The Reckoning

A train operator's homecoming

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A high-pitched fweeeet cut short the muddy fog of dreams clouding his head. Slowly, Frank opened his eyes a slit. The mechanical clacks from the tracks grew louder and louder as his mind waded out of his daze. He inhaled a deep breath and sat up. He must’ve dozed off.

He thought he would be more thrilled when he came on this ride. Thirty-five years it had been since he last saw his brother, Martin. When their widowed father passed away in 1956, he had come back to attend the funeral. After that, a cross continent trip back to Germany was just too long. Besides, the border guards asked too many questions. Even with his American citizenship, they made him nervous. What if those crazy Communists decided he was still a German from their occupied zone? And after the Soviets built the Berlin Wall, he decided he’d rather not take any risk.

If only Martin had followed his advice to immigrate to America when he still had a chance. The idiot always had his own ideas, and his own ideas never turned out good. Frank honestly thought they would never see each other again. But then a miracle happened. The Soviet Union dissolved. Three months ago in November, the Berlin Wall crumbled. He didn’t think this could ever happen in his lifetime.

Now, he had no more excuses. A return to his hometown Pirna was long overdue.

The train rattled and shook him out of his thoughts. Across from him, a little boy sat. The boy stared at him. His haunting eyes looked too big for his head, which bobbled on top of his too thin body as the train moved. Frank scowled. What a rude little brat. Didn’t his parents teach him not to stare?

Frank slid his eyes over to the woman sitting next to the boy, who he assumed must be the boy’s mother. The woman sat motionless looking straight ahead. Like her son, she looked too pale. Her face appeared empty and her mind seemed far, far away.

What crappy luck. He had to share the compartment with these two? Frank thought. When did they board the train anyway? No one was in the compartment before he dozed off.

He couldn’t wait to get off this train. Aside from the two zombies facing him, this train’s hard seat was hurting his back. How old was this thing anyway? He glanced around the car’s interior from bottom to top. The upholstery’s red fabric had faded to an orange-beige. The gold trims no longer shone, and wood finishes had long lost their luster. Communism sure did a job on the economy. And look at the way the two zombies dressed. Her wool suit dress looked like what his mother used to wear—before the war. The kid too, looked like he had stepped out from the past in his high-waist trousers. Fashion had frozen in time after Stalin took over, he supposed.

Thank God he escaped and never had to live in this hellhole. His grandson, Billy, was about the same age as this little brat now sitting across from him. Unlike the sickly little brat, Billy was a cheerful, handsome boy. Of course, good genes helped. Billy took after his father, Rod—Frank’s oldest son. Rod was a golden boy, too. Tall, strong, and athletic. He always made his old man proud.

The sickly boy kept his hard stare trained on Frank. His pencil-thin brows twisted, whether from anguish or fear, Frank couldn’t tell. Ignoring the boy, Frank huffed under his breath, and pulled his jacket closer onto his lap. His passport fell out from his jacket onto the floor. Frank bent to pick it up, and his finger glided inside the cover to the first page.

Frank Wagner, said the name printed next to the headshot photo. In America, everyone knew him as Frank, not Franz. Franz Wagner was a shadow he had buried and left behind. He crossed his arms at the thought of resurrecting the past. When he arrived to meet Martin and his wife, he would have to get used to them calling him Franz again.

At least Martin still had a wife. Frank’s own wife, Dora, had passed away from cancer three years ago. If she were still alive, he would’ve brought her along on this trip. God! How he missed her! Dora was quite a dish when she was young. A true specimen of beauty. The first time her crystal blue eyes shone on him, his heart leapt. On their wedding night, when she rested her head on his chest, and her luscious blonde hair fell on his skin as they lay in bed, he thought he had died and gone to heaven.

Dora was a good wife and a good mother. More than he ever deserved. Best of all, she never asked too many questions.

He put his passport into the pocket of his pants.

Wait. Where was his ticket? He had put it into this pocket after the conductor checked it before he dozed off.

He felt for the ticket in the entire pocket. No. Definitely not there. He checked his other pocket. His wallet was there, but not the ticket. Did he drop it? He looked around the floor and the seat. The ticket was nowhere to be found.

Oh well, he thought, and and leaned back into his seat. He should be arriving soon anyway.

The boy across from him was boring his eyes into him. Frank looked away and glanced at his watch on his wrist. How much longer until he could get off this train away from this creepy kid?

