Bury My Secrets - Prologue

First a little background on my writing history is needed. I count this as the first book I've ever written. In 2007 I wrote out a story on notebook paper that I called "Forgiveness" and I was so proud when it came to fifty pages. But if you dwindled down my handwriting closer to the size of most people's handwriting, and you took out all the sentances and words scribbled out in pen, it would probably total more like 30 pages.

Then in 2008 I wrote on the computer a story entitled "God's Work" and it came out to 60 pages. I was ecstatic. As soon as that was completed, I started this story. It was originally called "Hidden Secrets," and the first draft was 112 pages. This story has a background of its own, for I am only responsible of writing about a third of it. Elizabeth and Victoria Brook are responsible for the other two thirds. It is a version of a "house game" we once played, right before I left for Kenya. All three of us were the main characters. As soon as we were done playing this house game, I had vowed that I would write it down - all of it. I kept my vow.

When I finished Hidden Secrets, I sent it to Elizabeth, Victoria, and Skyeler Syrek. It was an instant hit. We would discuss it in great lengths in our emails, and even sign off our letters as the name of the character we played in the story. (I'm a guy named "Heinrich", Victoria's a girl named "Victoria", and Elizabeth's a girl named "Sarah". These characters are also known as "the General", "Stickyfingers", and "Elizabeth" for reasons that will be explained later in the book.)

Well, that was all great and grand for about two years. After that, I realized how bad my history was, how bad my plot was, how bad my character development was, and how bad my writing style in general was. I decided Hidden Secrets needed some editing - no, I decided it needed re-writing. Badly. And thus I have begun. I have re-entitled it "Bury My Secrets" and this is my second attempt to the prologue; so far I am rather proud of it. This may take a while, but I hope to publish chapters as I go. Let me know if you enjoyed this first part.



Warsaw Ghetto, Poland
Late July, 1943

I, DIEDRICK ZOOK, DID THIS.

It didn't sit well in his gut.

Zook looked down into all the faces of the tiny, half-starved children sitting on the ground before him. They were all looking up at him, quiet, waiting to see what he would do, and the silence was ringing in his ears at just the right pitch that gave him an eerie feeling. He couldn't make himself ignore it.

I did this.

He turned his face away from the older Jewish woman. She lay dead on the floor in a pool of blood, bullet holes running through her head. He gave a wave of his hand. "Take her away," he muttered to his soldiers.

They obeyed, hauling the body out by the arms. The head fell on the limp neck and the top of it dragged and scraped up against the ground. It left blood and pieces of dark, curly hair caught on the little niches in the rough cement floor.

He closed his eyes. I'm going to be sick.

Some of the children were crying now. One girl who looked to be about five years old was crying particularly loud. Zook wondered how well the little girl knew the woman he'd just given the command to shoot and kill. Maybe they were good friends. Maybe they were related. Maybe it was her mother.

One of the guards yelled at the children to shut up or he'd shoot them all. He yelled it in German, and Zook wasn't sure how well the little ones understood him. But he knew the young woman standing in the back corner of the crowded room heard and understood. Her face hardened. The crying little girl, her long hair tied up with a piece of string, jumped up and ran to the young woman, who took the girl in her arms. She held her, rocking her back and forth, pressing the girl's face into her skirt, and doing her best to hush her cries.

Zook made eye contact with the young woman. At second glance he decided she couldn't be a day over sixteen, but she'd obviously been helping with the teaching in this illegal underground Jewish school. She glared at him instead of lowering her eyes, and his eyebrows arched. This one meant trouble. She would continue to oppose - he could see the fire in her eyes.

"Take her," he said to his soldiers, nodding his head in the direction of the teenager. Two of them moved to obey his command, and dragged her away by the arms. The girl clung to the teenager's skirt, screaming. A third soldier ripped her hands away and practically tossed her aside like a little rag doll. She hit the floor, still crying.

