Concentration

September 20, 1944

Dear Mom,

Everyone says the war's ending soon. I don't know. We dropped into The Netherlands just yesterday, but it seems like a full century, those 24 hours.

I write this letter to you in hopes that I can get this out to someone. Anyone. You see, the Germans aren't just Germans- they've built these things called... concentration camps. We don't know the exact reasons yet, but they... they haul all these Jews, God rest their soul, to these camps and, well, I don't know. Kill them, I guess. Because we found one of those yesterday.

I remember it all so clearly. Jeremy and I were the first ones out of the plane. We were dropped above a cloud bank, so we couldn't see the ground until it was too late to manuever around.

Jeremy saw it first- a sprawling square of gray. Gray everything. Gray buildings. There were people on the ground walking in gray uniforms, and there were a bunch of gray watchtowers around, so I guess that was why Jeremy started screaming bloody murder, telling me that we were going to be killed by those Krauts down there.

I looked down and the first thing that hit me were how slow those guys in gray uniforms were walking around. They were more like shambling around. Actually, I didn't realize it until now: almost all of them were standing still. They had already spotted us and slowly moved into a circle.

Jeremy was screaming so loud by now that I was wondering whether or not his head was going to blow up or something. I tried to calm him down, but most of my attention was directed to the ground below us.

At this time I could see their uniforms clearly, and I knew that the people down there weren't Germans. They were too thin, and their uniforms weren't uniforms. They were gray, striped shirts and pants. They were prisoners.

It was only a matter of seconds before we hit the ground, and Jeremy was trying to hug me, asking me to deliver something to his ma, tell his girl he loved her, all that sort of stuff. I kept on trying to tell him that everything was going to be okay, that the people down there were just prisoners of war, but I kept on being distracted by the people in the gray prisoner suits down there. They were almost in a perfect circle now, just standing. What really got to me, though, was how they looked at us: at first glance, I thought they were looking at us as if we were food. But it was the glint in their eyes, the special frown they had: it was pity.

Jeremy started crying the minute we hit the ground. I got my gear off and had to get his off, too. It hit me then that no other guys from our plane dropped out other than us two. It was no use getting the heavy paratrooper gear off of Jeremy- he just kept on sobbing on the ground, saying that the Krauts got us and that I didn't sign up for this.

So it was just me and the prisoners. I looked at them, and they looked at me. None of them had any weapons, so I guess there wasn't a prison revolt or something. There were also no Nazi corpses around. But there was something that I can recall very clearly: it was the smell of rotten flesh.

"Hello?" I called to them. There was no response. Only the blank look of their eyes from their shallow eyes, the expressionless faces that looked at us. This was starting to creep me out a bit, so I took out my pistol.

"W-w-what's going on?" Jeremy whispered by my side. He had gotten up and finally accepted the fact that we were surrounded by prisoners of war. I motioned for him to stop.

Suddenly, I heard a ripping sound. I turned behind me and saw that a prisoner's arm had fallen off.

"What-" Jeremy had barely a second to react when there were more of those noises, coming from all around us. I swore that just a minute ago I saw human faces, human bodies, looking at me. Now, I was staring at death happening around us. There really wasn't a way to explain it. It had become very dark and windy, and the sky above had darkened considerably. And all the while the question of why everything was happening ran through my head. The answer was obvious:

We were surrounded by standing corpses.

I saw it now. The eyeballs became old, dirty. The expressionless faces' features fell off one by one. Cheeks had holes in them. Foreheads had bullet wounds. The only thing that remained constant about them were their clothes: that shade of gray. I tell you, if I ever see that shade again, I would vomit.

Jeremy had already begun running, but we were still surrounded. And even though the prisoners' bodies were falling apart, it seemed that they were slowly closing in on us. Now, I could see the effects of time: legs became femurs, and faces turned into skulls.

In a few seconds, pile upon pile of bones and rotting flesh lay around us. Yet, there was still one prisoner who remained. Even though his brethren had all "died", he still stood there, ever so slightly shaking back and forth. His head was fixated on the ground, but I swear he snapped it up in a quarter of a second when I aimed my pistol at him.

"Don't move!" I yelled. Jeremy was probably running for his life by now, but I wasn't going without this guy on our tail. He had to be dealt with.

He stared at me, his eyelids pulled back all the way. I fired a warning shot at his feet. No response.

Then, he smiled, and laughed.

It was an ear-piercing sound, but he cocked his head up and laughed. I turned around and began running towards Jeremy. The laughs got worse, and I think I know why it sounded so bad: his voice box was rotting. There were plopping noises behind me as his limbs fell off.

I don't really remember what happened after that. Me and Jeremy met up at HQ an hour apart, and even though we both didn't have a map, we made our way through a forest that took a jeep 4 hours to get through in 30 minutes. We found our squad leader there and he told us that we were missing during roll call this morning. We told him our story and he told us about the concentration camps. Of course, he didn't believe us, especially about certain parts of the story: how could a man rot in a matter of seconds? How could the sky darken in a matter of seconds? And, most mysteriously: how did we even end up in a place where we could only reach by paradropping out of a plane when we weren't even in a plane?

Nobody agreed to trek through the forest to find the concentration camp when we asked to go back there. Of course, in the end, me and Jeremy decided against it.

Oh, yes, there's one more thing.

Today we captured a village (name's too long to remember). In there, we were lucky enough to surprise and capture all of the German soldiers there without a fight. We even caught a high-ranking German officer.

Our corpsman, Nate, took some German language classes when he was in university. Our squad leader told him to interrogate the officer about key defensive positions, amounts of soldiers in the area, that type of thing. I realized this could be the chance to find out about something.

I asked Nate to ask the officer about the concentration camps in the area. Nate took some time to describe the camps to the officer, since I doubt German classes teach you how to say "concentration camp" in German.

The officer shook his head, saying that they cleared out the camps a month ago when they retreated to Germany.

-41488p