A YOUNG SUCCUBUS NAMED DELICIA by Michel Poulin - HTML preview

CHAPTER 16 – AN UNEXPECTED TRIP TO GERMANY

 

10:19 (Paris Time)

Friday, July 17, 1942

Butcher shop, Boulevard Saint-Germain

6th Arrondissement, Paris

Occupied France

Mélanie had just been served by one of the employees of the butcher shop she was visiting, having exchanged rationing coupons against the meager allotment of meat officially allowed to the girls at the cabaret and was on her way out, muttering to herself.

‘’Twelve ounces of meat per person, per week. What a joke! It is a good thing that I am able to loot German food supplies. If not, we would be bordering on starvation.’’

As she walked out of the butcher shop, she passed by one of her neighbors who was waiting in line for her own ration of meat. The graying woman gave her a poisonous look and spoke loud enough to be heard by the other people in the lineup.

‘’Well, well! Isn’t this the young bitch from the ‘Mille et Une Nuits’ Cabaret who sleeps with German officers?’’

‘’Fuck you, you old hag! You don’t know what you are talking about.’’ Leaving it at that before other people in the lineup started harassing her, Mélanie started walking back towards the cabaret, situated three blocks from the butcher shop. As she was waiting to cross an intersection, two German Army trucks came in suddenly and stopped with screeching brake noises in front of a bookstore. Now fully on alert, Mélanie watched a full squad of SS troopers jump out of the first truck and then brutally enter the bookstore. While the Waffen SS divisions which had briefly occupied Paris were gone, soldiers of the Algemeine SS, or General Service of the SS Corps, were still responsible for fighting Résistance members and other ‘enemies of the Reich’ through Occupied France. She then noticed the anti-Semitic graffiti painted on the front window of the boutique and understood what was happening: this was another instance of anti-Jewish repression by the Germans. To her deep displeasure, a woman waiting near her on the sidewalk smiled with glee at the spectacle.

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‘’Good! A few less dirty Jews in Paris!’’

Mélanie gave the woman a hateful glare but didn’t speak then: unfortunately, anti-Semitic sentiments were quite widespread through Paris and the rest of France, with many French citizens blaming Jews for the defeat and fall of France. Mélanie didn’t have any special feelings about Jews and in fact mocked their blind faith in a God that had never helped them in difficult times before. However, she was rational enough to understand why Jews were so despised by many in France: simple jealousy, jealousy at how the Jews’ hard work had brought them prosperity. As a being from outside France and the Material Plane, Mélanie despised xenophobia and racism in general, something that tended to set her against this whole anti-Jewish backlash. After less than a minute, the SS soldiers started coming out of the bookstore, dragging out with them a terrified family of six: two adults, three teenagers and one preteen. The family was brutally loaded up in the back of the second truck, which already had a number of despondent-looking men, women and children inside, guarded by two stern-faced SS troopers, then the trucks left. Taking a quick decision, Mélanie nearly ran across the street and into the bookstore, whose door had been smashed in. Once inside and out of view from the people on the street and sidewalks, she turned invisible, then ran back out. Seeing the second German truck about to turn a corner in the distance, she made a teleporting jump, landing on the roof of the truck’s cab, where she then lay down to distribute her weight while still invisible. As her truck rode through the streets of the 6th

Arrondissement, Mélanie sent a telepathic message to her mother, doing so before she became too far from the cabaret to communicate.

‘Mother, this is Mélanie. I just saw something happen and need to investigate it. I don’t know when I will return, so say that I went to visit a relative outside Paris for a few days. I will keep you posted as things go.’

She then braced herself, in order not to be thrown off when the truck she was on braked suddenly or turned quickly.

The two German trucks made three more stops around the 6th Arrondissement, brutally collecting more Jews from their homes and shops and loading them in Mélanie’s truck. On two of those occasions, she saw French policemen actively participate in the arrests, helping the SS troopers and being barely less brutal than the Germans. That didn’t surprise Mélanie, although it still infuriated her to no little degree: up to now the French police, under the orders of the Vichy government, had mostly sold its soul to the

