Page 25 of The Nanny Outside the Gates

EIGHTEEN

GAVRIEL

Hours have passed since Bea was shot in front of an audience.

The house has been eerily silent, though loud with grief.

The grief is my own. Something inside of me is breaking, slowly crackling like splintering wood.

He’s going to kill her, or me. Both of us.

Adam and the others too. We’re on a list of numbers and names, and too many of the others have been crossed out.

A one-sided armed war isn’t a war—this is a mutiny.

They took everything from us then attacked.

For years, I’ve been following rules, biting my tongue, sacrificing everything to be their living victim, rather than a dead one.

And now, they have us—the Jews, and every other minority who doesn’t fit within their Aryan race, in a chokehold, helpless, and weak—some begging for death.

My pulse drums within my ears and my temples throb, but rather than take the right turn back upstairs, I continue down the hallway and head down the main stairwell. It’s time to stop feeling so helpless.

The house is still quiet. Not even the hiss of a stove or the stream of the faucet from Kasia in the kitchen.

With a peek into each room on the main floor, confirming I’m alone, I slip into Officer Sch?fer’s office and close the door behind me.

I’ve never been here, not even seen past the bookshelf along the wall, visible at the doorway.

The entire room is lined with walnut bookcases encircling a worn Persian rug with a matching walnut desk, a leather smoking chair tucked in, and a single lamp in the corner, hovering over a pen stand and bottle of ink.

The windows are trimmed with heavy burgundy linen, and framed maps, certificates, and awards accent every open space along the wood-paneled walls.

Between the two large windows are a row of war medals and Nazi paraphernalia.

My throat clenches as I take in a whiff of a potent liquor mixed with tobacco and wood polish.

A small grandfather clock sits on a shelf facing his desk, each tick of the second hand, sounds like a tapped key on a typewriter. Tap, tap, tap, tap…

I don’t have long.

The drawers on either side of his smoking chair have brass handles, perfect canvases for fingerprints.

With the bottom hem of my uniform top, I yank open the top drawer and shuffle the stack of papers from side to side.

I work my way down the three drawers, finding what I was looking for in the deep bottom one.

I retrieve the pistol with a careful grip, as if it might detonate upon an unlawful touch.

I’ve never used a gun—never had a reason to.

Pa never liked hunting much and the pistol he kept for safety was locked away beneath his bed.

He showed me how to use it if there was ever a real emergency, and how to check the chambers, but other than that one time, it was never seen by my brothers or me.

“Guns kill,” Pa told us. “There’s no reason for you to ever lay a finger on one unless you have intentions to kill—God forbid any of you ever should.” He didn’t know what the world would turn into, and we didn’t speak much about that gun after he was forced to turn it in per German law.

As a grown man now, I see his point was: don’t do as I’m doing. He had a gun in case anyone ever threatened his family. He’d kill if it meant protecting us.

My drawers won’t hold this up with the string I fight with every morning just to keep these heavy baggy pants around my waist.

I hold the pistol in my right hand, keeping a solid grasp around the grip.

The hollow feel within the grip tells me there’s no magazine loaded into it.

I hold the weapon out in front of me, like my Pa always said, and pull the upper slide backward.

As the slide comes back, a round pops out and falls to the floor.

Good thing I checked. With a glimpse into the barrel, finding no other rounds, I slowly let the slide return to its place.

I scoop up the fallen ammo and close the drawer.

“I’m well, how are you this morning, Edith?” Frau Sch?fer calls out. Someone must be walking by the house. Her voice is muffled but clear enough that she’s likely right outside the front door. But she’s home.

I close the drawer with a gentle nudge and head for the hallway.

“Of course. That sounds lovely,” she says, ending the impromptu conversation.

I make a run for the stairwell, unable to see her profile in either of the tempered glass windows either side of the front door.

Skipping every other step, I clench my grip tighter around the pistol, my muscles and joints burn and ache—a reminder that my body has aged far beyond my twenty-three years.

My brain can’t keep up. I should have the strength to do what I’ve always done, but I’m losing too much weight, eating so little and pushing myself through twelve hours of labor each day.

The front door opens just as I turn up the attic stairwell. I stop my trampling motion and soften my steps to avoid making a sound until I’m upstairs in the expansion.

“Girls, your mother is home,” Frau Sch?fer calls out.

“Mama!” they shout, scampering out of their bedroom.

As if on cue, Flora begins to cry again. Perhaps it isn’t a coincidence that Halina can manage to keep her calm when the baby’s mother is gone. To think Frau Sch?fer’s bringing another child into this hostile environment is beyond my comprehension.

I spin around the unfinished space and stop in front of the hidden alcove.

I knew this small space would come in handy.

I pull open the two panels of wood, hinged on the inside to conceal any breathable space.