The mother of the kid turned her head, as though coming out of a trance. Finally, a sign she was alive, Frank thought to himself. She lowered her gaze at his watch.

Frank smiled and gave her a courteous nod. He held up his wrist and said in German, “It’s a retirement present. I live in the U.S. In the U.S., they give you a gold watch when you retire."

The woman did not reply.

“I was a train engineer for fifty-five years,” he said, more to fill the air with conversation for a dose of normality than he cared to make small talk with her. “I drove the train from Cleveland to Washington, D.C., then back from Washington to Cleveland where I live.” He turned to the boy. “You know where Washington and Cleveland are?”

The boy loosened his forehead and tightened his lips.

“Of course, you don’t,” Frank continued. “I drove that train route longer than you’ve lived.” He knocked on the wall near the window. “I’ve driven trains like this one too.” He tossed his head at the woman. “They used to be run by the DR. Kriegslok, these trains were called then. Bet you don’t know anything about that either, do you?” He snickered. He continued without waiting for her reply. “That’s right, I was a train operator. A darn good one too, if I don’t say so myself. I took people where they had to go.”

The woman turned away. She seemed to have lost interest as she gazed ahead again with her hollow eyes.

Frank grunted and stood up. He opened the compartment door and muttered, “Going to stretch my legs,” and stepped out. He couldn’t stand that woman and her boy anymore. The train should arrive in Pirna in another thirty minutes. He would rather walk up and down the corridor for the remainder of the ride than to be stuck with those two.

He moved along the windows opening to a scene of farmlands covered by snow. A thought hit him and he paused. Shouldn’t they have made a stop at Dresden already? Why was he still looking at acres of land without buildings?

Frank cocked his head at the view outside. The train slowed its speed, passing through a local station’s platform but didn’t stop. A sign with the station's name in a language he didn’t recognize rolled by.

What in the world?...

He leaned forward against the window. The train’s speed picked up as they pulled out of the station, where he caught a glimpse of another sign with an arrow pointing to Cracow.

Cracow? Krakow? Poland?

Did he get on the wrong train? How could that be? The conductor had checked his ticket earlier. He was sure of it. If he had gotten on the wrong train, the conductor would've told him.

Where was he? And where was this train going?

Tensing his chest, he searched the other compartments for passengers to ask where they were going. No one. There was no one in any compartment. Aside from the woman and the boy, there was no one else riding in this car with him.

He considered returning to the compartment to ask the woman, then quickly dimissed the idea. She and her kid gave him the creeps. So what now?

The next car then, he thought, and opened the door to the next car. He had to find someone, or a conductor.

As he stepped into the next car, the rows of wooden seats took him aback. Was this a car for third-class passengers? Shouldn’t it be behind him?

He deepened his frown and stalked down the aisle. Purses and bags sat unattended on the seats with suitcases and sacks cluttering on the floor, but the car was empty of people. Where was everybody? Who would leave their purses behind like this?

An eerie sense of déjà vu crept up his spine. A fragment of memory flashed in his mind. For a moment, he almost felt like he had been in this empty car before.

He shook off the thought, and continued on to the next car. A wall of bodies blocked him from moving ahead. A searing foul stench flooded into his nose. He held his breath, and swallowed back a reflexive gag surging out of his stomach. In the darkness packed tight with standing people, he couldn’t make out what was going on. Moans, cries, and gasps of heavy breathing surrounded him.

What was this? How could such a car be a part of this train?

Wrinkling his nose, Frank squeezed his body around to go back the way he came. But when he tried to grip the door handle, his hand grasped onto nothing. Confused, he swiped his hand over the surface of the door. His palm felt nothing but a wooden wall. Where did the door go?

Unable to hold his breath any longer, he exhaled. Against his will, his lung naturally sucked in a deep breath, drawing a waft of stench up his nostrils but little air. He was certain now the stench was one of human urine and excrement, mixed with putrid layers of sweat. A wave of nausea rose from his gut, and he scrunched his face and turned down his lips. Behind him, the pack of people struggling for space were pressing against his back and pinning him against the wall.

“Stop!” Frank shouted. “Stop pushing! Please stop pushing!”

