Despite the significance of the February day for lovers around the world, the holiday made no difference to the gloomy influence of a morning without a sky. Fog banks, thick and nigh impenetrable sat heavily on their haunches, leaving millions of luminescent water droplets on every surface in their wake. Dulling every sense available to its disposal, the mist sat snugly, apparently confident in it’s ability to stay without interference from the sun.
Hart didn’t like the fog. It was awful stuff, tumbling her few advantages over nature into disarray. The world having already been grayscale in her eyes, was chaotic through the fog, forcing a bit of a headache into the fur on her elongated head. Snuffling, the German Sheppard took a step forward, tail limply twitching in unease. The air was acidic even with the fog, and very nearly overwhelming. She exhaled, and then carefully began to pick her way through the bodies littered on the ground, nose following an invisible, trailing red hot line of loyalty and love. There were about 249 bodies total at the time, but Hart neither knew this nor cared. Her mind and nose were quite simply set on finding her Aliza, a task she wouldn’t lay down until she’d accomplished or died.
The piece of paper stuffed in her leather itched persistently, chafing her shoulder every time she took a step, rubbing the tender skin raw. Grimacing in annoyance, the dog stopped beside the body of balding man to furiously scratch at her collar with her hind leg. A cascade of dark dog hairs tumbled exuberantly into the face of the dead man, black fur stark against the whites of his sunken blue eyes. Hart snuffled his face carefully for traces of her master before picking her way around him.
Having scratched to no avail, the dog huffed and shook, decidedly setting her jaw against the pesky piece of paper. The Doctor had only given her the letter because of Aliza’s scent, and Aliza knew it, so she had absoloutley no problem with befouling it. Hart had tried to reason with The Doctor, but of course, he didn’t listen. Hart knew Aliza’s particular scent like no one else’s, and she certainly didn’t need one of Aliza’s old soggy school papers to “help her out.” And so, oblivious to her communication efforts, he’d placed it on her, tying it three times ‘round with twine before letting her out of his car and onto the desolate road to a so-called “Auschwitz .” Hart knew this only because she’d seen the sign, but she wagged her tail anyway at her brief stroke of genius.
The fog cleared a little further on, again putting more bounce back into her weary brindled tail. The ground, previously hard and sharp with frost, was warmer here but no less pleasant, burgundy mood squelching between Hart’s toes. Part of a women’s scalp blocked her next step, so she snuffled it hopefully before trotting onward, excitedly shuffling her way through the dead until she found what she’d been looking for.
A quiet sniffling preceded Alicia’s presence, alarm sizzling in Hart’s mind like an ember. Gone was the smell of death and rot at least, but the salty tang of blood and the living hung close, aided by the grimy scent of threadbare unwashed wool. And far more precedent, the smell of her beloved Aliza Hartmann. Lunging forward, the dog careened around the far side of a skeletal looking bush, nearly colliding with another hulking mass who most definitely was not a packmate.
In every aspect, the man was malicious. Malicious and unwelcome. And above all, he was blocking a dog from her master. The brindled tale whipped upward, fur spiking and rising as it went, spreading from the fur on her tail to the fur on her neck and shoulders like a wave of hostility. Not a second behind the upper lips followed suite, held high and aloft above spotted pink and black gums, heralding a chest-deep heart from the tip of her curled tongue. The vibrations shook her body, muscles rigid against sparse fat. A second longer and she would be have been 85 pounds of pure rage on tender flesh. As it was, the man’s back heaved unnaturally for a moment, bulging impossibly. Hart stepped closer, lips drawn taut and nostrils flaring wildly. Odd, her senses told her. Wrong. He still smelled of her Aliza, but he didn’t smell… alive…
Hart had only the emotional response time to yelp before she could oh-so-barely dart to the side, narrowly avoiding being crushed by the immense expanse of sallow flesh. The German Shepard paused warily before returning to the body, snuffling various scented parts gingerly.
He hadn’t been dead for long- maybe an hour or two at most, and the gaping hole in his side had long stopped easing crimson. His clothes didn’t match the other deaders’. On the contrary, it smelled like it might once have been regularly cleaned. Hart sneezed, swiftly pulling her sensitive snout away from the brown mess at the seat of his pricey pants. Finishing her inspection, she growled at the body. The front of his pants gaped open, male member hanging limply into the dirt, just as dead as the rest of ‘im, Hart nodded in approval. She’d been neutered as a pup, and she stood proud of the fact now.
