Five Ways Ludwig Montag Killed Daniel Abrahmowicz (And One Way He Saved Him)
anonymous
April 7 2009, 20:13:19 UTC
1
Going back to Ludwig’s house (not home, not anymore, and he hadn’t had his own home in a long, long time) had become increasingly uncomfortable. Daniel kept finding excuses to work late at the shop (easy enough, with business as bad it was) and then fall asleep slumped over his cramped, messy desk, dreaming of the twenties, of picnics and messy kisses and Ludwig’s sharp blue eyes electrifying every time they came up with something daring and new for the Berlin art scene, and of shivering next to him while shells thundered around the trenches, and of canaries that wouldn’t sing and long ledgers in which every line read, Jude.
He woke up to the sound of a brick shattering the window.
Ludwig looked different, in the dim light and civilian clothes, with his hair unkempt. Hooligans arrayed behind him, most of them with sledgehammers.
Ludwig carried an axe.
He grinned, with a loose, angry-wolf-unleashed sort of thrill, and started hacking apart the shelves, while the merchandise fell and crashed around him.
“Stop!” Daniel shouted, furious and less confused than he wanted to be. “No! You can’t - Get out of my shop.”
The pistol from the desk drawer was in his hands, and he didn’t care if it was stupid, because he was fucking done with Ludwig and his fucking street thugs thinking they could bully him and break in and do whatever the h-
One shot grazed Ludwig’s shoulder. Two missed. Five punched into Daniel’s body and three more took his face off.
2
Daniel’s hands stung fiercely, salt from his sweat trickling maddeningly into the torn-open blisters wreathing his fingers and palms. He flexed them briefly, aching for a pause.
A gun butt smacked the side of his head from above.
“Keep working, you lazy rat,” Ludwig growled. Daniel took a shuddering breath and wrapped his hands around the rough shovel handle yet again. He plunged the blade into the earth, digging himself deeper and deeper into the tough, chthonic coolness of the dirt, his body aching with the unaccustomed effort and his neck tingling as Ludwig’s shadow fell across his back.
By nightfall his bones lay jumbled with a score of his fellows in their dark soil cradle.
Five Ways Ludwig Montag Killed Daniel Abrahmowicz (And One Way He Saved Him)
anonymous
April 7 2009, 20:18:03 UTC
3
The bowl.
Daniel can’t think about anything, anymore, except the bowl.
It is all he has in the world. The filthy rags on his back, and the bowl.
Without the bowl he can’t get even the spoiled pittance of food Ludwig allots him.
He struggles to hold himself still through the interminable wait of the count, no matter how badly his limbs want to shake. He stares ahead at grey sky, unaffected by cold, sullen sun, unwilling to peak over the horizon so early.
Finally count ends, and his knuckles are huge knobs along the emaciated wires of his fingers as he clutches the bowl and holds it out. Ludwig watches him in disdain and distaste as he measures out most of a ladleful of thin soup, and Daniel gulps it eagerly down, long since ignoring any urge to gag.
It doesn’t help. He licks every remnant of the broth out of the battered bowl, lapping up no small portion of dirt and dirtier things besides, but it doesn’t help.
The knot in his stomach feel as heavy as ever, consuming him, feels like twisted metal and melted glass and tight cords of leather with nothing inside the unravelable tangle of them. He dreams of thin, undercooked slices of potato, of a slice of bread infested with vermin, of an extra spoonful of gruel. There’s nothing except the bowl, nothing except the next paltry gift Ludwig dumps into it, nothing except two gulps never mind his tongue and it’s gone and then there is nothing except the empty bowl and work and waiting again.
The morning that Daniel doesn’t wake up, his ribs are grotesque, leaping from his frail body, barely restrained by the aged paper wrapping of his skin, and the Sonderkommandos break three brittle fingers trying to pry his bowl out of his stiff, gnarled grip.
Five Ways Ludwig Montag Killed Daniel Abrahmowicz (And One Way He Saved Him)
anonymous
April 7 2009, 20:19:53 UTC
4
They sleep six to each bare wooden bunk, stacked three high in the crowded barracks, and Daniel is still cold, so cold. Ivan is used to the cold, and offers to take the end. Daniel gratefully curls up against his front, with another prisoner pressed against his back, surrounded by bony, dirty bodies crammed together under the fraying blanket while the wind howls like through the cracks in the slatted walls like all the wailing mothers they haven’t heard recently, and Daniel is terribly cold.
