Landsberg am Lech, Bavaria, April, 1945
It was the paleness in Billy Oswald’s face that warned First Sergeant Arrow that something was wrong. Billy Oswald was the unflappable sort – a paratrooper who’d survived that gruesome drop with the rest of the 101st last June and taken everything the Germans had thrown at them since in stride. Danger never fazed him, and hardship only seemed to embolden him. Even in the face of charging tanks and pounding artillery he’d retained his laconic temperament.
So, when Billy Oswald looked pale, John Arrow ordered his men to draw extra ammo before boarding the trucks.
The drive out to the camp was unusually quiet. At first, the men tried to extract the truth from Billy Oswald, but the man wouldn’t budge. He only told them that the Major wanted them all out at ‘the camp’ where some of the men had ‘found something.’ When asked if it was a POW camp, he said wasn’t sure. When asked what had rattled him, he said nothing.
John Arrow’s finger hovered near his trigger guard the whole drive.
When they arrived, the first thing he noticed was how still it was – statuesque, like the world was holding its breath, or perhaps staring in mute fascination. No, the first sergeant decided, not fascination. Horror.
He couldn’t say why, at first. From a distance, the camp looked much like any other POW camp. Larger, perhaps, with different structures and layout, but the familiar barbed wire and guard towers were far from unusual.
But that infernal stillness hung in the air – a force invisible and oppressive. It smelled of ash and felt… cold.
Cold despite the warmth of the shining sun that watched over the beautiful spring day.
First Sergeant Arrow and his men dismounted the trucks and approached the camp. As they did, another smell joined that of the ash.
The stench of death. And, with it, something worse. John Arrow had learned long ago what death smelled like. That day, he learned what death felt like.
Cries of horror filled the air as the men saw the prisoners. Like skeletons they were, their sickly skin stretched over bones. They lingered by the wire, swaying on their feet or drifting aimlessly around the camp. With sunken features and dead eyes, they resembled mummies or ghouls.
It was then that John Arrow heard them – heard the mortal frailty of their moaning on the cool spring breeze, a tale of lament in the universal tongue of humanity.
“Merciful God,” whispered one of the men behind him. “Sarge, what the hell is this place?”
John Arrow put a hand to his mouth and stared, tears forming in his eyes. Instinctively, he tried to pray, but he could not form the words. Oh God, he began over and over again. Oh God. Finally, he found the voice to answer.
“I… I don’t know.”
John Arrow answered his men truthfully that day. While the rumors of Nazi atrocities were well-known amongst the rank and file, the true devilishness of the Holocaust was shrouded in legend and supposition. Only with the end of the war did the truth of the matter come fully to light. When it did, the world was stunned into silence.
Had he known, First Sergeant Arrow would have told his men that the place was called Kaufering, a system of eleven subcamps of the Dachau Concentration Camp. There the Nazis murdered 15,000 of the 30,000 captives, most of whom were Jewish.
Another word John Arrow might have used was ‘genocide,’ but, even had the full truth of the concentration camps been known to him then, he still could not have called it genocide. True, the word, coined by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, had been published in 1944 as part of Lemkin’s ongoing efforts to ensure that such acts of barbarity would be criminalized in international law. However, it would not see any great use until after the war, and would not be fully codified in international law until 1948.
Lemkin had warned civil leaders in the United States government about the Nazi atrocities early in the war, and the Polish resistance leader Witold Pilecki even provided detailed intelligence he’d obtained by infiltrating Auschwitz, but the information had been suppressed, and the details he knew were not disseminated to the troops before they found the first camps. When the Seventh United States Army liberated Kaufering in 1945, they discovered that evil in all its rawness.
When Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, discovered the extent of the horrors his men had found, he ordered that every inch of the concentration camps be documented. He predicted, correctly, that one day men would seek to deny that the Holocaust ever happened. Eisenhower was determined that no one ever be able to forget the atrocity.
Despite his best efforts, some have forgotten the camps, the furnaces, the gas.
The men who liberated them never could.
Canterlot, United States, Present Day
The memorial was a simple marble affair, striking in its unpretentious bluntness – a six-sided dark stone pillar with one side broader than the others. Into this was engraved the Star of David, and beneath it an inscription, first in Hebrew, then in English.
Mr. Arrow neither read nor spoke Hebrew, but the translation was clear enough. It read, “In commemoration of more than six million Jews who were killed by the National Socialists between 1938 and 1945.” Beneath it was a list of the largest and most notorious of the deadly camps. To list them all would have taken more space than the pillar had, but what camps were there had more than enough blood to their names.
Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Groß-Rosen… Dachau.
It was not especially cold, but Mr. Arrow shivered.
The memorial was located in a garden behind Neve Shalom, Canterlot’s chief synagogue. There was a small open area in front of the memorial, and a compact bench was set across from it. It was a quiet place, ringed by thick rose bushes that were always immaculately trimmed. Cobblestone paths passed by on either side, with access points to the right and left, but the high bushes always gave the spot a sense of seclusion. If one was sitting down, it was easy to go unseen.