His loud voice could barely be heard over the thick crowd and their groans, but the pack stopped in their place. Frank squared his shoulders and elbows, and shifted himself toward the passengers. His eyes had adapted to make out the shapes of the men, women, and children under the bit of light sliding in from the rectangular window near the roof. He lengthened his body, hoping he could catch whatever air that might seep through the window. But when he stretched his neck to the max, he could see the glass panel that sealed the window. The barbed wire criss-crossed over the glass further smothered his hope.

Sweat beaded on his temple and he slumped. The thick, heavy shroud of carbon dioxide weighing down would soon suffocate him. How could he get out of here?

While he thought, his eyes landed on the yellow Star of David patched on the jacket of the man in front of him.

No! He jerked his head to the right, then the left. Every person in this car was wearing the patch.

No! No! No! This couldn’t be. That war ended more than forty years ago!

Meekly, he whimpered, “What’s happening?”

The man next to him let out a bitter sneer. “The Nazis want to kill us, that’s what’s happening.”

“The Nazis?” Frank frowned. “The Soviets had Nazis?”

“The Soviets?” the man scoffed. “Not the Soviets. The Nazis. Hitler’s Nazis. You’ve lost your mind. We’re all losing our minds locked up in here.” The man turned away from him.

Hitler’s Nazis? Frank curled his fingers. This couldn’t be real. This had to be a dream. A nightmare.

Coming back to Germany was giving him a nightmare.

The hums of a woman singing drew his eyes to the floor, past the ailing and dead bodies lying on top of each other to the spot where she sat. In her lap, she held a baby with its head hanging lifelessly back over her arm. Beside her, a teenage girl scratched her hairpin up and down and up and down the train’s wooden wall. Her repetitious effort made nary a dent, let alone a hole that could let in air or help her escape. The man slouching next to her abruptly got on his knees and started scratching madly at the wooden wall with his nails.

Frank looked on in horror. His head swirled and his knees weakened. All those times when he drove the deportation trains, he had never once sought to find out what was happening to the people inside the cattle cars. He didn’t want to know, and he didn’t care to know.

Although once, he had a chance to enter the third-class car after the passengers were herded off. A friendly SS guard had invited him to help clear the belongings. Sometimes, the SS would put the Jews in third-class cars to maintain the facade of sending them to work camps. The deportees would always bring their most valuable possessions with them. Little did they knew they would have to abandon everything when they arrived. Afterward, the SS guards would return to collect whatever remained on the train. Those who got there first got to pocket some very expensive jewelry and cash.

Memories began returning to him. The empty third-class car he had walked through earlier was the one he had gone into way back then in the hope of pocketing some valuables himself.

So what? Why shouldn’t he get some of the spoils too? Those Jews weren’t allowed to take anything with them anyway.

An old woman sitting in a corner rocking back and forth with her arms around her legs began to shriek. Her shrieks pierced Frank’s ears. With no room to escape, the volume of her voice filled what remained of their confined space, tearing his ear drums until he could take it no more. He struck out his arms and shoved the people around him away. He pushed his way toward the side door, climbing over bodies below his feet but ignoring their screams. Someone pushed him back and shouted, “Get off me!"

Frank tripped and his shoulder landed against the wall. In a panic, he banged his fists against the wall. “Let me out! Let me out of here! I’m not a Jew! I’m not a Jew! I’m with the Wehrmacht! Let me out!”

An arm under him pulled away. Losing his footing, Frank tumbled forward. As he tried to stand, he knocked over a bucket and the human waste inside spilled. A chorus of groans and cries erupted as another tide of stench boiled over the acrid stink that Frank thought could not possibly get any worse. A large pair of hands grabbed him and slammed him against the wall. “Bastard! You spilled shit on me.” The man he soiled raised his fist.

Frank closed his eyes. He had no strength to fight back. Once, he was a strong young man who could strike fear into anyone’s heart. Now, he was just an old man. He kept his eyes shut and waited for the blow.

The chugs of the engine grew and overtook the voices in the cattle car. Suddenly, all the human cries and moans stopped, even the old woman’s shrieks. The air, though a bit stale, no longer reeked. Only a faint scent of metal lingered from the engine carrying him away. Slowly, Frank opened his eyes. His back was still leaning limply against the car’s back door, but he was now in a third-class passenger car. One he had never been in before.

Frank slid his back up against the door. What a nightmare. He must’ve just had an episode of some kind. Strange. He had never had any mental issues.