He trudges through the snow, carrying rocks that feel like ice back and forth, trying to keep his sleeves between his blue-tinged hands and the cold stone, but the ubiquitous snow melts beside his body and soon his sleeves are crusted with ice in truth. His shoes ice-spiked too, the clear cold glass stained yellow and red where the shoes pinch and tear him. It’s a relief, actually: they don’t hurt so much, anymore.
Daniel is getting friendly with death. He’s a kind old fellow, really. Always there. He brushes his fingers along the gaunt faces of Daniel’s companions and then they don’t scream anymore, don’t soil themselves with dysentery, don’t strain to fetch another granite block from where they hauled it yesterday. He can see death in his brothers’ eyes, in his friends’ limp necks, lolling, when the Ludwig (strangely incongruous in his stripes and green triangle, kapo’s nightstick blunt and ominous at his side) smacks them, trying to rouse them in the morning. Daniel feels death, his gentleness in the still calm of their bodies when the Ludwig spits in exasperation, and tells him to haul their corpses out of the barracks for count.
Daniel smiles as death pets at his bones, deep, empty numbness spreading through him, and for the first time he can remember (what can he remember?) he doesn’t hurt, he doesn’t mourn, he isn’t cold.
He hopes, briefly, as he slips into the tender, mindless, bodiless white and blue quiet, that the others on his bunk dump his frozen shell on the floor when they realize. He wouldn’t want to cause them any more cold.
Five Ways Ludwig Montag Killed Daniel Abrahmowicz (And One Way He Saved Him)
anonymous
April 7 2009, 20:28:35 UTC
5
Daniel shivers, more from nervousness than cold, as they mull about on the platform, simply glad to taste fresh air after the hours jostling together in the stink of the cattle car. He pulls his coat tighter around him. He spies Ludwig, crisp and immaculate in his Schutzstaffel black.
“All right!” Ludwig barks, tapping his boot impatiently. "Line up in an orderly fashion and proceed in the direction indicated.
“You, left. Left. Right. Left. Right. To the right.”
Daniel shifts from foot to foot. Resettlement. He doesn’t like it. If Ludwig wants him to go, he’ll go (would go, tried to go, but no one would take him in, and it’s not unexpected, except it is, because he thought someone would -) but he doesn’t like Ludwig taking control of it. He doesn’t even know when he’s going to get his luggage back. He brushes his thumb over the tefellin jammed in his pocket and calms a little. God will make a way, however terrible it gets, he reminds himself.
Still, days like this, he misses the reconquista.
Daniel reaches the front of the line and gazes into Ludwig’s cold eyes. He faces them squarely, standing strait, trying to say
I lived with you for decades. Centuries. It hasn’t been perfect but it’s been good, sometimes, hasn’t it? You haven’t lied to me, you won’t hurt them. Not too much. Will you?
without saying a thing. Ludwig’s eyes flash, whether in answer (or what answer) or merely recognition, Daniel can’t tell.
“You go left,” Ludwig tells him, firmly. More emphatically than the others. Daniel nods, throat tight. He’s been sending the children left. This is good. This is - he’ll be able to take care of them. Ludwig will let him do that, at least. He follows the line and the instructions of another officer into a vast room lined with showerheads, fumbling and tripping over his feat as more and more people, many of them young or else very old, a few swaying women with bulging bellies, are pushed in behind him.
And then his ears are filled with hissing, like the buzz of a thousand locusts, and cries of worry that snap and break off in coughing, and the locusts are swarming his vision and it is all hissing, hissing, hissing.
He is loaded on the frames with the others and slid unceremoniously into the ovens. If the Sonderkommandos wonder at the selektion of what appears to be a strong young man (albeit faintly ill-looking) well within working age being reduced to ashes along with the usual bodies, they know better than to comment.
Five Ways Ludwig Montag Killed Daniel Abrahmowicz (And One Way He Saved Him)
anonymous
April 7 2009, 21:10:23 UTC
1
“Ludwig, what are you doing to me?” Daniel exclaimed as Ludwig dragged him by a painful grip on his elbow, the hastily prepared bag Ludwig had insisted he bring banging against his leg.