Zook gestured towwards the door and the group of soldiers that had broken into the underground school with him started to filter out of the door and back up into the weak sunlight. It was July, the warmest month in Poland, and temperatures weren't rising above sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit this year. They walked out to one of the main streets, where soldiers were gathering together a bunch of Jews to load into the waiting freight train.

Zook felt like he was going to be sick again. He knew where those Jews were headed.

He didn't even know why they were here. They were supposed to stop the transport of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto months ago.

His soldiers dispersed; he approached the ones still holding the teenager, and gave them orders to let the girl go before she was picked up as one of the chosen.

They let her go with a rough shove. She fell to the ground, but didn't cry out. She looked up and glared at them and one of the soldiers leaned down and gave her a solid slap on the face with the back of his hand. Zook grimaced and watched her cheek swell up purple and blue.

"Zook!"

He looked up to see the leader, a tall, large muscled, big-boned, blue-eyed, and blond-haired man, beckoning him over to his side. The man was already talking by the time Zook was six feet away from him. "I want to see how many we can pack into each car," he said, surveying the already large group of frightened, rigid Jews standing in the middle of the street. "The more we can transport over to Treblinka, the better."

Zook nodded as Wilhelm continued to talk.

"And I want to make sure - hallo, what's this?"

Zook snapped his head up from where he had been staring at the road, and watched his leader stride over to intercept a little boy about five years old running across the street with abandon. The leader's huge hand engulfed the starving boy's bony arm, and lifted him upa s if he weighed nothing. "You padded a little well there, boy?" the leader said loudly in German, shaking the child in front of his face.

He found among the boy's clothes bundles of bread and some potatoes. Zook swallowed. The boy was just one of the hundreds that were smuggling food across the ghetto to keep their families alive. The leader took the potatoes and threw them against the pavement with all the strength in his mighty arm. They splattered on the road, wasted. Next he stomped on the bread, treading it into the ground. All the while the boy he held up high in the air never made a sound.

"Something wrong with the food we provide, huh, Jewish boy?" the leader demanded, shaking him. "Is there something wrong with it?"

The boy shook his head, tears beginning to stream down his cheeks.

"However it no longer matters." He dropped the boy on the ground. "Food now is the least of your concerns." He nodded at a nearby soldier and gave him the command. "Take care of this one. And any others that you catch for that matter - I'm sick of dealing with them."

The soldier nodded and prepared to shoot.

There was a blood-curdling, ear-ringing, high-pitched scream, and the same girl that Zook had just told his men to set free threw herself at Wilhelm. "No, stop!" she cried in Polish, then she changed to broken up German with a thick accent. "Please, no!"

Her unrestrained emotion and rebellion took Zook by surprise. It made him take a second look, and he could easily see the similarities of face between the teenage girl and the little boy. No doubt Wilhelm saw it too. Siblings, Zook concluded.

"Please," she begged hysterically, falling to her knees in front of the German. "Please I beg of you! Take me away! Take my life. Do whatever you want with me. Only let him live!"

"You chose the wrong person to have sympathize with you, girl," Zook muttered under his breath. He watched his friend and Gestapo leader's face as it curled up into what could almost be mistaken for a smile - a cruel one.

"What's your address number?" Wilhelm asked her.

She didn't want to give it. Zook watched her fight with the decision. The soldier - who had let the gun drop - raised it once more and aimed at her brother again. She stiffened.

Wilhelm rubbed his forehead with his fingers as if he were extremely stressed. "Really, Jew?" He sighed, "I am so sick of playing games. Are you all really so dense that you can't see if you cooperate with us it will make your lives so much easier? Now I don't want to have to ask again. What is your address number?"

She blurted out her street and house number, but Zook did not breathe a sigh of relief. He caught that distinct nod that was communicated from Wilhelm to the soldier. And he felt sick.

The soldier put down his gun. The little boy bolted and the girl's shoulders sagged with relief. Just as the boy as about to turn the corner, Wilhelm jerked the gun from the soldier, aimed, and shot one single shot. The boy was a lifeless body before it even hit the street. It all happened so fast it even took Zook a second to register it, and he had seen it coming.

