Wilhelm Reisner
Treblinka, Poland. December 15, 1942
He had been there, watching the world from behind the spear-tip points of the barbed-wire fence, for close to a week. To be truthful, Wilhelm had no way of telling it had been that long. His watch had been taken when he was captured. But he judged from how many times the fires had sent their death-tinged smoke spiraling into the winter sky, it was close to seven days. Seven days of staring at the moist, rust-tinged walls of the small room he was being held in and of hearing the low snarls of German reverberating throughout the hallways.
The words kept playing over and over in his mind on a never ending loop like a broken record. He could see her face right there, so close he wanted to reach out and touch it. But when he did, his fingers were met with cold, empty air. Then he was on the front porch again, watching the streetlights cast their golden glimmer on the fresh snow. Amalia was silhouetted against the door, the flakes settling and melting on her golden curls as she looked up at him with eyes that reflected the sky. Her voice, soft and tinged with a Dortmund accent, whispered his name and the memories of the past twenty years flashed by. But they disappeared, crumbling to ash as he remembered, once again, that he’d failed to be an older brother.
The front door creaked open behind Amalia, just as it always did as the memory continued to play out. A second figure stepped onto the porch. She brushed the snowflakes off the railing with her gloved hands, stopping when she caught sight of him. Almost shyly, Vienna offered her twin brother a smile and he returned it in spite of himself. For a moment, his eyes followed the snowflakes coating her hair as they left a fine dusting of white over the mousy brown. She gestured at the front door, fingers trailing along the brass knob as she began to open it. He wanted to call out to her, to somehow stop her from going inside. But she did anyway, only glancing back at Amalia still standing on the porch. The front door closed.
Powerless, he watched yet again as his younger sister turned to follow, her eyes flitting right past him as though he wasn’t there. With a fleeting smile that would forever haunt him, she disappeared alongside Vienna. He stood without moving in the still falling snow, although now he couldn’t feel the cold winds beginning to gather strength. The scene faded and the green-tinted walls materialized.
The distant sound of a key rattling in the lock caught his attention and Wilhelm glanced up to see the door open. Part of him, some wild, crazy, make-believe, part imagined it was going to be Amalia and Vienna. He could almost see their snow-dusted hair and he felt hollow as the familiar German uniform came into view. It was all so recognizable, from the jackboots on the cold stone floor to the click of the pistol. Maybe it had been longer than seven days since he’d been captured.
The tall man stood in front of him, fingers trailing along the barrel of his gun. It was reminiscent of the way, moments before, Vienna had trailed her fingers along the railing. But that lived only in his memories and he was here, in Poland. He’d broken all of their hearts three years ago. In the sudden emptiness, the man motioned for Wilhelm to stand and follow him. Having no choice, he did as he was told, stepping out into a barren corridor.
The man’s easy, almost lazy navigational skills told Wilhelm he was very familiar with the barrack’s layout. As they walked into the center of the camp, he tried to place where he had seen him. There was something so familiar about the cold brown eyes and thinning dark hair that was painstakingly combed back. Wilhelm could have sworn they’d met before. It had to be somewhere mundane but special at the same time, like an airport on Christmas Eve. He could almost see the planes rising into the sky through the big glass windows. Somewhere that wasn’t here. This was a cold hell that no one seemed to know about, buried under shadows and screams. With an almost eerie feeling, he realized he might not be here much longer.
“Where are you taking me?” He forced the words out, pitching his voice to be heard above the cold wind picking up in the trees far above their heads. Snowflakes had begun to tumble from the sky, melting as soon as they touched the ground. The man began to walk faster, pulling his jacket closer around him. As they neared the camp’s periphery, even the wind didn’t hide the now familiar stench of death. Wilhelm knew, even though he wanted to lie to himself yet again, what was about to
happen.
But he had convinced himself as a 19-year-old to abandon everything. All of his hopes, his dreams, his family. Just for the chance to prove himself among the Polish resistance and that part of him refused to let it end like this. Not after everything he’d been through the past couple of years and the number of times he’d bested the odds before. Now, it was just this that lay before him. This last fight and he’d be gone with the dark again, disappearing into the shadows before anyone could remember it was him. Last May, he thought he’d be running through the streets of Warsaw forever, chasing German soldiers through the cracks in crumbling architecture. All under a cold, cloudy sky.
A chill settled over him, creeping through his fingers and then marching steadily towards his heart. Wilhelm stopped walking, watching the other man’s expression turn to a scowl, the words harsh. “Don’t make this difficult.” His fingers curled around the trigger of the gun as the man slowly raised it until it pointed directly at Wilhelm’s heart. He could barely see it through the swirling snow.