“Damnit, Daniel, don’t ask me that,” Ludwig snarled, tugging Daniel swiftly through alleyways in the middle of the night. “You won’t like the answer,” he muttered, half to himself.
“It’s past the curfew you said I had to -”
“Fuck the curfew,” Ludwig snapped, “And also, shut up unless you want to get caught.”
Daniel closed his mouth, grimacing in annoyance.
“Okay, here,” Ludwig said at last, when they reached a factory, locked up for the night. He pulled a key out his pocket and opened the heavy padlock, beckoning Daniel to follow him as he slipped through the gate.
“What is this place?” Daniel asked as Ludwig clicked the padlock shut behind them.
“It’s a munitions factory. Or, well, it used to manufacture buttons, but it’s going to make bullets soon. So it shouldn’t be raided.”
“Raided?”
“The lists are going up tomorrow. And your name will be on them, even if it wasn’t on the census.”
“What list? And how do you know?”
Ludwig glared at him, as they walked along empty assembly lines to a supply closet, where Ludwig opened a panel of the wall to reveal an extra space. “Okay, stupid question,” Daniel admitted. “What the hell is this?”
“It was a smuggler’s hoard for cocaine. Now it’s your new home.”
“Are you fucking serious? Your bosses are planning something so fucking horrible you have to hide me in a drug den smaller than a fucking prison cell?”
Ludwig’s lips twitched down in the way that Daniel knew, from long experience, meant that Ludwig wanted to tell him to stop kvetching, but for whatever reason, couldn’t bring himself to actually say so. Ludwig grabbed Daniel’s face in one gloved hand, forcing Daniel to meet his eyes, only inches away.
“Yes,” he answered flatly, low horror rolling in his voice. “They are. So be quiet, and stay put. I’ll find someone to feed you when I - when have to be away. I’m going to try and get you to Vash, but if I can’t -” he broke off, let go of Daniel’s cheek, and looked jerkily away.
“You’ll be. You be safe here. Until. Until I can find a way to get you somewhere else.”
Daniel swallowed, hard.
“Ludwig, if my people are suffering, I’ll suffer.”
“Stay put,” Ludwig repeated. “Just. Just survive. Even if it feels like you’re dying. Please. Please let me. I have to hide you.” Daniel reached out and traced a finger over the lines of anguish in Ludwig’s face. He felt, for a brief, mad moment, that if he applied just a little pressure, Ludwig would tear into pieces.
“Okay,” he promised. “I’ll. I won’t do anything. Reckless. I. Thank you for the place to hide.”
He brushed a kiss over Ludwig’s forehead, murmuring a Talmudic prayer.
Why are you so afraid for me? he didn’t ask, nor How can you live with all that loathing in your eyes?
Ludwig nodded, once, in acceptance, then closed the invisible door, sealing Daniel inside.
*
Notes: Krystallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was one of the largest anti-Jewish pogroms that took place during the reich. Shops were broken into and destroyed, and synagogues were set on fire. Thousands of Jews were arrested. One of the explicit aims of the pogrom was the disarmament of German Jews. Guns were confiscated and Jews who fought back wer killed.
About a quarter of the Jews killed by the Nazis never saw a concentration camp; they were shot by mobile death squads, usually after being forced to dig their own mass graves.
Many Jews in the camps died of starvation, dehydration, disease, or freezing. They were deliberately given insufficient rations to live on. Sonderkommandos were prisoners whose work detail was operating the cremation furnaces. Kapos were prisoners, usually ethnic Germans sent to the camps for criminal offenses (green triangle), whom guards chose as work captains and had authority over the other prisoners.
Re: Five Ways Ludwig Montag Killed Daniel Abrahmowicz (And One Way He Saved Him)
anonymous
April 7 2009, 22:19:43 UTC
OP here and speechless. I have to be honest, I really wasn't sure what to expect, but I think you handled it really well. Thank you for taking on this task and writing such an emotional piece. It really is interesting to have this fandom take on a more serious tone since history isn't ever (hardly ever) a nice thing. Again, thank you so much for writing this.
