Stormfuhrer (19 page)

Savina is shaking with fever.  I must get food and safe drinking water for us but don’t want to leave her alone.  We have three blankets around us.  The nights are bitterly cold.

July 2025

One night, asleep in the the little guest bed, helmet on, Farash felt a brighter glow against his eyelids. He awoke.  Foggy and unfocused, the image before him was accompanied by the sound of shuffling feet or perhaps the movement of some padded object being dragged along a smooth floor.

“
Herr Krafft.”  The sound was garbled.  “Herr Krafft.”  It was a male, talking to him from his left side.  He continued to see nothing but a gray, moving blur.

Farash moved his avatar's head to the left and down.  A variety of pale colors came into view, surrounded or perhaps embedded in a rectangle of metal.  He leaned his head back and a brighter picture emerged.  A circle this time, piercingly bright.  Farash squinted in his helmet.

“Herr Krafft.  Are you awake now?”

“
I am,” he responded.

“
Good.  That is very good.  You have been out for many days. Now you must eat to stay conscious.”  The words were good-natured and apparently came broken and short from an elderly man who himself didn’t sound completely well.  Farash moved his helmet in all directions until stopping on a face.  Though blurry, it was white with age.

“
Is this the Ministry?”  Krafft asked.

The old man seemed amused.  “Ministry?  Hmm.  What ministry would this be?  A ministry of pain, perhaps.  You are in a room under Gestapo headquarters.”

“Under?”

“
It’s a dungeon, my friend.  But you have been well-treated.  Your head.  They hit you on the head.  Do you remember anything?”

Krafft felt his chest.  No wrappings were there, just a thin button-up shirt.  No wounds.  He hadn't been shot, at least not in the chest.  He tried to sit up.  The screen and audio went dead.

“Damn it!”  He slapped at the helmet.  Farash had finally gotten back in the game and was out just as quickly.  Next time he would be more careful.

It was an hour before the screen lit up again and the audio returned within the black helmet.  Farash was ready.  The images weren’t quite as blurry this time and he was alone.  There was a metal tray of food next to the old mattress on which he lay.  Light streamed through the bars of a small window at the top of the cell.  He lay there, resting his avatar very carefully this time, trying to think what specific error of his resulted in this, his new condition.  He ate the hard bread and overcooked carrots from the tray.

There was another mattress against the wall opposite him.  Between the two mattresses was a doorway.  The door, a foot deeper into the wall, was old yet braced with metal strips and circular studs.  It rattled slightly with the movement of a subterranean wind.  A day of semi-consciousness followed.

Eventually, a man in a black coat and gray hat unlocked the door and appeared in the doorway.  The other mattress had disappeared.

“Herr Krafft.  It is good to see you awake.  Can you walk?”  With some effort, Farash was able to lift up his avatar to a somewhat standing position and shuffle his feet towards the man.  “Good.  You will be so kind as to come with me.”

Krafft followed.

He was led to a table and bade to sit down.  The room was very small.  He was in a plain metal gray chair behind a small fold-out table.  Farash could himself feel the pounding of Krafft’s skull and resisted the urge to take an analgesic.

Soon, another man in a long coat walked in.  He was tall, thin, silent.  He put a fountain pen on the desk and walked out.  Farash inspected it.  Eventually, he took it apart.  A tiny, rolled up slip of paper was found in the empty chamber of the pen.  Farash unrolled the note and read.  It was in Goebbels’ jumpy handwriting:

He believes you.  – JG

That was all there was to the note.

This was very good news to Farash.  He would be released.  He would be placed in an office of real power, perhaps just above the Reichsminister of Propaganda himself.  He would be more careful this time with how he addressed his superiors and perhaps one day become Deputy Fuhrer.  If the note read true, Hitler had called off Operation Barbarossa.  An eastern front would not be created with Russia.  Germany might just win the war.

Krafft was taken back to the cell.  Now all there was to do was to wait for his release.

Summer ended and his release never came.

June 1942

We jump in and out of boxcars, sleeping in barns, stealing what we can in the way of food from those we think can afford it.  We had decided to take a Czech train headed north, but there were many stops during which the train was repeatedly checked for refugees and other stowaways--many of which we have met on our journey.  It is becoming increasingly difficult for Savina whose pregnancy is starting to show.

We have finally made it back into Poland.

Other than a border said to exist somewhat vertically through the middle of Poland, life goes on here as if there were never any war.  I remain in disbelief regarding the alliance between Germany and Russia, but my eyes tell me otherwise.  Other than a few German soldiers patrolling the streets here and there, no one would think Poland had ever been involved in a war.  Clearly the game allows for alternate endings.  We need to get to the eastern side.

July 1942

Polish newspapers tell the whole, sad story.  Germany has taken all of Western Europe, including Britain, and has invaded America's east coast.  There are predictions that the Russians will invade California but troops in Alaska and the parts of Canada that now belong to the Soviets are merely building up along America's northern border.  The US government now resides in Colorado.  Multiple newspapers have predicted an unconditional surrender to the Axis Alliance within a few weeks.

I talk to Savina about it sometimes, how things were supposed to happen.  I tried to trivialize it once as “just a game” to give some hope, to perhaps make it clear that another world exists, my world, one where men are free from the oppression her world now stands to inherit.  It was a stupid comment.  “It's not a game to me,” she responded.  Nor to me, I now realize.

She listens attentively but shows more concern for coming by the basic necessities for daily survival and mentally preparing for the baby's arrival.

We've finally crossed into the Russian sector, only a few hundred kilometers from the town where she grew up.