He drew in a long, shaky breath of air. He couldn’t believe this sordid chapter of the past had come back to haunt him this way. He didn’t kill anyone. He only operated the trains, and he never regretted that for a day. He never wanted to go to the front to fight and risk his life. As soon as he heard the Reich was running into a shortage of train drivers, he asked for a transfer to join the troops to be trained. It wasn’t his call what they used the trains to carry. He was conscripted to serve. He was just following orders like everyone else. He took those deportees where they had to go.

Frank straightened his legs. Coming back to Germany was a bad idea. He should’ve left the past alone.

Feeling calmer now, he swept his eyes up the rows of wooden seats. In the middle of the car, a conductor stood talking to a young woman passenger.

Relief washed over him. "Mein Herr!” Frank called out and rushed toward them. “Mein Herr!” He reached the conductor and grabbed his shoulder. “Could you please tell me where . . . “

The conductor turned around. Instantly, Frank fell a step back. “Josef?”

The conductor smiled. “Welcome home, Franz.”

“No . . .” Frank grabbed the back of a seat to steady himself. This couldn’t be. Josef Hausmann, his once best friend and neighbor with whom he grew up, was long gone. If he were still here, he would be as old as Frank himself. But the Josef standing before him looked as young as the last time Frank saw him.

“Did you think you’d seen the last of me?” Josef asked. “How could you, Franz? I thought you of all people would spare me. How could you turn me in?”

“I—” Frank started to explain, then stopped. Josef had no right to blame him. “You were a traitor! You laughed and drank with us like we were all brothers in arms, when the whole time, you were feeding information to the White Rose.”

“So I’m a traitor?” Josef walked closer to him. “What about you? Deserter.”

Frank shook his head. How could Josef know that? As far as he knew, Josef was executed for aiding the resistance in 1943. As for Frank himself . . .

Frank straightened his stance. “Yes, I gave up. I had an order to pick up three hundred kids from Drancy, but I ditched the order and took a train to Paris instead. It was hopeless by then anyhow. Anyone could see the Allies were winning and Hitler wouldn’t last much longer. By the time I abandoned the army, nothing would’ve made a difference. Why should I drive a train into Poland when the Ivans were coming to catch us? I served like a man, but I wasn’t a fool.”

That’s right, Frank thought, and lifted his chin. If nothing else, no one could ever accuse him of being a fool. In France, when all the German troops were running west back to the Fatherland, he went south and walked right up to the first American GIs he saw, and surrendered himself. The GIs put him on a ship to a POW camp in Georgia, and the rest was history.

Still, Josef . . .

“Look,” Frank said, reaching his hand out to his old friend. “I had no choice. Don’t you understand? If the SS ever found out what you were doing, I could be punished too. They knew you and I were close. They wouldn’t believe I wasn’t a part of it.” He clenched his fist. “You should never have put me in that situation to begin with. You should’ve followed the rules like the rest of us. Turning you in was the only way I could save myself.”

Josef remained unmoved. “What about Hannah?”

Frank squinted his eyes. “Who?”

“Hannah,” Josef repeated. He turned his gaze to the passenger he was talking to when Frank entered the car. The young woman raised her head and looked into Frank’s eyes. Frank had no recollection of her.

“Do you remember me, Franz?” the woman asked. “I’m Hannah, Josef’s girlfriend.”

Frank’s fist loosened. Hannah. Of course. She was the Jewish girl Josef was smitten with when they were still school boys. He thought all that ended when he and Josef joined the Hitler Youth. What a shock it was when he learned that Josef and his family were hiding her in the basement under the lumber yard office owned by Josef’s father.

He could still hear Josef’s last words to him before the execution. After Josef’s arrest, a tinge of guilt had brought Frank to the jail cell. He wanted to know if Josef had any last wishes. Maybe they could even reminisce about old times, and forget for a moment what was to come. But what Josef wanted was to talk about the girl hiding in his dad’s basement.

“My parents’ been arrested too. I have no one else. You have to help me,” Josef pleaded in a whisper behind the bars. “Save Hannah.”

“Who’s Hannah?” Frank asked, confused.

“Hannah Eisenberg. She went to school with us, remember?”

Hardly, Frank had thought at the time.

“Please, Franz. I beg you. I love her! Do this one last thing for me. Tell me I can count on you.”

