Das Zweite Kapitel
Josef Baginski spent the rest of the day at the furniture shop, pacing the front of his store by the window. He furrowed his brow, remembering his sternness with Johanna, but she knew better than to be sneaking around. At least, that’s what he had tried to teach her before. Even worse, Josef was afraid he might have scared her — that the fear that had been icing his veins for weeks now had spilled over and the frost of it had gripped his daughter now, too. Either way, it pained him to see her cry like that. He wanted to leave, at least for a moment or two, just to see if she would forgive him. Ester, Johanna’s mother, refused.
“She’ll be fine, Josef. She’s cried many times. She’s a child, dear.”
Josef stood silently by the window with his back to his wife. She hadn’t known about the conversation Johanna had overheard. Not wanting to frighten both of the women in his life, he chose to keep quiet about it. Naturally, Ester assumed Johanna was being childish, as usual.
“This time’s different,” Josef said. “You should have seen her face. It was — She was– ” He trailed off. He’d never seen Johanna look at him in such a way, and he’d certainly never talked to her the way he had ever before. He wasn’t sure he could properly describe his feeling to his wife, even if he was able to find the right words.
Ester waved him off. “When we close up, you’ll see. She’ll forget it ever happened. She‘ll come running down the steps and jump up on you like usual. ‘Daddy, Daddy,’ she’ll say, ‘guess what I did today?’, and then you will say, ‘tell me all about it, sweetheart’, and that will be that.” She sighed then, putting down the needle she was working with and stared up to the ceiling. “Josef, you made me forget what I was doing.”
Josef looked at his shoes and gripped the window frame, trying not to yell out to his wife — trying not to scream at her what Mr. Kaminski could have been so-very-right about all along. Instead he pulled the latch on the frame and lifted the window. The cool August evening breeze flitted in, cooling his steaming forehead.
Ester walked backed with her mannequin and needles into the sewing room sighing and scuffing her worn shoes at the absence of Josef‘s response. The lacey white and gray fabrics on the fitting mannequins swooned and danced with the breeze as if ghosts of the room, folding and following her swift retreat. Josef looked back in time to see them fall still again and a shudder made his blood run cold.
***
In the truck that had stolen her, Johanna’s cries of pain and terror faded into quiet sobs despite the soldiers vile laughing, and she eventually fell asleep, still curled up on the floor of the blackened cab.
She dreamt of a time when her father had held her, and her mother had sung a beautiful song. The house was filled with the last lights of dusk casting long shadows throughout the room. They flickered and faded in and out and brighter and darker as if responding to the pitches of her mothers voice. She had always had a beautiful voice. The shadows swirled around the room in front of a Johanna’s eyes, and she laughed and clapped her little hands.
As the song went on, her father’s grip seemed to loosen and she was jostled around his lap. Her mother’s song was suddenly being flooded with what sounded like banging coming from outside, and the room began to darken. Those long, dancing shadows slithered down the walls, as if slinking away from something and Johanna looked up to find reassurance in her father’s eyes. Fear and shame flooded her brain as she looked upon her father‘s face. It was ice cold again, but this time smiling.
It wasn’t his face at all anymore. It was changing. His cheeks, once round and hairy were now sinking in and smoothing out. Her father’s jawbone widened and his once beautiful brown eyes drowned in a splash of empty blue. His brown locks uncurled and snaked their way up his head before they faded to a sickening blonde. He became the tall man, eyes chin and all. His smile was even bigger than before, and he was whispering something. Louder, always louder the whisper rose and rose until he was screaming at her. “Kinder! Kinder! Aufwachen!”
Johanna opened her eyes, and after a short moment of trying to make sense of the split in time and space, realized she had been dreaming. Nevertheless, that man’s face — the man in black — was still in front of her, and him and his two friends were laughing at her screams.
***
“Did you lock the back?” Josef called to his wife.
He was again pacing around his shop, faster than before, desperate to get home to his daughter. There was something more to it than the tears she had shed. With all the whispers lately, there was a sense of doom in the air — something Josef couldn’t just discount to rumor, as troublesome as it was. It was a sense, no, a knowledge — fatherly or not, about Johanna or not — that something was wrong.