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Germans and had actively collaborated with them, helping by guarding jailed Résistance members and harassing groups, like the Jews, who were in the sights of the Germans. Finally, the two trucks arrived at the Paris Winter Cyclodrome, or Vélodrome d’Hiver, better known by the Parisians as the ‘Vel d’Hiv’, situated near the École Militaire in the 15th Arrondissement. A mix of German soldiers and French policemen guarded the entrance to the Vélodrome, where the Jews inside Mélanie’s truck were led after jumping out of the back. Still under cover of invisibility, she climbed down from the cab of the truck and followed the group inside the big domed building, where bicycle races were held on a long oval wooden track. What she saw inside made her stop for a moment, shocked: thousands of people, men, women and children guarded by French policemen packed the bleachers surrounding the race track. The air stank of urine and feces and the heat was near intolerable, at least for normal human beings. Seeing a senior French police officer speaking with a German officer near the entrance, Mélanie cautiously approached them in order to be able to listen to their conversation, while being careful not to bump into anyone.

‘’…and when will all these Jews be transported out of the Vélodrome?’’ asked the French police officer, making the German officer answer him in good French.

‘’In four days. A collection of buses will bring them to the internment camp in Drancy, where they will await their shipment by train to Germany.’’

‘’But, I already have over 7,000 people packed in here and I haven’t received any food for them. The sanitary situation is also near catastrophic.’’

‘’Let those Jews starve in their shit!’’ replied coldly the German officer with a dismissing wave of the hand. ‘’They don’t deserve better! Just make sure that no one escapes until they can be picked up and brought to Drancy.’’ The French police officer, clearly feeling ill at ease with this, swallowed his objections, knowing that they would only bring trouble to himself.

‘’Very well! You can count on my men.’’

‘’Good! Then, I will see you again in four days.’’

As the German turned around and walked out of the Vélodrome, Mélanie closely followed him, having heard enough. Once outside, she teleported to her bedroom in the upper floor of the cabaret, where she became visible again before going down to the kitchen. There, she handed over her small package of meat to Sylvie Renaudin while making a face.

‘’Here, Sylvie: our meat for all of us for a week.’’

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The 45-year-old widow looked at the package with disdain while taking it from Mélanie.

‘’It is a good thing that you are so good at stealing German rations, Mélanie. If not, we would all be nearly down to bones and skin.’’

‘’I know, but we still have to play the rationing game, unless those Vichy functionaries could become suspicious and put the Germans on our trail. Where is Mother, by the way?’’

‘’In the show room, speaking with a photographer.’’

‘’A photographer? What for?’’

‘’You will have to ask her about that: I don’t have a clue.’’

‘’Alright, I will go speak with her then.’’

Walking out of the kitchen, Mélanie went to the big show room, where she saw her mother sitting on a sofa and speaking with a thin man in his forties. Marie smiled on seeing her and presented Mélanie to her visitor as she approached them.

‘’Aah, here is my daughter Mélanie, Monsieur Lepage. As you can see, she will make a perfect subject for our posters project.’’

‘’Posters, Mother? What are we talking about here?’’

‘’A small idea that could bring us quite a lot of extra money, while also helping Monsieur Lepage’s business. I remembered a concept that is very popular in the United States, that of the ‘Pinup Girl’, and think that it could be very popular with our customers. Basically, Monsieur Lepage would take good quality pictures of you and of the other girls in various stages of undress, then produce large copies of them as posters or portraits for sale to our customers. The more undressed, the higher the price. What do you think?’’

Mélanie smiled at that, amused at once by the concept.

‘’I think that those posters would sell like hot cakes, Mother. I’m for it!’’

‘’Good! Monsieur Lepage is going to return here early this afternoon with his camera equipment, after we get an agreement on the price of the posters. Could you be ready then to pause for him in various dresses and in the nude?’’

‘’I will, Mother. Uh, can I see you afterwards concerning another business?’’

‘’Of course, my dear Mélanie! I should be done here shortly.’’

As promised, Marie Laurent came to see Mélanie about fifteen minutes later, meeting with her in the manager’s office of the cabaret.

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‘’So, what did you see, Mélanie?’’

‘’The Germans, helped by the French police, are conducting a massive roundup of Jews around Paris, collecting men, women and children. Over 7,000 Jews are already packed inside the Vel d’Hiv, with more coming by the hour. They are to be transported to an internment camp in Drancy, where they are to await transport by train to Germany.’’

‘’But, why round up children as well? They can’t be used as forced labor.’’ Mélanie then gave a somber look at her adoptive mother.