Re: Five Ways Ludwig Montag Killed Daniel Abrahmowicz (And One Way He Saved Him)
anonymous
April 8 2009, 08:52:42 UTC
The other, potential writer here. This was very, very powerful, anonwriter. That last scene was... just amazing. I would write more, but right now I just can't type anything coherent because this was so good. I'm really liking Daniel, too- and of course he's not a child, because Israel and the Jews have existed for around four thousand years, if my history teacher is correct.
Re: Five Ways Ludwig Montag Killed Daniel Abrahmowicz (And One Way He Saved Him)
anonymous
April 8 2009, 17:22:31 UTC
Thank you.
I thought about have a Jewish-diaspora-tan seperate from a young Israel-tan (especially since Israel today is multi-religious), like, with JDT handing off the baby/child to Ludwig to hide before going off to suffer in the camps, but that's another story. I really like having the continuous Israel from the first temple kingdom era all the way to the present, just to spite everyone and everything that's tried to break him, from Babylon and Rome right on down the line.
Four thousand? Woah. I thought it was more in the ballpark of 3000-2600, the point stands, I suppose.
Re: Five Ways Ludwig Montag Killed Daniel Abrahmowicz (And One Way He Saved Him)
anonymous
April 8 2009, 18:09:25 UTC
This is interesting!
I always though Israel-tan would have grown separate from the others, "discovered" by Ashkenazim-tan during the first push of Zionism in the 1890s.
But, writer!anon, I am really glad you wrote this -- your other story with Daniel is the only Israel I've ever liked, and I was worried that this story would turn into revisionist history stuff.
Re: Five Ways Ludwig Montag Killed Daniel Abrahmowicz (And One Way He Saved Him)
anonymous
April 8 2009, 18:22:24 UTC
My other story? <.< >.>
Unless I've been sleep-posting, this is the first thing I've done with Daniel.
Did you mean this one?
*is confused and needs coffee*
I loved zed-azrael's fic with Israel as a changed Ashkenazim.
I like exploring different ways -tans can be overlaid on the history/people, you know?
(Although I will never stop loving the image of Daniel slouching around Europe with a backpack, sleeping on different people's couches/attics/basements until they kick him out because he doesn't have a house. It's funny because it's tragic true.)
Re: Five Ways Ludwig Montag Killed Daniel Abrahmowicz (And One Way He Saved Him)
anonymous
April 10 2009, 14:31:58 UTC
Why have I ignored your reply for so long. Sorry >.<
Anyway- I really like this idea! I myself have been playing around with the idea of an Ancient Israel, sorta a father to Israel-tan the way there is an Ancient Greece to modern Greece, or a Mother Egypt to the modern one? Ah, but yes, the Jewish population has become multi-religious only after Israel's independence, or at least openly, so the JDT could have died during WWII, and the new Israel-tan would have replaced her/him. Also- I really like having the continuous Israel from the first temple kingdom era all the way to the present, just to spite everyone and everything that's tried to break him, from Babylon and Rome right on down the line.- I really like this idea too. Wow, so many possibilities!
Hmm, my history class didn't go too much in depth when it comes to Jewish history, so we were only told a little bit, and I don't exactly remember it detailed, and what I know of Jewish history is from around the 15th century to present time, so I'm not too good with that.
(wow, I never talk this much. At all, in fact. Sorry for anyone whose internets I killed D:)
Going back to Ludwig’s house (not home, not anymore, and he hadn’t had his own home in a long, long time) had become increasingly uncomfortable. Daniel kept finding excuses to work late at the shop (easy enough, with business as bad it was) and then fall asleep slumped over his cramped, messy desk, dreaming of the twenties, of picnics and messy kisses and Ludwig’s sharp blue eyes electrifying every time they came up with something daring and new for the Berlin art scene, and of shivering next to him while shells thundered around the trenches, and of canaries that wouldn’t sing and long ledgers in which every line read, Jude.
He woke up to the sound of a brick shattering the window.
Ludwig looked different, in the dim light and civilian clothes, with his hair unkempt. Hooligans arrayed behind him, most of them with sledgehammers.
Ludwig carried an axe.
He grinned, with a loose, angry-wolf-unleashed sort of thrill, and started hacking apart the shelves, while the merchandise fell and crashed around him.
“Stop!” Daniel shouted, furious and less confused than he wanted to be. “No! You can’t - Get out of my shop.”