Before she passed, Mr. Arrow had frequented this place with his friend Gertrude ‘Gertie’ Rosenkranz. He’d met the diminutive German immigrant five years after the war ended when he wandered into the first of a chain of diners ‘Ma Gertie’ would open after moving to Canterlot with her son and daughter to start a new life.
Five years after he met her, Gertie had shown Mr. Arrow the numbers tattooed on her arm at Auschwitz.
Five years after that, the two of them finally talked about it.
The old paratrooper never discussed what he’d seen at Dachau with anyone but Gertrude Rosenkranz. Not with his fellow soldiers. Not with his children. Not even with his wife. Dachau was between him, Gertie, and God.
Mr. Arrow was not the sort to talk much, certainly not about his troubles. After his wife died, he talked even less. His friendship with the Apple family had gradually encouraged him to talk more, and he tried to be more deliberate about sharing his stories and his thoughts with people. He’d learned that, even if he didn’t think his life was something to make a big deal about, others disagreed.
Besides, he’d seen enough of life and known enough people, some good, some evil, that he had lessons to pass on, especially to this generation. Mr. Arrow was wise enough to be persuaded to share that experience.
But Mr. Arrow never talked about Dachau.
He didn’t know how.
So, he sat alone on the bench across from the memorial in the privacy of his own thoughts and tried to make sense of them.
The dreams had been coming more and more often, lately. Mr. Arrow did not dream much. Not that he remembered, anyway. When he did, they were sometimes pleasant things. Memories of his wife, Bess, or thoughts of their children.
Sometimes the dreams were dark ones. Dreams of his brothers, torn apart by machinegun fire or cut down by snipers, butchered in the cold of Bastogne and the forests of Korea. But, wherever the dark dreams started, they always ended there, at Dachau. It didn’t matter if it began as a memory of a brother dying in a parachute accident in training or in an ambush near Sunchon; it always ended in that damnable camp.
It was these dark dreams which had haunted him of late. He knew the reason why – seventy-five years was a long time in a man’s life, but to the ghosts of an old horror it was but the blink of an eye. The past’s ghouls had long memories, and no mortal man could live long enough to forget. Far more likely, he’d just get lost in the echo.
Mr. Arrow was a man alert to his surroundings, a wartime habit he’d never outgrown, but even he was not immune to such distraction. So it was that he didn’t hear the approach of the young woman until she was practically on top of him.
She was talking to herself, speaking in a voice that bespoke training in refinement. Mr. Arrow could not make out the words, but it sounded like she was cataloguing a ‘to-do’ list as she walked. Though her voice was refined, she didn’t sound particularly calm as she muttered a litany of minor difficulties under her breath. Her stride kept harsh tempo to her words as her heels clacked sharply on the cobblestone path like the staccato of a cantering horse.
The voice struck Mr. Arrow as familiar, and when the elegantly-clad young woman clacked past, her dark locks bobbing with her stride, he understood why. The black-haired, pale-skinned teen was one of Applejack’s best friends – the aspiring fashion designer. Persnickety, but generous to a fault.
She reminded him of Bryce Braxton, one of the men from his unit who had been called the “only gentile in the garment industry,” as he’d worked for Sears-Roebuck in New York at a time when most of his coworkers were Jewish. It had been solidarity with them that motivated him to join the 101st, and for that solidarity he died in Belgium.
Rarity Belle was a lot like Bryce – same tastes, same career, same courtesy, same generous heart. And, he learned when she dropped her keys and a Yiddish curse slipped out of her mouth, the same tendency to cuss when she thought no one was around to hear.
Her slipup was so unexpected that Mr. Arrow let out an uncharacteristic snort of laughter. The pale young woman flushed beet red as she fumbled for her keys. “Terribly sorry, darling,” she exclaimed. “I didn’t realize anyone was…” she trailed off as she looked up and saw his face. “Oh! Mr. Arrow! What a pleasant surprise!”
The old man rose and nodded politely. “Good day to you, young lady.”
Rarity bit her lip and shifted her purse, seeming quite out of sorts for not only having cursed, but having cursed in front of a venerable old man she happened to know. “I— I was just, well I was in a hurry, you see, and I wasn’t really thinking about—”
Taking pity on the poor girl, Mr. Arrow interjected, “No need to apologize. I’ve heard worse.” After more than a decade in uniform, it would have been impossible not to. “What brings you here today?” he asked, hoping to distract her from her embarrassment.
She smiled gratefully and held up her keys, one of which appeared to go to the synagogue. “There’s a bar mitzvah happening tomorrow and I’m helping out with the setup, so I need to go in and check on a few things. And you?” she continued politely. “What brings you to…” her eyes drifted to the memorial and she trailed off, her flush returning. After a wordless moment, she cleared her throat. “I see. I’m… ah… sorry to have disturbed you.”