‘’Mother, from the way I saw those Jews treated inside the Vel d’Hiv, I don’t think that the Germans collected them only as slave labor. I don’t know yet what they will do with the children and old men and women, but I suspect something more sinister than slave labor.’’

‘’Like what?’’

‘’Again, I don’t know. I will need to visit that camp in Drancy in four days, when those Jews in the Vel d’Hiv will be bused there. Then, I should be able to find more about this. Just be prepared to lose me for a few days then.’’ Marie sighed in resignation at those last words: Mélanie was still the undisputed star of the cabaret and attracted a lot of German officers to it.

‘’Very well, Mélanie! I will tell that you went to a relative’s farm in Normandy to pick up fresh vegetables and butter there. Please be careful during your trip, Mélanie. I would hate to lose you now.’’

‘’Don’t worry about me, Mother: you know how hard I am to catch…or to kill. Nobody in Drancy will be able to see me, let alone capture or hurt me. Well, with this said, I better go start selecting a few titillating outfits for my photo session this afternoon.’’

‘’Your best titillating outfit is still yourself in the buff, Mélanie.’’

‘’I know!’’ replied Mélanie, grinning with mischief. ‘’I like being in the buff!’’

20:36 (Paris Time)

Tuesday, July 21, 1942

Drancy internment camp, Northeast suburbs of Paris

When the French gendarmes ordered out the occupants of the long convoy of buses which had just arrived from the Vélodrome, they paid little attention to a tall

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teenage girl that exited last her bus. Like the other Jews, she had a yellow star sewn on her jacket and, apart from being very beautiful, did not stand out with the rest of the crowd, in which quite a few other beautiful women and girls were. The gendarmes, watched over by a few German SS officers, made the newcomers line up ten deep in the wide-open ground surrounded by the big, U-shaped building that made up the camp. Ten French gendarmes sitting at small folding tables set in the courtyard then started the long, tedious process of registering individually the new inmates, with German officers in attendance and watching closely. It took a good three hours before Mélanie was pushed in front of one of the tables, where the gendarme sitting behind it couldn’t help admire her beauty for a second before starting asking questions in a rough manner.

‘’Papers!’’

‘’I don’t have identity papers: I lost them when I was arrested.’’

‘’That’s if you had any legal papers to start with, young girl: you are probably some illegal immigrant, like most of the rest here. What is your name?’’

‘’Lilie Lorenz!’’

‘’That doesn’t sound French to me! Where are you from?’’

‘’I was born in the Alsace, but moved to Paris years ago.’’

‘’And your parents are here with you?’’

‘’No! I was alone when I was arrested and I don’t know what happened to the rest of my family.’’

‘’Well, that’s not really important. Date and place of birth?’’

‘’June thirteenth, 1924, in Strasbourg.’’

‘’Last fixed address?’’

‘’34 Rue Suger, 6th Arrondissement.’’

‘’Occupation?’’

‘’Student!’’

The gendarme then consulted a list of rooms in the camp’s main building and wrote her name down alongside a number, then wrote down the room number on a small piece of paper that he gave to Mélanie.

‘’You are now to go to that room, on the third floor of the wing behind you. Stay there!’’

‘’When will we get something to eat, sir?’’

That was when the SS officer standing behind the gendarme spoke up, his voice harsh.

‘’You Jews don’t need to eat! Shut up and go to your room!’’

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Feigning meekness, Mélanie obeyed and went around the crowd of people still waiting to be processed, entering the four-storey building through one of its doors and climbing stairs to the third floor. There, she found that the room assigned to her, a bare concrete one containing only a number of old steel double bunk beds with straw mattresses and no blankets or pillows, already lodged nine other women and girls. Those women and girls all looked understandably despondent but still greeted her warmly, exchanging their names with her. Apparently exhausted by their five-day ordeal at the Vélodrome, where they had been kept with no food and little water, the women quickly enough went to sleep on their old straw mattresses, leaving Mélanie alone to watch outside the remaining prisoners still being processed. She had deliberately chosen to infiltrate this camp as an inmate in order to see what this was all about, but she already could sense that, as bad as things were already for those unfortunate people, worst was probably to come.