The pistol from the desk drawer was in his hands, and he didn’t care if it was stupid, because he was fucking done with Ludwig and his fucking street thugs thinking they could bully him and break in and do whatever the h-
One shot grazed Ludwig’s shoulder. Two missed. Five punched into Daniel’s body and three more took his face off.
2
Daniel’s hands stung fiercely, salt from his sweat trickling maddeningly into the torn-open blisters wreathing his fingers and palms. He flexed them briefly, aching for a pause.
A gun butt smacked the side of his head from above.
“Keep working, you lazy rat,” Ludwig growled. Daniel took a shuddering breath and wrapped his hands around the rough shovel handle yet again. He plunged the blade into the earth, digging himself deeper and deeper into the tough, chthonic coolness of the dirt, his body aching with the unaccustomed effort and his neck tingling as Ludwig’s shadow fell across his back.
By nightfall his bones lay jumbled with a score of his fellows in their dark soil cradle.
Reply
The bowl.
Daniel can’t think about anything, anymore, except the bowl.
It is all he has in the world. The filthy rags on his back, and the bowl.
Without the bowl he can’t get even the spoiled pittance of food Ludwig allots him.
He struggles to hold himself still through the interminable wait of the count, no matter how badly his limbs want to shake. He stares ahead at grey sky, unaffected by cold, sullen sun, unwilling to peak over the horizon so early.
Finally count ends, and his knuckles are huge knobs along the emaciated wires of his fingers as he clutches the bowl and holds it out. Ludwig watches him in disdain and distaste as he measures out most of a ladleful of thin soup, and Daniel gulps it eagerly down, long since ignoring any urge to gag.
It doesn’t help. He licks every remnant of the broth out of the battered bowl, lapping up no small portion of dirt and dirtier things besides, but it doesn’t help.
The knot in his stomach feel as heavy as ever, consuming him, feels like twisted metal and melted glass and tight cords of leather with nothing inside the unravelable tangle of them. He dreams of thin, undercooked slices of potato, of a slice of bread infested with vermin, of an extra spoonful of gruel. There’s nothing except the bowl, nothing except the next paltry gift Ludwig dumps into it, nothing except two gulps never mind his tongue and it’s gone and then there is nothing except the empty bowl and work and waiting again.
The morning that Daniel doesn’t wake up, his ribs are grotesque, leaping from his frail body, barely restrained by the aged paper wrapping of his skin, and the Sonderkommandos break three brittle fingers trying to pry his bowl out of his stiff, gnarled grip.
Reply
They sleep six to each bare wooden bunk, stacked three high in the crowded barracks, and Daniel is still cold, so cold. Ivan is used to the cold, and offers to take the end. Daniel gratefully curls up against his front, with another prisoner pressed against his back, surrounded by bony, dirty bodies crammed together under the fraying blanket while the wind howls like through the cracks in the slatted walls like all the wailing mothers they haven’t heard recently, and Daniel is terribly cold.
He trudges through the snow, carrying rocks that feel like ice back and forth, trying to keep his sleeves between his blue-tinged hands and the cold stone, but the ubiquitous snow melts beside his body and soon his sleeves are crusted with ice in truth. His shoes ice-spiked too, the clear cold glass stained yellow and red where the shoes pinch and tear him. It’s a relief, actually: they don’t hurt so much, anymore.
Daniel is getting friendly with death. He’s a kind old fellow, really. Always there. He brushes his fingers along the gaunt faces of Daniel’s companions and then they don’t scream anymore, don’t soil themselves with dysentery, don’t strain to fetch another granite block from where they hauled it yesterday. He can see death in his brothers’ eyes, in his friends’ limp necks, lolling, when the Ludwig (strangely incongruous in his stripes and green triangle, kapo’s nightstick blunt and ominous at his side) smacks them, trying to rouse them in the morning. Daniel feels death, his gentleness in the still calm of their bodies when the Ludwig spits in exasperation, and tells him to haul their corpses out of the barracks for count.
Daniel smiles as death pets at his bones, deep, empty numbness spreading through him, and for the first time he can remember (what can he remember?) he doesn’t hurt, he doesn’t mourn, he isn’t cold.