Fall 2025

The fall session began.  Farash had slept through the remainder of his summer, unfazed by the possibility that Krafft, his virtual counterpart, would be screaming all sorts of outrageous claims during those periods while Farash was engaged in restless sleep.  In the game, for days, Krafft had only received food in his cell.  No letters.  No visits from the Reichsminister.  In a sense, Farash was stuck there, sharing a cell with Krafft, his avatar.  Krafft had sent many letters to the Reichsminister and one even to the Fuhrer himself.  He received no responses. 

In the game, it was August of 1942.  Even before his imprisonment, Farash had wondered at the lack of ordinance dropped on Berlin.  There were supposed to be hundreds of bomb attacks on Berlin between 1940 and 1945.  Yet though some bombing had occurred over the preceding years, Berlin remained completely intact.  Farash, languishing in his cell, had started to rely on Berlin's destruction as a possible means of getting free of the cellar.  It wasn't happening.

Farash had in no way prepared for his first day, so he relied on the rote events of the two previous years, jotted into lesson plans, as his teaching script.  Students were students.  What worked on the junior class before would work on this group now, and the next, and the next.  A few unrulies would have to be shown the door here and there, but otherwise, it was as mid-August as mid-August would ever be.

He had completely forgotten to attend "Trainings Week," the in-service week before students arrived.  However, no one had called to check on him.  Well, he thought, they may have.  He could hear very little outside the black helmet and rarely answered his phone either way.  Amala would have told him had she gotten a call from the school, but she wasn't always home.

On the morning of the first class day, he descended from his classroom and down the main set of stairs into the cafeteria.  It was still early enough that only a few dozen of the student body had yet been dropped off by parents and buses.  At first, he saw students, getting their breakfast, chatting within their groups at the heavy fold-out tables.  Then, he noticed the redundancies.

Students were in line to receive their class schedules from counselors, lower administrators, and some teachers.  That was expected.  But had the district instituted a campaign for the wearing of uniforms during the Christmas break?  Certainly,
he
had not been informed.  And yet there they were.  The cafeteria was filled with students, the vast majority of which wore khaki pants or knee-high shorts, and brown long-sleeved shirts.  Their shoes looked like hiking shoes.  Darker vests held in their black ties, even those of the females, who had uniforms identical to those of the males, though cut more shapely.  The others, those very few not wearing uniforms, seemed to keep company together on the outskirts of the large eating room.  Apparently, like Farash, some students hadn't gotten the memo.  Farash nodded.  Buy-in would be needed from the students before they would all start to accept the new policy.  This would have to start with the semblance of optionality.  He had learned a few things from the Nazis.

It was first period.  The students were loudly retelling to each other the climactic and not-so-climactic events of their respective summers.   Once the bell rang, all fell attentive and completely silent.  This had startled Farash. 

“
I know that it is the first day of class, but it is my habit to plunge into history from the first minute.  That’s how important history is.  I hope you understand.”  He paused.  Silence.

“
But what I would really want to know is how did you all find out about the new policy on uniforms?  I didn't see any notices going out in May.” The students remained silent.  A few in the front row looked questioningly at the teacher and at each other.

“
Your uniforms.  Certainly, you didn’t all go out and join the Boy and Girl Scouts over the summer?” He grinned but received no like response.

“
The what?” a boy in the second row asked almost in a whisper.  There was brief murmur among the students.  A blond, female student from the back row stood up.  “Sir.  Our uniforms haven’t changed since last year. 
Wir haben die gleichen
. . .”  Her words trailed off.  The student sat back down out of what seemed like embarrassment.

Farash was perplexed.  The students seemed to be even more so.

Farash walked to the door and looked out into the hall.  He decided the students would be fine on their own for a few minutes—they certainly seemed especially docile this year.  From the hall, looking into one classroom, he viewed through the narrow window a male teacher lecturing.   He was tall, young, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, black tie.  He looked down at his now seemingly woefully inadequate combination of dark red, short-sleeved button-up shirt tucked into Khaki pants.  He was even wearing his black sneakers.

When he returned to his classroom, his students fell completely silent again.

Farash decided to wait until lunch to ask about changes in dress-code policies implemented over the summer.  He launched into his first-day World History lecture, beginning with the Sumerians.  The students, for the most part, took wild notes, seeming to document every word.  He was impressed though one student in the back seemed to doze off by the end of the period, pencil still in hand, seemingly attentive from a distance.  By the end of the period, he touched on the base-12 system of the Babylonians, emphasizing its influence even today, with our 12 months in a calendar year and 12-hour clock.  That was, until he glanced at the ten-hour clock above the chalkboard in the back of the room.

“
Aren’t there ten months in the year?” one boy in a front corner seat suggested as he slowly raised his hand.”  “The
lehrer
obviously refers to the calendars from the old days, right Herr Schreiber?” came the voice of a small girl in the row behind.

“
Herr Farash,” another corrected.  "He said so earlier.  Look, it's on the board."

“
No, Farash is his first name.  Don’t you listen?  He wants us to call him by his first name.”  Giggles came from the back row.  The bell rang and students flooded from the room with a new, smaller group filing in minutes later.

About fifteen minutes into fourth period, the classroom door opened.  “
Es tut mir leid, Herr Lehrer
.  My tire was low, but I thought nothing of it until . . .”  A rather bulky woman came in with a menial and apologetic look, closing the door behind her, dealing fitfully with the several handbags she had been carrying.

“
Oh, I almost ran off the road.  A kind field laborer helped me with the tire.  It was so frustrating trying to speak with the man . . .”  She tiptoed up to Farash as he had been writing samples of cuneiform on the board and explaining what they meant.  His manner was to speak while he wrote, never pausing when picking up the chalk or the eraser.  He didn’t seem to notice her there.  The woman stopped at the board, still fiddling with a bag which contained several paperback books and a newspaper.  She looked up at his face with a hushing sound.