Zane’s Redemption (25 page)

Zane nodded. “Unimaginable. Are you sure you want to know about this?”

“Yes. Go on. What happened in those barracks?”

“Here, the prisoners were fed well. Their bodies were clean, and the doctors in attendance monitored their health on a constant basis. On its surface, it looked like a state-of-the-art hospital with every type of medical equipment available in the early 1940s. Any casual visitor would have seen nothing more frightening than two dozen inmates dressed in hospital whites, rather than the striped prison uniform worn by their fellow prisoners in the other barracks.

“But these men and women didn’t count themselves lucky; each and every one wished they’d never been picked from the vermin-infested barracks where the rest of the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and political prisoners were kept. Had they known what would be their fate, they would have gladly returned to the hard labor that the other, more fortunate ones, were performing daily.”

Zane felt Portia holding her breath in anticipation.

“But they’d had no choice. They selected my sister Rachel and me in 1942, two years after we entered the camp. The day they brought us to the research barracks was the day I saw my parents for the last time. I don’t know what happened to them after that.”

Portia’s hand stroked over his arm, comforting him.

“My hair was no longer than half an inch by that time, but they shaved what remained so they could attach the electrodes they used for some of the experiments.

“The medical chief of the facility was Dr. Franz Müller. There were four other doctors working under him. They did everything he demanded. Nobody questioned his methods. Even the commandant of the camp, Standartenführer Hermann Pister, didn’t interfere. Müller was given free reign. His official orders were to conduct experiments that would help the German military in the recovery of their wounded soldiers. And mostly, it was what all these doctors did, not only at Buchenwald but also at other camps like Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Müller was as cruel as Mengele, and as mad as the Führer himself. But worst of all was his obsession with two things: immortality and a master race.”

“Oh my God, I always thought some of those stories were just rumors.”

Zane shook his head. “The inmates were his guinea pigs to experiment on as he wished. Cruelty was part of the program. At the beginning, he tested the threshold of pain a man could endure, applying injuries upon injuries, cuts, burns, and whippings to determine what the human body was capable of enduring. The experiments were more cruel and brutal than anybody could have imagined: bone, muscle and nerve transplants from one prisoner to the next—without the use of anesthetics; freezing experiments to figure out when hypothermia set in, and at what body temperature it was irreversible.”

He felt Portia shiver next to him as if she physically felt the cold he was talking about.

“The head injury experiments were among the most savage: prisoners were strapped to a chair, and sustained repeated hammer blows to their heads. The screams were bloodcurdling, and the results inevitable: irreversible brain damage and eventual death.

“Müller went through hundreds of prisoners. They were disposable. When he breached a threshold, killing a test subject, he called for the guards to bring him more from the other barracks. There was limitless supply. Each day, more came in trains, herded in like cattle. Buchenwald wasn’t an extermination camp, but the prisoners outside the research barracks died just as quickly as those inside from the experiments, and those working in the armament factories from sheer exhaustion and malnutrition.

“Eventually, Müller had enough data to take the tests further. He knew the limits of how far a human body could be taken before it would give in to death. But he needed more. He injected the prisoners with different compounds, testing what would allow them to endure more pain, live longer, or make them stronger. All so he could advance the Reich’s racial ideology: to create a master race, humans who were superior to others, so they could rule the world. As many died from the injections as from the beatings and other injuries.”

Portia let out a sigh. “How could those poor people even survive for as long as they did?”

Zane glanced at her for a moment. “I wished so many times to die then. But I wasn’t that lucky.” Neither was his sister.

“They did the same to the women. Even now, I can't get the screams out of my head. Rachel’s screams. She was sixteen then, and her life was over before it began. Knowing what she went through, hurt me more than what they did to me. And I was powerless to stop it, powerless to help my baby sister.”

He took a steadying breath, trying to lend his voice the strength it always lost when he thought about his sister.

“The experiments, of course, led nowhere. The entire program was a failure, but Müller wouldn’t give up. With every month that passed, his desperation to reach his goal manifested itself in more and more brutality and cruelty... Müller’s face had turned into a mask of madness, his eyes often wild with obsession, his hair in a constant mess because he couldn’t stop raking his fingers through it as he contemplated his next move and thought up new ways of advancing his so-called research. Then one day in the winter of 1944, the solution fell into his lap.

“Just as Hitler was obsessed with the occult, Müller too believed in the supernatural, as did the men who worked for him. There was a strange occurrence in the camp one night, and guards investigated. They found a man feeding off some prisoners. Drinking blood. Later I found out from a local prisoner who was in the barracks with me that there had been rumors about vampires in that region, but those had been dismissed as stories to scare unruly kids.

“They managed to trap and capture the vampire. When they brought him to the medical barracks, chains as thick as my wrist wrapped around him, Müller couldn’t have been more ecstatic.”

“How? A vampire would have been much stronger than those humans.”

Zane nodded in agreement. “The vampire killed several of the guards before the others could overpower him. It turned out that he was near starvation himself and too weak to fight them any longer.”

“What happened then?”

He put his hand over hers and squeezed it. “Terrible things happened, baby girl. Things nobody should have to experience.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

“A vampire,” Müller echoed, his eyes wide with surprise.

From the treatment chair he was chained to, Zacharias witnessed what would become the turning point in Müller’s research.

Immortality suddenly within his grasp, the evil doctor approached the creature. He looked human, except for the large fangs that protruded from his mouth, and the hands that looked more like the claws of an animal than human fingers. His body gaunt, his cheeks hollow he appeared starved, almost as starved as the prisoners in the other barracks. The snarls the man-beast released as he fought against the heavy chains the guard had wrapped around him, reverberated against the walls of the barracks and woke the test subjects in the nearby cells.

