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Franz and Abraham were born identical twins in 1917, and remained so their entire lives.
Their mother, a destitute girl asea amongst the flotsam of Berlin, had unlocked herself and allowed the wolves in. They took what they wanted and left her with more than she thought possible to bear, but bore and birth the twins, she did.
Then subtracted herself from the human equation.
Separated at birth, the adopted twins gave way to nurture not nature ignorant of each other.
In 1933, Germany coughed up a hairball: a man of despicable disposition became Chancellor. The world looked away. Forgave such an egregious faux pas. Ignored his convulsive hacking and hectoring.
As Germany succumbed to their tyrant, Franz and Abraham grew to be strapping young men never realizing when they looked in the mirror, they were looking at their brother.
Franz grew up Catholic and became a Nazi. Abraham grew up Jewish and became an anathema.
Germany, swept along by mass hysteria, followed their brutal dictator into the depths of hell, and introduced that fiery dominion to the rest of Europe.
Jews and other biological aberrations served as firewood for their conflagration.
Abraham and his family fled to Poland to escape the persecutions. They hid in a cellar on an isolated farm. There among the potatoes and cockroaches they languished. Bitter cold made their bones ache. Constant fear gnawed at their sanity.
Abraham made a chess set of paper and spit for his daughter. They played in silence and in dim daylight. She learned check before they were discovered. And checkmate ever after.
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Franz, spellbound by the lunacy of the dictator’s speech, joined the army and toiled away at Auschwitz supervising the dragging of naked bodies from gas chambers or the sweeping out crematoriums of human debris.
Following orders.
Day after day, Franz labored—overseeing the poisoning and cooking of hundreds and thousands of men, women and children with diligence of a factory worker affixing exhaust pipes to Volkswagens.
It was a job that needed doing. So he was told. So he willed himself to believe.
For a lie repeated enough times becomes the truth. And when a lie becomes truth, it frees folks to be their best monsters. Numbs them to their malevolence.
After hours, Franz listened to Beethoven while tending flowers that bloomed in the garden he cultivated outside his front door.
He knelt amongst the edelweiss, asters and snowdrops as a penitent paying homage to the sublimity of being. Taking his fertilizer where he will. And comfort where he could.
The perfume and poetry of roses masked the depravations of the abattoir where he worked.
Following orders.
In Poland, Abraham and his family were freed from their cellar prison by Nazi moles and marched to the nearest train depot as if livestock to the slaughterhouse where, unbeknown to him, his brother participated in genocide. Winter had fallen on the ravaged landscape like an oppressive weight. Silent snow benumbed even the possibility of speech.
No matter. Their circumstances went beyond language. Beyond recitation. Beyond, even, metaphor.
One sparkling spring morning, daffodils in full flower, Franz, having seen enough breasts and pubises and circumcised shvantzes to last several lifetimes was stunned when he happened upon a body being dragged from Chamber 1 and saw himself.
Stupefied, he stepped back from his doppelganger and tripped over his own booted feet onto his back. Fear and horror etched his face. How could it be? Who was this imposter? What was he, Franz, doing amongst the so many dead?
Daring a second look, Franz saw, indeed, his murdered self staring back at him. Accusatory and all too familiar. A spectral vision from hell.
Panic absorbed him. Terror blasted away the shield of his Nazi dogma. The fog of his repugnant rationalizations cleared, and the nightmare sprawled out before Franz became immediately real and untenable. The warm bodies accompanying his mirror image, a mute chorus of anguish that ravaged his awakened consciousness.
Thoroughly repelled, Franz lurched to his feet and surveyed the totality of the camp’s business—registered the collective depravity and spun about and sprinted across the parade grounds chased by his specter. He hit the barbed and meters tall fence in full stride, and scrambled up the barrier ignoring the inches deep lacerations on his hands and face and legs and arms. At the top, he tore free his clothing and leaped to the denuded ground.
Guards hesitated—one of their own escaping? In their hesitation, Franz stumbled clear of no-man’s-land afire with pain, traumatized by terror and thrashed his way through the forest.
Miles later—lungs gasping, legs aching, mind in tatters—Franz tumbled to the ground in a pretty glade where leaves jitterbugged with sunlight. A rare haven in the god-forsaken world.
Franz curled up into a fetal position and wept. A coarse, cacophonous wretched howling. This retching up of his utter despair until empty and hollowed out he lost consciousness.
Three days later, Franz rose desolate and without a past.
He made his way to Switzerland where he worked as a gardener and strove to do good at every opportunity. A solitary man beloved by his community, he lived to celebrate his 80th birthday.
The local newspaper published an article in his regard. Celebrating Franz’s age and his humanity—accompanied by a photo of his younger self.
Born in Germany it read, and the year, but lived ever after in Switzerland—as far as he could remember. Would remember.
Other dailies reprinted the article hither and yon throughout Europe.
Abraham’s granddaughter—Franz’s unknown grandniece—saw the piece and wrote to Franz, including in her correspondence the place of Abraham’s birth – Berlin; the year – 1917; and birthday – May 23rd. Also, in the envelope, Abraham’s photo as a youth.
His twin.
Both the letter and the photograph were found at Franz’s feet as he hung, just inches off the floor, from an exposed beam in his small and neatly appointed house.
It seemed as if he had seen a ghost.