Once Upon an Us

The History, As Told by Me in a Short Chapter

When I was five years old, I was kidnapped from my home by SS officers.  Tony and I had been playing in the creek down the road, trying to catch the fish that swam past our short legs.  Tony had just caught a frog and was showing it to me when they appeared behind us with guns and bulletproof vests.  One of them offered us some candy, something we’d never had before. We’d heard about it, of course. Our parents read us all sorts of books I now know were banned at the time.  We were distracted by the candy and Tony’s frog so at the time we didn’t notice the officers that marched into the house and shot our parents.

They told us we were being rescued, returned to our real parents and that the man and woman we’d been raised by had kidnapped us as babies.  We were born for a different purpose, a special purpose. We were Lebensborn and the woman we called mother was a liar who had stolen us away from our home to keep us from our purpose.

“You’re going to be the best there ever was,”  one of the officers told me, smiling as he handed me a white daisy.  My hands were cold from the water and I ended up dropping the flower into the creek, but Tony caught it before it could float away.  He had to let go of his frog to do so, but the flower was nicer anyway.

“Come with us,”  another officer said, helping us out of the creekbed.  We were soaked from the waist down, but that didn’t stop them from carrying us down the road to the vehicle they’d brought.  “We’ll take you back home to your father.”

I never saw my parents alive again, didn’t even get to say goodbye before being delivered into the hands of the Nazi Reich and trained to be a murderer.  They gave me a new name, but I never liked it that much; Hilda sounded so hideous compared to the name Thea that my parents had given me. Tony was still Tony, although they did change Antonio to Anton because it sounded more German.  Anton could work for the Reich, but Antonio could not.

I was eight when I killed my first victim and got punished because I cried afterward.  Tony and I rarely saw each other during the day, only seeing the other at night when we were returned to our room and locked inside.  When he heard what I’d been forced to do that day, he got himself beat. He’d tried to fight my trainer.

“Leave her alone!”  he had screamed, running toward him the next day.  He managed to get one hit on the man before being bested and taken away to be punished.  When I was returned to our room that night, he was passed out on the bed, blood caked on his arms and legs.  Our blanket was soaked in blood from his back and I remember hiding in the corner just to avoid looking at him.  That was the last night we both cried ourselves to sleep. After that, we became determined to be their best.

“Only when you’re the best will the pain and suffering end,”  my trainer told me every time he nearly killed me. I believed him.  I worked harder, trained more, and started to beat my trainer more and more.  Eventually, they must have realized I’d kill him if I wasn’t given a real target to take care of.  I was ready to prove I was the best.

I signed the letter of allegiance at the age of sixteen.  I had barely set down the pen before I was sent out on my first mission and killed a low-level government agent.  Now that I think about it, he wasn’t a threat at all. The Reich didn’t need him dead, they just wanted to see if I’d really kill a man without asking and I did.  Tony knew why I was gone that night; didn’t say anything about my allegiance pledge or my mission when I returned, just made sure I was alright then continued his training.

When I was twenty-four, I finished a mission early.  It was sloppy, I’d made multiple mistakes and I knew were going to get me beat that night.  I didn’t want to return right away, so I wandered. The target I’d killed had a large estate in the middle of the city, so I wandered through the city.  I found a kid on the side of the street who was lost and tried to help him get back home.

“Where do you live?”  I asked him, taking his hand and walking with him down the sidewalk.

“I don’t live anywhere,”  he answered. He said it so simply as if it was the only thing he knew for sure.  I asked where his parents were and he pointed down the street. “In the church.”

“Why are they at church?”  I asked. It was the middle of the night and I knew there wasn’t a church service at that time even if the illegal services tended to meet at odd hours of the night.

“They’re dead,”  he told me. It shocked me how okay he was with that.  I’m still not sure how long his parents were dead for, but it must have been a while at that point.  He didn’t even tear up at the thought of them being dead. I asked how they’d died. “The pastor says they were found by angels, but angels don’t put round holes in people’s heads.  At least, they don’t in the Bible.”

I left him after that.  He called after me, asking where I was going, but I just left.  His parents had been shot and I could have been the one that did it.  I couldn’t be certain, of course, but what if it was me? I’d just killed a man and woman that night without checking if they had kids, maybe I’d done that same to that boy’s parents.

I told Tony about the little boy as soon as I was returned to our room.  He was preoccupied with the injuries I’d gotten from my beating, but I repeated it for him once he was finished fussing.  I couldn’t keep doing this, not without knowing who exactly I was killing and why. The Reich refused to tell me. They got upset when I started asking questions and I started getting beat more.  Tony started fighting them more often which didn’t help because then we were both getting beat. As if to prove to us they still controlled our lives, they dropped us in Florida with no supplies and twenty-four hours to find the mark and kill him without messing up.  The only thing we had to go off of was a blurry photograph and a city name.

We’d been beaten only a few hours before and it was hard to cover up all our injuries and avoid suspicion by citizens.  I’m pretty sure that’s how Jude found us, limping down the street and nearly bleeding out. At that point, I was ready to be dead.  Even if I was injured and was struggling to stay upright, I could have killed him. I didn’t, though, hoping maybe he’d kill me instead and then I could escape the Reich.  Instead, he offered us a safe place to hide and the promise that the Reich would never find us. We took it and were out of Florida before the Reich had even sent a jet to pick us up.

We stayed with Jude and Laura--Jude’s wife--for a few days.  It didn’t take long before the Reich had officers searching the streets for us.  He took us to Carol and hid us in her back rooms. By the time Tony had come up with aliases for us, he’d wiped all the digital information the Reich had on us off the face of the earth.  Apparently, we turned up dead a couple of weeks later which must have been Jude’s doing. I worked with the OSS until the day it collapsed and Tony helped people on the black market who were hiding from the Reich escape for good.  With the OSS gone, I did freelance work with Jude and Marie, helping Tony get people to safety and getting rid of officers that were important to the Reich’s advances.