“Ester!” he yelled. “The back?!”
“Yes, Josef. I didn’t forget,” she said, shuffling into the room. She stopped when she saw his face, his eyes wide and almost in tears.
“Oh, Josef,” she said. “You aren’t still worried are you?”
“Get your coat, Ester. We have to go.”
“All right, all right,” she said. “But you’ll see. Johanna is fine. I was going to stop and make the deposit, but if it’s that important to you Josef, we can do it in the morning.”
“Morning. Coat.” He could feel fire behind his eyes as they bore into his wife.
Ester let loose another sigh, the kind that Josef was beginning to hate. He watched her meander over to the rack, and grab the coat that he had made for her a year before, all the while cracking his knuckles behind his back.
He knew that Johanna, because she was his daughter — a miniaturized version of himself — would not be there to greet him, all smiles and joy as his wife suggested. Ester was a good mother, but she didn’t have much of the bond that Joseph and Johanna had had. And she didn‘t know much of the world beyond the shop at all. It never interested her one bit, and all the recent talk of war and murder, Ester brushed it away as if what would be would simply be. If anything has happened, he thought. Anything at all…
“I swear — ” he said, pulling open the front door and turning around the “Open” sign.
Ester walked through behind him and locked the door. Josef grabbed her hand and begin walking toward their street, his pace quickening with each step, trying to pull along his dragging wife.
“Josef!” Ester said, breaking his grip and deflecting his urgency. “She’s fine.”
***
As her eyes adjusted to new light, Johanna remembered where she was and who was in front of her. It was him, all right. The man that took her and put her in the decrepit pit that was the darkened cab. The man that stole her from her family, too. He was holding open those two big doors, and glaring at her with eyes that burned, flamed with hate, but Johanna stared right back, angry about being torn from the few moments of peacefulness she was able to summon on that cursed night.
The man in black, the one with the decorations on his chest, smiled again, almost scoffing at her attempt at being brave. He glanced up to the two soldiers who accompanied him for a brief moment, and then his gaze fixed on Johanna once more. He raised his eyebrows and began speaking something Johanna couldn’t understand, but she could tell from the voice and the failed attempts of concealing a laugh that he was being sarcastic. She looked away, wrinkled her forehead and crossed her arms, for some reason feeling shame, but not quite understanding why, and definitely not wanting to show it.
“Aww, Armer Junge,” he said pouting his lips and down turning his brows. It was a joke. Another sarcastic attempt at comfort, only to be changed again into hate. He held out his hand to her and his face tightened again, eyes burning into hers. The man in black clenched his teeth.
“Steh Auf, Jude.”
“Stay off?” Johanna replied. “I’m not on anything, how can I sta–”
“Aufstehen!” he yelled, grabbing her coat and ripping her off of the floor of the cab.
Johanna felt the tears begin to come to the swollen corners of her eyes, such a familiar feeling now, she didn’t know how she had any tears left to give, and as much as she tried to stop it, there in the clutches of this monster once again, her eyelids overflowed. At this, she was dropped to the ground in disgust, landing on the dirt and gravel, eye level with those big black boots. She scurried away, before he could do anything, in fear that he may lash out and kick at her. Johanna rested with her back against the frame of the cab, cowering behind her shielding arms. The man in black wiped his hands on the front of his tunic, disgusted.
The night air was cool and clear, and far above them the stars twinkled without judgment, twinkling over everything, oblivious to whatever horror lay below them throughout the world. They had parked on some dirt pass, high up in the hills and far away from any foreign light of any city or village nearby, if one had even been nearby. There was nothing. Just a lone dirt road, hidden by the hill’s edges, dead-ending into the face of the looming cliff that over looked her and her captors. At that moment, Johanna had never felt so far away from anything before.
She hugged her knees and looked away from the three men, the men that stole her away. She missed her dad and her mom and didn’t understand how she had gotten here–with these kinds of people. She cried for her family. She cried for her neighborhood. She cried because she knew that if what Mr. Kaminski said was true, and these were those same people he was talking about, the worst was yet to come; not just for her, but for every single person she knew.
The Blank Page 
Leave a comment