The teenage girl screamed again and threw herself at Wilhelm, pounding him with her fists, still screaming at him like a banshee. It was more than useless. Wilhelm was the biggest, strongest, and most muscled guy around. The girl was almost half-starved herself, short, and small statured. Zook waited for Wilhelm's anger to flare, but instead the man just laughed. He wrapped one arm around her upper body and pinned her arms to her sides as he gestured to his men. "You heard the house number. Go take care of her parents, and anyone else you find." Four Gestapo soldiers all with guns ran off in the direction of the house.

"No, no, no!" she cried alternately in Polish and German. "Please, no!"

He tossed her aside to another soldier. "Load her up with the others."

Zook closed his eyes.

"I hate you!" the girl screamed in German. She swore several times in Polish. "I hate all of you! May God curse you all!"

Wilhelm just laughed at her. "You still dare to mention the name of God, Jewess? He abandoned you long ago. Zook, load them into the train."

Zook turned and directed his men, the girl's screams still ringing through the air. They herded the Jews like cattle through the Warsaw Ghetto gate. There were hundreds of them.

They would all be dead by morning.



Treblinka Extermination Camp

Zook stood next to Wilhelm on the porch of the fake railway station as the soldiers opened the groaning, creaking sliding doors to all the freight train cars. He looked up at the sign hanging above him, painted white with big, black letters: Treblinka.

Soldiers started pulling stunned, weak, and confused prisoners from the cars, and out onto the platform. Zook hadn't been here at Treblinka in a year, and he could tell that the commandant was someone new. Back when he was here in 1942, with Irmfried Eberl as commandant, he could smell the death camp several kilometers away. Dead, rotting bodies were always strewn about the railway tracks and other buildings. Eberl had been ousted on account of lack of efficiency in running the camp in September of last year.

Wilhelm voiced Zook's thoughts. "I'm glad Stangl tries to keep things a bit more clean around here," he muttered uner his breath. "Makes things a bit more...civilized. Never did like that Dr. Eberl. The man had no idea what he was doing."

As if Wilhelm was an expert.

Zook found himself looking for the teenage girl he'd been forced to throw into one of the freight train cars filled with Jewish men. As the cars emptied, the blue squad Jews from the camp entered into them and pulled out the bodies of those who had preferred to kill themselves some way or another over dying at the hand of the Nazis. The bodies were taken to be burned in the pits along with all the others. The buckets of waste were also thrown out.

Then Zook caught sight of her. She'd thrown up all over herself, and it had stained her clothes and clumped in her hair. She was pushed and shoved along with all the others past the platform and toward the barracks. This was where they would all be stripped and their belongings taken before being pushed up the trail naked and into the gas chambers. The women would have their hair shaven off. Wilhelm was busy talking with someone else, most likely Stangl, and Zook bolted off the railway station porch. He pushed through the soldiers, yelling at them to move out of his way, and they obeyed. He pointed to the girl and four others that looked stronger and healthier than the others and commanded that they stay and work in the camp as the sondorkommandos.

"Put her in the red squad," he said, pointing to the teenage girl. "Put the rest in Totenjuden." He wasn't sure if he was just being more cruel. Should he just let the girl be gassed today and die? End her misery? Or should he extend her life and see how well she survived? He'd tried to do what he could - he'd put her in the group that was in charge of undressing the prisoners and taking their belongings. It was better than the Totenjuden, or "Jews of Death" who were responsible for taking the gassed bodies from the gas chambers and burning them in the pits. They also had the horrendous job of taking any leftover recognizable parts out of the burning pits and grinding them into pieces.

The girl's eyes met his for a brief second, and he saw within them his daughter back in Germany whom he had yet to meet. She was coming up on her fourth birthday this November. He only knew what she looked like through pictures and his wife's description: "She looks just like you - except your nose is bigger."

This teenage Jewish girl was someone's daughter.

Don't mistake my decision for compassion, he wanted to say to the Jewish girl. You'll be wishing you were dead by nightfall.