He hopes, briefly, as he slips into the tender, mindless, bodiless white and blue quiet, that the others on his bunk dump his frozen shell on the floor when they realize. He wouldn’t want to cause them any more cold.
Reply
Daniel shivers, more from nervousness than cold, as they mull about on the platform, simply glad to taste fresh air after the hours jostling together in the stink of the cattle car. He pulls his coat tighter around him. He spies Ludwig, crisp and immaculate in his Schutzstaffel black.
“All right!” Ludwig barks, tapping his boot impatiently. "Line up in an orderly fashion and proceed in the direction indicated.
“You, left. Left. Right. Left. Right. To the right.”
Daniel shifts from foot to foot. Resettlement. He doesn’t like it. If Ludwig wants him to go, he’ll go (would go, tried to go, but no one would take him in, and it’s not unexpected, except it is, because he thought someone would -) but he doesn’t like Ludwig taking control of it. He doesn’t even know when he’s going to get his luggage back. He brushes his thumb over the tefellin jammed in his pocket and calms a little. God will make a way, however terrible it gets, he reminds himself.
Still, days like this, he misses the reconquista.
Daniel reaches the front of the line and gazes into Ludwig’s cold eyes. He faces them squarely, standing strait, trying to say
I lived with you for decades. Centuries. It hasn’t been perfect but it’s been good, sometimes, hasn’t it? You haven’t lied to me, you won’t hurt them. Not too much. Will you?
without saying a thing. Ludwig’s eyes flash, whether in answer (or what answer) or merely recognition, Daniel can’t tell.
“You go left,” Ludwig tells him, firmly. More emphatically than the others. Daniel nods, throat tight. He’s been sending the children left. This is good. This is - he’ll be able to take care of them. Ludwig will let him do that, at least. He follows the line and the instructions of another officer into a vast room lined with showerheads, fumbling and tripping over his feat as more and more people, many of them young or else very old, a few swaying women with bulging bellies, are pushed in behind him.
And then his ears are filled with hissing, like the buzz of a thousand locusts, and cries of worry that snap and break off in coughing, and the locusts are swarming his vision and it is all hissing, hissing, hissing.
He is loaded on the frames with the others and slid unceremoniously into the ovens. If the Sonderkommandos wonder at the selektion of what appears to be a strong young man (albeit faintly ill-looking) well within working age being reduced to ashes along with the usual bodies, they know better than to comment.
Reply
“Ludwig, what are you doing to me?” Daniel exclaimed as Ludwig dragged him by a painful grip on his elbow, the hastily prepared bag Ludwig had insisted he bring banging against his leg.
“Damnit, Daniel, don’t ask me that,” Ludwig snarled, tugging Daniel swiftly through alleyways in the middle of the night. “You won’t like the answer,” he muttered, half to himself.
“It’s past the curfew you said I had to -”
“Fuck the curfew,” Ludwig snapped, “And also, shut up unless you want to get caught.”
Daniel closed his mouth, grimacing in annoyance.
“Okay, here,” Ludwig said at last, when they reached a factory, locked up for the night. He pulled a key out his pocket and opened the heavy padlock, beckoning Daniel to follow him as he slipped through the gate.
“What is this place?” Daniel asked as Ludwig clicked the padlock shut behind them.
“It’s a munitions factory. Or, well, it used to manufacture buttons, but it’s going to make bullets soon. So it shouldn’t be raided.”
“Raided?”
“The lists are going up tomorrow. And your name will be on them, even if it wasn’t on the census.”
“What list? And how do you know?”
Ludwig glared at him, as they walked along empty assembly lines to a supply closet, where Ludwig opened a panel of the wall to reveal an extra space. “Okay, stupid question,” Daniel admitted. “What the hell is this?”
“It was a smuggler’s hoard for cocaine. Now it’s your new home.”
“Are you fucking serious? Your bosses are planning something so fucking horrible you have to hide me in a drug den smaller than a fucking prison cell?”
Ludwig’s lips twitched down in the way that Daniel knew, from long experience, meant that Ludwig wanted to tell him to stop kvetching, but for whatever reason, couldn’t bring himself to actually say so. Ludwig grabbed Daniel’s face in one gloved hand, forcing Daniel to meet his eyes, only inches away.