And behind the man, crumpled and frozen against a cold metal chain-link fence- Aliza. With not a second’s thought for the body, Hart bounded forward, clearing the man in an easy jump but landing almost directly ontop of her owner. Within seconds, the girl’s face was slick with saliva and burning with contrast against Hart’s warm, and very much alive, body heat. And then her tiny face was convulsing, disappearing under salt and wrinkles. Promptly, Hart ran her nose over every available surface, tongue following soon after until the cold was gone and her master’s little girl was back.
“Hart, H-hart,” she sobbed, fingers twining deep into brindled fur and gripping somewhat harshly. Hart waited patiently, unwilling to drop her own thorough worried investigation.
“Hart, I m-missed you! I missed you so much! M-mama, Papa, they’re all d’ed. B-but I remembered giving you to Doctor Bakst, so I knew you were okay! I knew y-you were okay…” Subsiding into continuos quiet sniffles, her body relaxed slightly, eleven year old bony body yielding entirely to Hart’s care.
After a moment of silence, she rocked back from her kneeling position onto the frail balls of her bare feet. Smearing tears and snot across her sleeve, she grimaced, then returned disbelieving fish-yellow little hands behind Hart’s ears, under her belly, around her face, and along her back. In Hart’s mind, it was the best petting she’d ever had. When Aliza had finished (and no sooner), Hart stood up to nose her cold snout under Aliza’ armpit, making Aliza giggles and Hart sneeze. Ignoring the little girl’s profound joy, Hart shrugged her youngest packmate to her feet, taking care to be gentle. Aliza babbled on, apperantly anxious and relieved to have someone to spill her heart out to again.
“Oh, Hart! It was awful! This place…” She shuddered, angrily wiping a few stray tears loose with a scowl. “Well, I’ll get to that later. But these men, prisoners I guess, Jews like me an’ gypsies an’ oddities, these people collect ‘em! So they staged this attack thing, to get out, you know? The whole crematorium blew up! There were dead guards and everything. They called it a mass breakout,” Aliza paused, beaming. “And by golly, we did it! 249 de’d, but the men, they were saying that if even one survived, it’d be worth it, and I did!”
~~~~~~~
Alternate Ending 1;
“Oh, Hart! It was awful! This place…” She shuddered, angrily wiping a few stray tears loose with a scowl. “Well, I’ll get to that later. But these men, prisoners I guess, Jews like me an’ gypsies an’ oddities, these people collect ‘em! So they staged this attack thing, to get out, you know? The whole crematorium blew up! There were dead guards and everything. They called it a mass breakout,” Aliza paused, beaming. “And by golly, we did it! 249 de’d, but the men, they were saying that if even one survived, it’d be worth it, and I did!”
Hart smiled inwardly at her master’s joy, and, indulging the little girl’s patience, nudged little Aliza Kaiser onward, away from her death and back into loving arms and paws.
~~~~~~~~~
Alternate Ending 2:
“Oh, Hart! It was awful! This place…” She shuddered, angrily wiping a few stray tears loose with a scowl. “Well, I’ll get to that later. But these men, prisoners I guess, Jews like me an’ gypsies an’ oddities, these people collect ‘em! So they staged this attack thing, to get out, you know? The whole crematorium blew up! There were dead guards and everything. They called it a mass breakout,” Aliza paused, beaming. “And by golly, we did it! 249 de’d, but the men, they were saying that if even one survived, it’d be worth it, and I di-“
She froze. Swaying unevenly, she looked down at her chest, brown eyes wide with surprise at the darkness spreading across the shallow ivory purity of the wool.
The blossom of the gunshot cracked through the air only a second later, and it seemed to Hart that she took a decade to collapse, limps slowly unfolding in on each other as she hit the ground, young eyes wide and unseeing.
Almost blindly, Hart shoved her wet nose to her Aliza’s face, numbly searching, questing for her old master’s vibrant spark of life. The bruised skin under Hart’s flesh cooled to nothing, as unyielding as the dead around them.
And with that, Hart lost everything she’d ever had. Her mind, bent so far backward in loops and u-turns, snapped, erasing every impulse control, thought, and joyous feeling she’d ever had. There was only longing, and her human.
Hart was alone. More alone than she’d ever been. With trembling limbs, Hart sank down by her master, and waited hopefully simply for her to come back to Hart, blind in her own faith.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Background Information
On October 7, 1944, 250 Jewish Sonderkommandos (laborers) at Auschwitz attacked their guards and blew up Crematorium IV with explosives female prisoners had smuggled in from a nearby factory. Three German guards were killed during the uprising, one of whom was stuffed into an oven. The Sonderkommandos attempted a mass breakout, but all 250 were killed soon after.