07:22 (Paris Time)

Wednesday, August 5, 1942

Le Bourget train station, near Drancy

Like the other inmates, Mélanie was stuffed into dirty, overcrowded cattle cars, with only one sanitary bucket per car and no water or food provided. The food provided in Drancy having been near starvation level, all the inmates were already quite weak, except of course for Mélanie, who needed little food to sustain herself and who had been able to discreetly teleport back and forth to the cabaret to give quick reports to Marie. The train then started moving, slowly at first, then took up a bit more speed as it switched lines a couple of times, all the time heading east.

The trip, going on for three days, was an ordeal for the occupants of the train, with insufficient water and no food being provided only once a day at various stops along the way. Those stops however allowed Mélanie to roughly follow the itinerary of the train, which crossed the whole of Germany before entering the southern part of Poland. When the inmates were finally allowed to come out of their stinking, overheated rail cars, it was to find themselves in the train station of a place called Auschwitz. With SS soldiers opening the sliding doors of the cattle cars, Mélanie was finally able to leave the hot and stinky car where she had been stuffed with over 160 other prisoners. Still, she was in

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much better shape than her companions, who were weak from lack of food and exhausted by the stifling heat inside the rail car. The few thousand Jews from the train were then brutally made to line up two deep along the quay, with a few SS officers then starting to go down the ranks, quickly inspecting the newcomers. Mélanie carefully but also discretely listened and watched that process from her place in the rear rank, noting how the SS officers would point in turn at each prisoner they had just inspected and simply said ‘recht!’ or ‘links!’ A soldier following the officer closely would then grab the prisoner in question and turn him or her towards either the right or the left. Mélanie was quickly able to discern a pattern in that process, a pattern which raised a bad feeling in her. Most of the Jews, including all of the young children, elderly people and women with small children, ended going ‘left’, while those looking relatively fit physically were sent ‘right’. Things became even clearer when some of the Jews selected to go ‘left’ and who were too weak or too old to walk away were then brutally grabbed by a SS officer, pulled aside and then shot dead with a bullet in the head, causing the other Jews to exclaim and whimper in fear and horror. Inmates already present in the train station and waiting with wheelbarrows then came forward to load the bodies and carry them away. Mélanie was then able to see that those inmates, looking frightfully emaciated, wore only black and white stripped, two-piece prison fatigues and ill-fitting wooden shoes without socks. They also had either color triangles or yellow stars sewn on their shirts.

Mélanie was still watching all this when a SS officer briefly stopped in front of her and gave her a quick head to toe look. She was then able to note the human skull insignia that was part of the man’s SS collar tabs. While the SS stayed apparently impassive, Mélanie was able to feel the lust the man felt as he eyed her fit, sexy body. He then spoke one word: ‘recht!’, before stepping in front of the next woman, who was sent ‘links!’. Pushed in the correct direction by a soldier, Mélanie walked to join the group selected with her, with women and girls segregated from the men. A female German SS auxiliary guarding the hundred or so Jewish women of her group forced her into the ranks with liberal use of her truncheon and insults in German. While waiting for the culling to be completed, Mélanie was able to survey in more detail her surroundings. The place was a bleak one, with two separate camps visible from the train station, both surrounded by barbed wire fences and watchtowers. The furthest, and also largest camp, towards which the children, women and old people selected to go ‘left’ were now walking, had rows and rows of long, single-storey barracks, plus a few brick buildings.

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The nearest camp, with fewer barracks, also had what appeared to be a number of warehouses or workshops and was only a few hundred yards from the train station. Mélanie’s group of women was soon ordered to start walking towards the nearest camp. The women who dared ask questions or were crying as they saw their husbands or sons splitting from them got beaten up by the guards and female auxiliaries, the latter apparently taking great pleasure in doing so. As a Demon, Mélanie/Delicia was a proud being who knew how much more powerful she was than those German guards, but she contained herself, promising under her breath while walking in silence to get back at those sadists one fine day.

Her group soon entered through the main gate of the nearest camp, passing under a forged steel sign saying ‘Arbeit macht frei’, or ‘Work brings freedom’ in German. Stopping in front of a brown brick building near the main gate, the group was then made to go inside it in single file under heavy guard. In the building, Mélanie’s turn eventually came in front of a German woman sitting at a desk and registering the prisoners in, asking questions in fair French.

‘’Name!’’

‘’Lilie Lorenz!’’

‘’Date and place of birth!’’

‘’June thirteenth, 1924, in Strasbourg, France.’’

‘’Last address?’’

‘’36 Rue Suger, Paris.’’