Frank looked at his friend clutching the iron bars. Slowly, he shook his head. “I’m sorry. That’s not possible. You shouldn’t keep defying the Reich. I was the one who reported you.”

The look of shock on Josef’s face was one that haunted him for many nights until he left for America and decided to never look back.

After that, he mumbled goodbye to his friend, and left the jail. He had no intention to save that Jewess hiding in the basement. She was a rat like all of them, infesting the Reich and hampering their progress. Maybe this was all her doing. Maybe if she hadn’t bewitched his friend, Josef would never have gotten himself involved with the White Rose.

Promptly, he reported her hideout to those in charge, and washed his hands of it.

In the train car, Frank stared at the ghost of Hannah. He pointed his finger at her. “It wasn’t my fault. It was yours. Yours! I—”

The clack of the door opening at the back of the car interrupted his words. The woman and the child who shared his train compartment before these nightmares began were now walking in. Holding hands, they strode down the aisle toward him, their faces hard and cold.

He remembered them now. It was all coming back to him. A train had arrived from Westerbork. The passengers were being transferred onto a German train. An unruly little boy had run away from the herd of deportees. The boy didn’t want to get into another cattle car. His mother ran after him. The SS guard standing nearby raised his rifle and released a shot. The woman died instantly and fell face flat onto the ground with her arms stretched out. The boy screamed.

Frank happened to be passing by. He signaled to the guard he’d take care of the boy. He was closer to the spot where the woman was shot, and the guard had his hands full directing the deportees. Frank went and grabbed the wailing boy’s hand to lead him back to the crowd. The gold watch on the dead woman’s wrist caught his eye.

Well look at that, he remembered thinking. A reward. He paused to slip the watch from her wrist into his own pocket, then grabbed the boy’s hand again, and pulled him back to where he belonged.

That was so long ago.

And now, the ghosts of the woman and the boy had returned. They marched toward him. Frank stumbled back two steps. The engine’s chugs drummed louder and louder, thrashing his ears. Josef raised his arm to grab him. He dodged and backed away. Hannah Eisenberg stood up from her seat. All four of them were coming toward him.

“Leave me alone!” Frank shouted. He turned around and ran. He forced the door at the front of the car open and ran forward from one car to the next. He couldn’t stay here anymore. He wanted to get off at once. He had to get to the engine. He had to stop this train.

He reached the locomotive and barged inside. A single driver in uniform sat at the helm.

“Hey!” Frank shouted at him. “Stop this train. Now!”

The driver ignored him and sat still.

“Do you hear me?” Frank walked up to him. “I said stop this train!”

Slowly, the driver turned his head. The face of young Franz Wagner, square jaws and broad shoulders with a golden shock of hair over his forehead, looked back at him.

Frank widened his eyes. “Who are you?”

The handsome face of his younger self opened with a grin. Out of his mouth, a pungent smell of decay unleashed. Frank slapped his hand over his nose. The sour odor stank even worse than the stench in the cattle car.

The youthful figure’s grin grew wider, revealing his black, rotten teeth. Beneath his striking exterior, a rot that existed since the dawn of time continued to fester. The Nazis’ reign had ended, but the rot within Franz Wagner had never gone away.

Frank lunged at the rotten relic with the ghastly grin. “Move!” He tried to grab the ghost’s shoulders to throw him off his seat. Instead, his palms landed on the steering wheel. In an instant, he was in the driver’s seat. The relic of his past had vanished.

Startled, Frank lifted his hands. But his hands wouldn’t move. He couldn’t get them off the steering wheel.

Behind him, Josef said, “Keep going. You’re doing your job. You're taking yourself where you have to go.”

Frank turned his head around. Josef, Hannah, the woman and her son, all stood behind him.

“We’re almost there,” Hannah said.

Frank turned his sight back to the front window. The tracks before him led his eyes to the main entrance of the Auschwitz death camp. Smoke billowed from the camp’s chimneys as the train came closer and closer to the building. Above the camp’s gate, a fiery red fire began to spread in the sky. The fire wrapped its flames around the camp, as though it was swallowing up the horror with its blaze.

The train sped forward, its engine's furious chugs fused with the escalating thumps of his heart. Behind him, Josef bent down to his ear and asked, “Do you know where you’re going?”

Frank gulped. He stared ahead.

Yes.

Yes, he knew. He knew all too well.

He was on a one-way train to hell.