ANDREJ : Chapter Four

 ANDREJ
by John Dee Cooper
© 2021

Chapter 4

I’d known that school hall all my life. It’s where we came for big events like plays and concerts and festivals. It wasn’t just school stuff. There were dances and parties – anything where the Town Hall was a bit too grand or expensive. It’s where the scouts and the judo club met every Saturday. So it was old familiar territory for me. Which is why when they opened the doors to let us in, stark naked, it was like being on another planet.

All I could see at first were the huge white and red Reich Marshall banners hanging from the ceiling, dozens of them; then the armed guards lined up on the stage at the far end, keeping watch over everything; and below them at floor level a long table where three officials, two of them in military uniform, sat facing the hall like a panel of judges or invigilators at an exam.            

My view ahead was blocked because we’d joined the end of a queue and I had the Newsagent’s giant back in front of me, but as we slowly shuffled along I could see that as well as the soldiers with rifles wandering up and down keeping us in line, there were civilians sitting on either side of us – mostly men, but there were a few smartly dressed woman among them. They were observing us closely as though we were some kind of freak show. They looked and sounded foreign and were clearly enjoying the spectacle. Some of them were scribbling notes, others were taking photographs.

That was the first time I felt the full humiliation of our defeat. We had lost everything to these people. They had taken our homes, stripped us naked, stolen all our possessions. Our identities had been reduced to random numbers scribbled on pieces of card and hung around our necks. Our future was clouded in fear and darkness and our lives were at the mercy of these strangers.

I was desperately frightened. Luka was standing right behind me, but I needed him by my side even though I knew he was probably feeling just us humiliated as me. Even the thought of father coming to rescue us filled me with shame. I felt us though we had let him down badly and that we should never have left his side.

To add to the whole weirdness, there was a continuous stream of military music pumping through the sound system. It wasn’t loud, but it was monotonous and threatening and kept nudging your brain till you wanted to scream out and make it stop. It was while I was trying my hardest to overcome this monotonous drone, that I heard the first scream.
                        
It came from somewhere close to the stage. A deep throated scream of anguish punctuated by the snap of leather on bare flesh.

The Newsagent’s big hairy back was in the way and in any case I was too frightened to look closely, but as we moved down the line I could see out of the corner of my eye there was a naked man hanging by his wrists surrounded by a group of young men in brown shirts who were taking it in turns to lay a whip across his back. I remember thinking how brave he must be to bear such punishment even though I could hardly see anything of him – except for a moment I caught a glimpse of his muscular body writhing as the whip cut into his flesh and his thighs and buttocks quivered with the aftershock. I looked away quickly as much in shame as fear because to my horror I discovered I had an erection.

I kept my head down and hoped that none of the strangers watching  had noticed. To keep my mind off it I tried to think what we were going to say to the military officers when we reached the long table, because clearly that’s where we were headed. If only Luka were in front of me in the queue, he would know what to say. He’d tell them who we were and who our father was and how there’d been a mix-up and our father would explain everything when he came to fetch us after he’d collected our papers. But to be honest the more I thought about it the more anxious I got. Without our clothes or  papers how could we prove who we were? There was just this stupid number hanging round our necks.        

We kept shuffling forwards, step by tedious step, and the further we went, the tighter the gap became between us and the less I could see, squeezed up against the Newsagent’s sweaty back.    

Meanwhile the whiplashes and screams from that poor wretch kept echoing round the hall until it was all one with the music and the scuffing of our bare feet on the wooden floor and the babble of the foreign voices talking about us as we trudged past them.

In addition to the two military officers sitting at the long table, there were more of them roaming around, taking a closer look at us. I held my breath and squeezed up close to the Newsagent so as not to draw attention to my erect penis. He stank of fear and sweat and was shaking so much I thought he was going to break into a panic.

But the officers weren’t interested in him or me. I couldn’t see what was going on but I heard a scuffle ahead of us, and Marko yelling and cursing, and then there was a sound like the swish of a leather strap and after that all I could hear was Marko sobbing.

All this was going on right in front of the Newsagent which made him take a step back, treading on my toes and knocking me off balance with his fat behind. I had to grab hold of his waist to stop us both from tumbling over. I was almost as scared as he was by now and I was sure they were going to drag us out of line and give us a beating.