Zacharias closed his eyes. It was the only way he could hold onto his sanity, by thinking of the others not as humans, but as test subjects. Only when it came to his sister, when he saw her in her cell when passing on his way back to his, or when he heard her cry and whimper, did he remember that they were all human. During those moments, he wished for a way to end his life. But there was none.

“I will kill you all!” the vampire snarled in Czech, his voice hoarse and weak.

Zacharias had picked up a few Czech words from fellow prisoners, enough to understand what the vampire was saying.

“It speaks!” Müller marveled, then looked at the guards. “Do we have anybody who speaks Czech?”

Both of them shook their heads.

“Quickly,” Müller instructed curtly, “find somebody and get him here.
”

When the captured vampire clawed at the guards and snapped his teeth in a futile attempt to attack them, Zacharias gazed at the poor creature. His heart filled with pity. Maybe he was an animal, a dangerous demon, but subdued by the vicious Nazi guards, the vampire would become just as much a test subject as the others in their midst. A quiet sob escaped him. None of the guards seemed to hear it. Yet, the vampire’s gaze clashed with his. For a moment, he only saw the man inside the creature.

Zacharias mouthed one of the few words he knew in Czech. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t know it then, but that brief connection from one soul to another was what would eventually save his life.

Müller rubbed his hands. “Chain him to the gurney. Wake Brandt and Arenberg, and get them in here now. We have work to do.”

By the time the two subordinates arrived a few minutes later, nobody seemed to remember that Zacharias was still chained to a treatment chair in the other corner of the room. Everybody’s eyes were on the vampire.

Müller’s instructions were simple. “I want to analyze his blood.”

Brandt proceeded to draw blood from the chained vampire, while Arenberg assisted. Müller watched from a safe distance.

Coward, Zacharias thought. With the weak human inmates, Müller had no problem doling out injuries and pain himself, but with a vampire who was stronger and who had already killed several guards during his capture, the doctor wanted to play it safe.

Nobody knew how strong the vampire was, and whether the chains would hold. Already now, as Zacharias watched in fascination, allowing his eyes to examine the strange man, it appeared as if the chains were stretching, the iron groaning, as the vampire’s body fought against the restraints.

Without eye contact to the vampire who now lay face up on a gurney, Zacharias wasn’t able to communicate with him without giving away that he understood some Czech. His instinct told him that it was a secret he needed to keep.

When the sound of snapping metal suddenly filled the room, and one of the vampire’s hands broke free from its restraints, Müller’s colleagues started screaming.

“He’s breaking the chains!”

Instead of helping his colleagues, Müller retreated to safety, his eyes wide with fascination. “So strong,” he whispered to himself.

Right then, Zacharias could fairly read Müller’s thoughts. He would try anything to tap into the vampire’s strength, harness it, and use it for himself.

“Scheiße!” Brandt screamed before the vampire’s hand wrapped around his neck.

As they struggled and Arenberg tried to subdue the vampire by plunging a syringe with unknown contents into his neck, the silver chains Arenberg liked to wear around his neck, made contact with the vampire’s exposed skin.

A sizzling sound was followed by the stench of burnt hair and skin, and mingled with the vampire’s scream, at the same time as he released Brandt’s neck. Brandt coughed and jumped back.

“The silver!” Müller yelled. “It burns him.”

He rushed toward Arenberg and ripped the two chains off his neck, then quickly wrapped them around the vampire’s.

The prisoner howled in pain, his skin burning as if they’d poured acid over him. His movements weakened.

“Get me more silver!” Müller ordered.

From that night on, they chained the vampire with silver. It weakened him, making it impossible to escape. The next weeks were agony, not only for the vampire, but also for the other prisoners. It took many botched attempts before Müller and his colleagues figured out how they could turn other prisoners into vampires. Simply injecting them the blood of the captured vampire wasn’t enough. While it healed the prisoners’ injuries, it didn’t in turn make them stronger or turn them into vampires.

Only when they figured out that the person they wanted to turn had to be on the verge of death and ingest vampire blood at that point, did they meet with success. After they turned the first prisoner into a vampire by using the Czech vampire’s blood, they made sure to keep him weak and deprived him of human blood so he would be easily subdued.

Zacharias was in the cell next to the Czech vampire, and during the times when Müller and his colleagues weren’t in the hospital barracks, and only a few guards were in attendance, they often whispered to each other. During those hushed conversations, Zacharias learned what he could from the vampire.

“Our kind is capable of mind control,” he said one night.

“Mind control?” Zacharias wasn’t sure he’d translated correctly.

“Yes, I can send my thoughts to others to make them do what I want.”

“But then why don’t you tell them to release you?”

A tired smile crossed the vampire’s lips. “I was too starved and weak when they captured me, and even now, they’re keeping me too weak to have enough strength for the task. I need more human blood.”

Zacharias immediately reacted by moving away from the bars that separated them. “No,” he whispered to himself. It was a ploy. If he allowed the vampire to feed off him, he’d grow too weak and die himself. And then who would save Rachel?

“Give me your blood and I’ll help you escape.”

Zacharias shook his head, too scared to believe the man. “You’ll kill us all.”

In retrospect, it was a mistake to deny the vampire. He could have saved them all, had Zacharias not doubted his words.

In March of 1945, a month before the camp was liberated by Patton's approaching army, Müller turned both Zacharias and Rachel into vampires to study the effects on both male and female of the species. Rachel endured the most horrible experiments: they amputated fingers and toes only to watch them re-grow during her restorative sleep. While the pain would eventually subside, Zacharias recognized that his sister’s mind was going; the mutilations and the on-and-off deprivation of blood took their toll on her mind and drove her mad. Her eyes had an emptiness to them that made Zacharias despair.