While the woman asked her questions and wrote down the answers in a large registry book, a SS officer standing behind the auxiliary eyed Mélanie with barely hidden interest.

‘’You seem quite strong and healthy, Jew. What kind of work were you doing in Paris?’’

‘’I was a student.’’ replied Mélanie. A SS female auxiliary standing behind her immediately hit her back with a wooden rod she held in her right hand.

‘’YOU WILL ADDRESS THE OFFICER AS ‘SIR’, JEWISH BITCH!’’ Fighting the urge to simply turn around and break the jaw of the matron, Mélanie repeated her answer in a flat tone.

‘’I was a student, sir!’’

‘’That’s better! Never forget from now on that you will live only as long as we wish so, girl. Now, you will have to work to earn your food. If you don’t work hard

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enough, you will be punished. If you lack respect to a German, you will be also punished. If you try to escape, you will be executed. Do you understand, girl?’’

‘’Yes sir!’’

‘’Good! You will be assigned to the rock quarry detail and will start work tomorrow morning, after you will have been processed in.’’ The officer then spoke in German to the auxiliary at the desk, who registered Mélanie’s designated assignment and gave her a little piece of paper with a number on it.

‘’Go to the next room to your right and present this number to the attendant there. NEXT!’’

Walking to the opened door to her right, Mélanie stepped inside a fairly large room where inmates were made to sit into chairs, with their denuded left forearm put on a table and with women wielding tattooing drills then marking a number on the inmates’ forearm. The process was done quickly and crudely while ignoring the moans of pain from the prisoners being tattooed. Mélanie was made to sit at one of the tattooing stations and told to give her paper with a number on it to the tattooing ‘artist’. The latter ‘artist’ however frowned when her drill barely managed to scratch the surface of Mélanie’s skin. When she saw that the process was taking an inordinate amount of time in Mélanie’s case, a SS female matron came to her, barking at the artist.

‘’Why are you taking so long with that girl?’’

‘’Her skin: it is incredibly tough, like hard leather, Frau Wolsingen. My drill has a hard time scratching it.’’

‘’Let me see that!’’

The matron then pushed away the tattoo artist, taking her place and grabbing the drill. She soon found out that the artist had not been exaggerating and gave a puzzled look at Mélanie.

‘’What did you do with your skin?’’

‘’Nothing, Frau!’’

Shaking her head, the matron tried again, this time pressing the drill hard into Mélanie’s forearm and finally managing to etch her assigned number on her forearm. Sweating from the effort, the matron gave her a mean look and pointed to the door of an adjacent room.

‘’Go in there!’’

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That room proved to be a sort of changing room, where the inmates were told to undress completely and leave behind any possessions they still had with them, before being given a single set of two-piece stripped camp fatigues and a pair of wooden shoes, plus a tin canteen and a spoon. The SS officer watching the Jewish women strip was left staring at Mélanie when she stripped naked, her tall, perfect sexy body and angelic beauty setting her apart from the other inmates like a light in a dark room. The officer then approached her while she was still naked and waiting for her camp fatigues and slowly turned around her while admiring her body.

‘’What is your name, girl?’’

‘’Lilie Lorenz, sir!’’

‘’You are quite beautiful…for a Jew. Are you sure that you are not of Aryan blood?’’

‘’Quite sure, sir!’’

‘’Too bad: you truly stand apart in this crowd. Maybe I will be able to arrange something special for you. Which work were you assigned to?’’

‘’The rock quarry, sir!’’

‘’Very well! Get in the line!’’

‘The bastard is probably hoping to use me as his personal sex slave.’ thought to herself Mélanie while joining the line of inmates waiting for their camp uniforms. While waiting, she noticed that veteran inmates were collecting the clothes and possessions of the newcomers and doing a triage of the lot, throwing the various categories of objects or clothes in specific bins on wheels, to be carried away later.

Now wearing no underwear under her rough stripped camp fatigues and with no socks in her ill-fitting wooden shoes, Mélanie and the other women of her group were lined up again outside of the brick building and formed into a large marching group by SS matrons and soldiers before being walked away towards a row of long, low wooden barracks. However, before getting to the barracks proper, the group was made to stop on one side of a courtyard and face a waiting SS officer. Many of the female inmates sucked in horrified comments when they saw the four prisoners, all women, suspended by ropes to thick wooden vertical posts: the women’s arms had been tied in their backs, then had been forced up, making their feet rise from the ground while the ligaments of their arms were painfully stretched and slowly thorn under the weight of their own bodies in a torture known to the old Spanish Inquisition as ‘Strapado’. The four tortured women

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were crying and moaning with pain as the SS officer addressed the horrified newcomers in French.

