Free Stormfuhrer by E. R. Everett

real.”
    “ Inmates. . . .  OK, Devices.  First, imagery. My ribs show through my loose skin and my bunk, filthy with lice, is only five feet long.  I work at the digging spot with nothing but the pathetic striped clothes.  The pants are loose and they just come to my calf.  They took my shoes away at the train platform and gave me some brown ones that don’t even look like shoes any more.  More like pieces of muddy beef jerky with strings.  My feet are always worse off than the rest of me, dried mud between my toes.  Like others, I tried wrapping them in whatever I could get, newspapers mostly.  The Germans have separate trash bins, but I quickly realized that the more generous of them—and one is actually generous—leave some of their trash in cans where some prisoners can get at it.  I almost starved once except for that can.
    “OK, Simile.  A few prisoners are like the dogs that some of the guards walk around with, wanting to bring you down to build themselves up.  They just want to please the guards—they have it pretty good and it makes me want to volunteer for their jobs, the ones that take away your humanity.”
    “ Very good, Pete,” Mr. Perry encouraged.
                       “Personification.  My sad feet.  Once they                     are gone, the rest will very quickly follow.
    “ There is a guard.  Herr Spiegel.  The guards just call him Spiegel.  He sometimes inspects the area where we work and even dropped a part of his sandwich by a prisoner once, the prisoner in the worst shape who was about to die.  He always tried to volunteer for stone-cutting or carrying or setting it, but he couldn’t even lift his own head.  Because if you can’t work, you are taken behind the ovens and shot in the back of the neck and then you fall into one of the pits that I help dig.  I’ve seen it many times.   They don’t even kill you and drag you--they walk you to your grave and shoot you there.   Less work that way.
    “ Spiegel has the fewer medals and patches than most of the other guards I’ve seen. 
    “ Metaphor.  He doesn’t bark orders like the others.  Just patrols, mainly the workers’ areas.  Once, he accidentally dropped his wallet beside a rock that I was chopping at with a broken spade.   It fell open and a picture of his family showed.  There was a blonde woman in the picture, overweight, holding two babies.  I picked up the wallet and handed it to him.  He put it in his front pocket, nodded to me, and walked on.”  At this point Pete lifted his fleshy chin off his chest and looked at his audience for the first time.
    “A nod?  What am I?  Just a Polish Jew.  A nothing.  And here is a member of the great Master Race, no, one of its inner circle, nodding to me as if I were more than a pigeon crapping on his favorite car.  Spiegel became my favorite Nazi from that point on.  He acknowledged that I have a self, that I am not a burden, an animal to be kicked out of the way because it doesn't serve a purpose, or a bunch of physical characteristics that even some of the Germans themselves have.  He also shows me that not all Germans regard us as non-human.  But if they let on, they’d be in here with us, so they play along, kicking, yelling.  The rest just beat us for fun.  You can tell the difference.  I’m not sure, but I think he smiled when he handed me the wallet.”
    The boy returned to his seat in the front-row beside a red-headed girl with braces.  The speech over and no one clapped.  No one moved or said anything.  Then the clapping began in the middle rows and spread to other students.  Finally, the whole room was all howls, whistling, and clapping.  Pete turned to the girl with the braces, looking past her, grinning.  “I told you it sucked.”
    A sizable jock wearing a gray t-shirt started to stand up in the back row, staring fixedly at Pete, thought better of it, and then sat down again, working his