It looked to Mr. Arrow that she wanted to dart off, but he held up a hand to stop her. “Wait,” he said. It was instinctive, not deliberate and, once he said it, he wasn’t sure what else to say.
Rarity obediently waited, and she watched him expectantly, but Mr. Arrow didn’t know how to answer her expectations. He could not answer even his own. The old man looked to the memorial for inspiration, but it remained silent.
Mr. Arrow swallowed and closed one of his hands.
The pair stood in silence for a moment. After he’d drawn several breaths, there was one sharp clack on the cobblestones, then another, then a third as Rarity stepped into the enclosure with him, her eyes on the memorial.
Mr. Arrow glanced at her. She glanced back. They both glanced at the memorial. Mr. Arrow ran a hand through his hair. Then, having no better idea what to do or say, he gestured for the bench. The pair sat and stared at the memorial in silence.
How long they sat, neither looking at the other, Mr. Arrow could not guess. Eventually, the silence was broken by Rarity.
“My great-grandfather was an Austrian Jew,” she said. “He had a business partner who saw the writing on the wall in 1937 and encouraged him to take his family with him on an extended work assignment to America before the Nazis moved in. They got out. But their cousins, their aunts, their uncles, his and his wife’s respective parents…” she trailed off and Mr. Arrow didn’t press her with questions he already knew the answer to. “I come here sometimes,” she concluded, “and think about how I wouldn’t be here if that partner hadn’t gotten him that American assignment.”
Mr. Arrow nodded. “What happened to the partner?” he asked after a moment.
Rarity sighed. “Werner Banner,” she named him. “He wasn’t Jewish, so he was safe at first. But he was a member of Josef Mueller’s network.” Mr. Arrow knew the second name; Mueller was a Bavarian lawyer who was the connecting point between the German Resistance, the Vatican’s anti-Nazi spy network, and the Allies. He was also one of the only senior members of Operation Valkyrie, which had so nearly succeeded in assassinating Hitler, to escape execution.
He suspected that Banner had not been so lucky. A moment later, Rarity confirmed it. “After Hitler survived the Valkyrie bombing, Banner was rounded up with the others and shot for treason.” She swallowed and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Mother said that Great Grandfather never could talk about his friend without crying.”
Mr. Arrow couldn’t blame him. Men like that were worth crying for.
Rarity sniffed and continued to dab at her eyes. “Did you have a… were you…” She couldn’t quite seem to form the question.
In a strange way, that fact actually helped Mr. Arrow speak. He had a hard time speaking for himself. But to spare another her discomfort? That he could do.
“I was in the 101st Airborne,” he explained. “I was there when we liberated Dachau.”
“Oh God,” she breathed, unknowingly echoing his own simple prayer of lamentation those seventy-five years ago. “I… I’m so sorry, Mr. Arrow! I can’t even imagine carrying memories like that!”
Mr. Arrow wanted to correct her that he wasn’t carrying the memories, but rather being haunted by them. But he could not form the words to say so.
It seemed neither of them could form the words, as they lapsed once more into silence. This silence was different, though, at least for Mr. Arrow. It was stifling, painful, like something in his chest wanted to leap out, like if he kept it in even one moment longer that he would burst—
“Never again,” he heard himself say.
Rarity was taken off-guard by his sudden exclamation. “Pardon?” she asked.
“Never again,” he repeated, his voice shaking with sudden emotion. “When we saw those camps, we swore it would never happen again. But did we keep that promise?” His hands balled into fists. “Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur… more than a dozen times since we swore, ‘Never again!’ And now? The Chinese government has over a million Uighurs in concentration camps! A founding member of the UN has innocent people in those fu—”
Mr. Arrow took a deep breath and forced himself to unclench his hands. He’d never sworn in front of a lady in his life, and he wasn’t going to give the monsters of the world the satisfaction of changing that now. “—in camps like that, and no one stops them.” He closed his eyes, and felt tears forming between the lids. “‘Never again,’ we said. But there will always be wolves in the world, Rarity.”
Having said his piece, he closed his mouth and let his tears fall. Beside him, Rarity cried as well. He put an instinctive arm around her to comfort her, and she leaned into his embrace, but she said nothing. There was nothing more to say.
Or, so he thought.
“There are always wolves,” Rarity agreed with a shaky voice. “But there are always sheepdogs too.” She reached up and clasped the gnarled hand on her shoulder with her own delicate fingers. “Men like you are the reason we’ve survived the wolves all these years. It’s what God put you here to do.” The young woman met his gaze and smiled through her tears. “Maybe we’ll never reach our ‘Never again.’ But neither will the wolves ever win without a fight!”
Mr. Arrow turned the words over in his head. As he did, he felt a slow, somber smile spread across his craggy features. “No,” he agreed eventually. “No, I guess they won’t.”
The pair sat. A light breeze caused the roses to sway.
“Thank you, Rarity.”
“For what?”
Mr. Arrow’s gaze drifted upwards. “For reminding me of that.”