“Yes,” he answered flatly, low horror rolling in his voice. “They are. So be quiet, and stay put. I’ll find someone to feed you when I - when have to be away. I’m going to try and get you to Vash, but if I can’t -” he broke off, let go of Daniel’s cheek, and looked jerkily away.
“You’ll be. You be safe here. Until. Until I can find a way to get you somewhere else.”
Daniel swallowed, hard.
“Ludwig, if my people are suffering, I’ll suffer.”
“Stay put,” Ludwig repeated. “Just. Just survive. Even if it feels like you’re dying. Please. Please let me. I have to hide you.” Daniel reached out and traced a finger over the lines of anguish in Ludwig’s face. He felt, for a brief, mad moment, that if he applied just a little pressure, Ludwig would tear into pieces.
“Okay,” he promised. “I’ll. I won’t do anything. Reckless. I. Thank you for the place to hide.”
He brushed a kiss over Ludwig’s forehead, murmuring a Talmudic prayer.
Why are you so afraid for me? he didn’t ask, nor How can you live with all that loathing in your eyes?
Ludwig nodded, once, in acceptance, then closed the invisible door, sealing Daniel inside.
*
Notes: Krystallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, was one of the largest anti-Jewish pogroms that took place during the reich. Shops were broken into and destroyed, and synagogues were set on fire. Thousands of Jews were arrested. One of the explicit aims of the pogrom was the disarmament of German Jews. Guns were confiscated and Jews who fought back wer killed.
About a quarter of the Jews killed by the Nazis never saw a concentration camp; they were shot by mobile death squads, usually after being forced to dig their own mass graves.
Many Jews in the camps died of starvation, dehydration, disease, or freezing. They were deliberately given insufficient rations to live on. Sonderkommandos were prisoners whose work detail was operating the cremation furnaces. Kapos were prisoners, usually ethnic Germans sent to the camps for criminal offenses (green triangle), whom guards chose as work captains and had authority over the other prisoners.
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I thought about have a Jewish-diaspora-tan seperate from a young Israel-tan (especially since Israel today is multi-religious), like, with JDT handing off the baby/child to Ludwig to hide before going off to suffer in the camps, but that's another story. I really like having the continuous Israel from the first temple kingdom era all the way to the present, just to spite everyone and everything that's tried to break him, from Babylon and Rome right on down the line.
Four thousand? Woah. I thought it was more in the ballpark of 3000-2600, the point stands, I suppose.
Reply
I always though Israel-tan would have grown separate from the others, "discovered" by Ashkenazim-tan during the first push of Zionism in the 1890s.
But, writer!anon, I am really glad you wrote this -- your other story with Daniel is the only Israel I've ever liked, and I was worried that this story would turn into revisionist history stuff.
Reply
Unless I've been sleep-posting, this is the first thing I've done with Daniel.
Did you mean this one?
*is confused and needs coffee*
I loved zed-azrael's fic with Israel as a changed Ashkenazim.
I like exploring different ways -tans can be overlaid on the history/people, you know?
(Although I will never stop loving the image of Daniel slouching around Europe with a backpack, sleeping on different people's couches/attics/basements until they kick him out because he doesn't have a house. It's funny because it's tragic true.)
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*fangirls zed-azrael SO HARD*
That is a compliment, thank you for your suspicions. ^_^
But no, I'm not her. Her fic was totally inspirational to me, though, so I'm delighted the style seems similar.
Reply
Anyway- I really like this idea! I myself have been playing around with the idea of an Ancient Israel, sorta a father to Israel-tan the way there is an Ancient Greece to modern Greece, or a Mother Egypt to the modern one? Ah, but yes, the Jewish population has become multi-religious only after Israel's independence, or at least openly, so the JDT could have died during WWII, and the new Israel-tan would have replaced her/him. Also- I really like having the continuous Israel from the first temple kingdom era all the way to the present, just to spite everyone and everything that's tried to break him, from Babylon and Rome right on down the line.- I really like this idea too. Wow, so many possibilities!
Hmm, my history class didn't go too much in depth when it comes to Jewish history, so we were only told a little bit, and I don't exactly remember it detailed, and what I know of Jewish history is from around the 15th century to present time, so I'm not too good with that.
(wow, I never talk this much. At all, in fact. Sorry for anyone whose internets I killed D:)
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