Then, I loosen one of the shorter wall panels, built the same way as the doors, revealing the small, cubed compartment, perfect for hiding smaller objects, and this pistol.

“Of course, my child is wailing when I walk in through the door. What else would she be doing?” Frau Sch?fer shouts.

Footsteps cross through the hallway below me and disappear at the stairwell. Halina must be bringing Frau Sch?fer her wailing child.

“Where are the hounds?” Adam whispers. “We should be halfway back to Auschwitz by now.”

“I don’t know,” I answer. We’re standing between the SS-owned homes and the brink of the wooded path that leads back to the camp.

The two lines of us, men and women, are facing each other, in formation like we should be.

By this time, there is usually a guard or two waiting to escort us, but not even the kapos are here.

It’s late, and much darker than usual. Something isn’t right.

Sch?fer is sitting in his parked car just a dozen steps away from our lines. There’s no way he would be the one escorting us back to Auschwitz, not through the woods. Another set of headlights flashes down the street, a slow, smooth gliding vehicle—another officer.

“What are they expecting us to do?” Benson utters. It’s one of the first times he’s walked back with us at the same hour. He’s been brought here to cook for one of the other two families and doesn’t return to the barracks until midnight some nights.

“They’re all watching,” Reuben says, holding his soot-covered broom in hand.

“If we don’t report back on time, we’ll miss roll call,” Kasia says. “If we miss the roll call, everyone in the barracks will suffer. Maybe we should just go on our own.”

Kasia knows just as well as the rest of us that Bea was killed today after her failed plan to escape, which means we’re likely awaiting punishment for Bea’s decision. But for what purpose when she’s already dead?

I turn over my shoulder, and whisper to Adam, “I did something today…”

He swallows hard, the lump in his throat dry and coarse. “Wh—what’s that?”

The officer in the newly arrived vehicle steps out in front of the next house down, and his boots thud against the gravel as he walks like a deadly shadow backlit by his headlights.

“I’ll tell you later,” I say, quieter than my previous whisper.

Officer Sch?fer steps out of his vehicle next but walks into the house.

He doesn’t acknowledge our existence, which should give me relief.

Instead, every muscle tenses as I watch the last slice of sun melt into the horizon.

We’re in the dark. There are no kapos. One of us is dead. And we’re going to miss the roll call.

I should have taken the pistol with me. I don’t know how good of a shot I would have, but there’s a chance I could have taken them both out, set us all free.

Though, a guard in the distance at a checkpoint too close for comfort would pick up the sound.

We wouldn’t have anywhere to run. We’re trapped.

That’s why Bea likely gave up and stayed where she was in the cellar.

We walk between two checkpoints with nowhere else to go.

I don’t know who I am, even thinking this way. Never in my life had I imagined hurting another person, but this rage building inside of me, it’s taking over every fiber of my being, and each day I continue to survive, seems like a year in passing.

“Someone knew about the girl who was hiding in the cellar,” the silhouette of an officer belts out. “Which one of you was it?”

No one in the group opens their mouth to speak.

None of us knew. At least, I don’t think any of us knew.

Maybe there was suspicion of Bea’s whereabouts, but nothing more.

Anytime a guard or officer tells a group of prisoners one person is guilty of a crime, it’s to get someone to confess, even when there’s nothing to confess.

This is when prisoners turn on each other, hoping to save themselves.

The SS likely need someone to blame, someone other than a kapo they trusted.

Adam’s breathing harder than he was. We had nothing to do with her plan to disappear and hide in the Sch?fer’s cellar of all the terrible places.

The officer steps up to me, the toes of his boots touching the toes of mine. “You work in the same house as that rat.” She’s dead. Name calling isn’t necessary.

“I work in the attic, away from any others. Hammering all day, leaves me with a hissing buzz in place of any type of quiet.”

The officer steps to his right, in front of Adam. “You. You also work there.”

“Yes, but outside, in the garden,” Adam says. “I—I haven’t a clue what’s happening in the house.”

In the seconds of the following silence, a shout echoes from the Sch?fer house.

I fight the urge to whip my head around and convince myself I can see through the walls.

What more is there to yell about? He already found and killed the girl in the cellar.

Flora wasn’t crying when I left twenty minutes ago, and Frau Sch?fer was setting the dinner table—or so I believe due to the clinks of dishes and silverware I overheard.

The front door of the house storms open. “Find it, Ada. Find it now,” Sch?fer yells, his voice carrying loud as he comes closer.

“Anything?” Sch?fer asks the other officer.

“No,” the interrogator replies.

“I just sent for a guard. Someone will be here within the next few minutes.”

The officers walk several steps behind us, and I do my best to listen in on their conversation. “Has your wife ever?—”

The conversation becomes entirely silent.

“What? No. Are you sure?” the other officer asks.

“It was locked,” Sch?fer says, the rest of his statement seeping into a passing gust of wind.

Locked?