He began to back away. His feet sunk into the mounting drifts, slipping on the snow gathering over the barren wasteland. Then he was scrambling through the back alleys of his mind, trying to remember the escape routes he should have noted when he’d first been brought in.
They shattered into a million little pieces, like bits of glass tantalizingly reflecting light. His foot caught on a rock hidden beneath the snow and unable to catch himself, he fell towards the ground. Wilhelm could do nothing but watch as the man slowly walked towards him, the gun still casually pointed at his heart. After a long moment, he spoke, his voice cutting sharper than the cold wind whistling all around them.
“I should have known you wouldn’t make this easy. Perhaps I was fooling myself into thinking that you would, you damn resistance fighter. God, they’ve been saying your name all over Poland. Wilhelm Reisner, the liberator. That’s what they call you when they’re chanting your name in the streets. Only that’s in your little teenage fantasies now. The people you saved aren’t going to save you today.”
The man stopped advancing and the falling snow instantly covered his hard, cold tracks. Several feet away, Wilhelm’s jaw clenched. Paralyzed, he watched in slow motion as the trigger was pulled. It should have been darkness and he should have been dead. But somehow, he was suddenly back on the front porch. It was like time had decided to replay itself, Amalia was still watching the tumbling snow and Vienna's hand was on the doorknob.
He was met with hazy vision as the porch and the wasteland blurred together until he could barely distinguish one from the other. Motion caught his eye and he looked over to see the man unjamming his pistol with harsh, desperate movements. The words were out before Wilhelm even gave himself the chance to think them through. He lost them to the swirling snowstorm. “Don’t you have a family?”
The effect produced was far from what he had dared to hope. The man barely paused in his work as he finished unjamming the pistol. Just for an instant as the snow cleared, Wilhelm could see the name imprinted on the side of the barrel. Walther P38. In the same instant, the man had leveled the gun and with a sinking feeling, he realized how foolish it had been to try and talk his way out of this. Re-runs didn’t exist in the real world. But this was his only hope, no matter how desperate it was. His last chance of getting out of this alive and back to the family who still waited for him on a snowy porch in Dortmund.
“What would your relatives think if they knew you were a killer?” Again, the snowy wasteland began to blur in a way that was now familiar. He could barely see the gun being aimed at him. Instead, Wilhelm was standing on the front porch, only now it was getting clearer. He could make out the glistening diamonds on Amalia’s dragonfly hairpiece.
It was from a distance that he heard the man’s cold tone as he spat out his answer to Wilhelm’s question. “Do you think they’d care?”
But Wilhelm was too far away now, in another world. One where two sisters waited for him through the dwindling years. As the scene came sharply into focus, he saw Amalia enter the house, the golden light from inside reflecting on her face only for a moment. Then the door silently closed behind her.
The illusion shattered and he caught a glimpse of the snowy wasteland. It must have been somewhere in Poland, where even the mountainous drifts couldn’t hide the taint of death. The end was right there and it all seemed so easy it was almost laughable but the conflicted expression on the man’s face halted him. Wilhelm wasn’t sure when he began speaking or why. All he knew was that the words were spilling out into the snow, there he left them. To be taken or ignored.
“One day, I know you’re going to find someone,” Wilhelm said. “We all do. You’re going to love her more than your entire world, you’d do anything for her and then she’ll find out all you are is a murderer. She won’t love you back and it’ll break your heart worse than anything you’ve ever experienced. You’ll beg her to stay but it won’t change anything. You’ll remember me in that moment because I know it’s going to happen. One day.”
The click of the trigger barely registered as the haze began to descend. For the last time, his sister was looking back at him, and her hand was slipping into his. Just for a moment he could feel the warmth of Vienna’s skin. He felt her guide him towards the door and begin to open it, and he glanced back towards the street. Only it wasn’t the street he was seeing anymore but a barren wasteland where a man looked down at a corpse lying in the snow, last words still echoing into the frosty air. As blood began to turn the snow red, Wilhelm gave one final glance and then finally followed Vienna into the warm, golden glow of the house.
Elizabeth Cocchiarale is a 17-year-old high school from suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She enjoys researching various historical periods and has done work in multiple archives. Outside of academics, she has spent several months living in Greifswald, Germany, along with visiting the Rhine Valley, Turin, Italy, and Amsterdam. In the future, she hopes to pursue a degree in history and go into international criminal law. Another excerpt from Statesmen & Criminals won a regional Gold Key at the 2024 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards.
"barbed wire" by grendelkhan is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.
