, and with aching 85-year-old bones, pushed aside the curtain to peer at
another Buenos Aires dawn. After all, he reasoned, as he'd done a thousand times before, I
only did my duty. The order had come directly from the Fuehrer.
Strange, he thought, the dreams had become worse and more frequent in the past few years. Yet
always, when he awoke, the reality pained him like a splinter in a thumbnail.
Retired, with a company pension, he was financially comfortable Soon after arrival in Argentina, Sunnhauser had installed him as supervisor in a city textile factory. Everyone knew him as Pieter Brand, the kindly old pensioner from Switzerland. He knew there were others - ex SS - in the city but they never fraternised.
He sighed as he thought of pre-war Germany. His mother, father, uncles, aunts, cousins. All dead. Sometimes in summer he thought of the good times. The sunny days in Munich, the long tables in the Hofbrauhaus, the oom-pa-pah of the band in the beer garden, the arms-linked singing with the teenage gang, the waitresses with their large bums and champion boxer forearms, able to carry two steins in each hand. What had happened to them all?
Returning was impossible. He would have to die with the secret. Even today he might still be recognised by one of the Poles from that region. He'd heard some of them wandered the Fatherland checking telephone books, birth registries, voting lists, looking for their tormentors of so long ago.
Sunnhauser was dead, and the thought made him shudder. His old friend had been found lying in the street last year, just outside his home. According to witnesses, someone on a motorcycle had peppered him with an AK45. They'd got the bike number but it had been stolen.
Cursing, he realised he'd forgotten to check the mail. Slowly he donned a dressing gown and began the tottering, rail-gripping descent down the stairs to the ground floor. Carefully he opened box 6. Inside was a letter. He put on the battered spectacles from the dressing-gown pocket. He gasped. It wasn't addressed to Pieter Brand, but Klaus Hartmann. There was no stamp, no postmark. Hand delivered, he thought instinctively. Furtively tucking it into the pocket he shuffled back.
Upstairs and with fumbling fingers he opened the envelope. Fear began to invade him. How many people could have known his real name. Inside the envelope was a four-page leaflet. Nothing else. On the front page was a huge cross with the wording spilling around it. "Ha" he scoffed as he saw the headline "God's forgiveness," and was about to put it down when suddenly Skohl's face was in front of him.
Skohl had been a private in their unit. When the order came to shoot the villagers he had refused. Immediately the watching Colonel Grumm yelled "Schnell" and ordered two soldiers to put Skohl in the execution lineup alongside the women, men and small boys. "Jesus I'm yours," Skohl shouted, and as the chattering bullets plopped into him had gone into eternity grinning. Hartmann wondered how that were possible.
The apparition vanished like a drive-in movie screen enveloped by fog, and he began to read again. "As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us." Immediately following was "Psalm 1:18." He didn't know what that meant, but knew it was from the Bible. Forgiveness. Could it be possible after what I've done, he thought.
He read the next sentence. "Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow, though they are red like crimson they shall be as wool." It was as though someone was branding the words onto his brain. At the end of the leaflet was a request to repeat aloud a prayer. It said this was how one could become a Christian and be forgiven for the past.
"This is amazing," he muttered, "if God forgives me, who can I be afraid of." He began to repeat the words on the paper. "Lord Jesus, forgive me, I am a sinner........"
* * * * * * * * *
A month later, at the Simon Wiesenthal Institute in Vienna the clerk at the desk looked up. A haggard old man stood before him. The man spoke slowly, "I'm Klaus Hartmann. Poland 1944. I'm here to give myself up." END