But instead they went straight on to my brother Luka. I could feel him tensing up behind me even though our bodies weren’t touching. I heard him snatch his breath and moan and make a strange gulping noise. I wanted to turn round and see what on earth they were doing to him but I was way too scared. I was glad when they let him go and moved on to somebody else.

A little further on a uniformed orderly took our measurements. There was a small platform with a metal plate that showed your weight when you stepped on to it and a vertical wooden gauge which measured your height. The orderly wrote it all down on a slip of paper which he pinned to the card hanging round your neck. It was very efficient. You didn’t even have to break out of line,  just step onto the platform, wait for the orderly to do his thing, then step off the other side and continue in line. But for that one  brief moment on the platform I was high enough to see over the heads of the others and get a much better view of what was going on around me.
                                        
I could tell from his dark uniform that the middle of the three men sitting at the long table was the senior officer. He was a slim, handsome man in his late fifties with dark neatly trimmed black hair brushed flat with a centre parting. He wore a monocle and gave the impression of being very cool, precise and efficient. The officer on his right was in his thirties and seemed to have nothing more to do than observe and occasionally lean over and whisper to the senior officer. The third member of the panel, sitting on the senior officer’s left, was a civilian clerk, busy with files and notebooks and rubber stamps. Behind them an orderly hovered ready to run errands and pass documents back and forth.

Three of our townsmen were at that moment standing in front of the examiners. Being naked it wasn’t easy to recognise them but I was pretty sure the one in the middle was our local butcher’s assistant who coached us in Judo at the weekends. Even from the back you could see how fit he was. He made the  two standing next him look quite paltry in comparison.

A strange looking man dressed in riding breeches and leather boots was examining him and I thought maybe there was going to be a fight because the butcher’s assistant was all tensed up with his legs astride, his buttocks clenched and his fists bunched. So I was pretty amazed when the man with the boots suddenly barked at him (it really sounded like a bark!) and the young man fell onto his knees and after a few more barks began to crawl around in a circle. It was pretty creepy. He wasn’t being made fun of. It was all quite serious like he was being assessed in some way. The man with the boots kept tapping him with a riding crop and poking it between his legs, and when the young man was ordered back onto his feet he had to flex his muscles.     

After consulting the two officers at the table, and speaking to the clerk, who rubber stamped a slip of paper for him, the man with the boots wrote something on the young man’s forehead, tied his wrists together with rope and led him out through a door at the side of the stage.

I was so caught up with what had just happened to the young butcher’s assistant that I hardly noticed how they dealt with the other two men, but I think they had something scribbled on their foreheads as well before being led out to the car park. I remember thinking how desolate they looked trudging out into the cold night, stark naked and terrified, with no idea what their fate was going to be  

One other thing I noticed before I stepped off the platform was a group of young men, mostly about Luka’s age, occupying the front row of chairs facing the long table. They were strong healthy lads  who took a close interest in everything that was going on, even participating. They wore khaki shorts and brown shirts with rolled-up sleeves and I assumed they were the Reich Marshall’s version of the Boy Scouts. They had notebooks and cameras and occasionally raised a hand to ask questions or make suggestions about the men being examined.

Back in line I was in despair thinking how Luka and I would ever be able to avoid the calamity that was about to come crashing down on us if we didn’t tell someone that this was all a mistake and we shouldn’t be standing in line naked like this. I even thought about asking the Newsagent for help, I was that desperate. Then to my utter relief I saw the man who had taken us away from our father making his way towards the long table carrying a bundle of documents and I clung to the belief that our identity papers were among them and that he was going to explain everything to the examiners and finally put things right.
                            
It was about then that I noticed the whipping had stopped. I was close enough to the front now to peer over the Newsagent’s shoulder and see that the man they’d been whipping had been taken down. But his ordeal was clearly not over. His tormenters, who’d been joined by some of the older scouts, had dragged him over to a bench where, from what I could see, they were submitting him to all kinds of obscene physical and sexual abuse – not that anyone around them appeared at all concerned.  

My attention was abruptly brought back to my own worries when I heard Marko’s number being called out. He and his father had already stepped forward to confront the examiners, leaving me totally exposed, naked and unable to breath.

The abyss was about to open up and swallow me.

To be continued...