‘’You see those four women behind me? They are being punished for a number of infractions they committed yesterday and will stay up until I decide that they will have been properly punished enough. If you don’t obey our orders, if you don’t work hard enough or if you show disrespect to one of your guards, then you will be similarly punished. If you try to escape, you will be shot, period! If you become too lazy to work, we will then get rid of you, as the Jewish vermin you are properly deserve to be! However, if you work hard and respect and obey your guards, then you will be allowed to live…for the moment. With this said, you will now go into your assigned barrack and wait there for further instructions. GUARDS, GET THEM INSIDE!’’ The Jewish women, many already traumatized by the horrors and cruelty they had been witnessed to, were then pushed inside one of the barracks, finding there long rows of rickety wooden double bunks. There were no mattresses or blankets in sight, only rough wooden platforms and not a single table or chair in the barrack, which stood empty at the time. The SS matron then assigned bunks to the newcomers, with six women per double bunk, before leaving. Now alone, the new inmates looked at each other with fear and despair in their eyes.

‘’My God, what are we to become here?’’ Cried out a young woman. ‘’What will happen to my family?’’

‘’Do not cry!’’ replied a mature woman. ‘’Let us pray instead.’’ Most of the other women then started praying quietly as a group…but not Mélanie. Seeing her silent and impassive, one of the women sharing her bunk bed looked at her questioningly.

‘’You are not praying, friend?’’

Mélanie gave her a no-nonsense look in response.

‘’I don’t pray: I act instead.’’

‘’Act? And do what?’’

‘’You will see soon enough.’’

The Jewish woman then gave up on the conversation and continued with her prayers.

Mélanie’s group didn’t have much time to pray or rest, as the same SS officer who had lectured them soon returned briefly to call them out.

‘’EVERYBODY OUTSIDE! BRING YOUR CANTEENS WITH YOU!’’

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Seeing the prospect of finally getting their first thing to eat in over three days, the women walked out quickly enough, lining five deep in the courtyard under the orders of a SS matron. A small hand cart pushed by two prisoners and carrying large pots of hot soup then came in and served each woman with a cup’s worth of thin, meatless cabbage soup, but nothing else. The women were however so hungry that they eagerly took and ate their meager lunch as soon as it had been served to them. The SS officer then made the women quickly rinse their canteens in a bucket of water before lining them up again for another address.

‘’JEWS, AS YOU MAY HAVE UNDERSTOOD ALREADY, YOU ARE HERE TO WORK, NOT TO REST. SO, EVEN THOUGH THE MORNING WORK DETAILS HAVE ALREADY GONE TO WORK HOURS AGO, YOU WILL GO JOIN THEM NOW TO DO YOUR PART FOR TODAY. YOU WILL NOW SPLIT ACCORDING TO THE WORK DETAILS YOU WERE ASSIGNED TO ON ARRIVAL. FRAU MÜLLER, TAKE

CHARGE!’’

‘’YES SIR! COME ON JEWS! MOVE!’’

With liberal use of their truncheons and wooden rods, the SS matrons split the hundred or so women into eight separate groups, each led by a German matron. The groups were then led to their various places of work inside and outside the camp. In Mélanie’s case, her group made a prior stop at a warehouse near the main gate, where the women were given an assortment of picks, shovels, sledgehammers and wheelbarrows before walking out of the gate, with four SS soldiers as armed escorts to supplement the SS female auxiliary.

The walk from the camp to the rock quarry was maybe one mile long, but walking in ill-fitting wooden shoes and on a muddy dirt road quickly caused blisters to the feet of many of the women. The SS matron didn’t take pity on them however and kept liberally distributing both insults and blows to the Jewish women all along the way. Mélanie, carrying a big sledgehammer over one shoulder, got a few blows herself that had been given at random but kept her mouth shut. Instead, she recorded the face of that matron in her mind, promising herself to return the favor to that German soon enough. When they finally arrived at a small rock quarry dug on the side of a hill, the women found another forty or so other female prisoners already hard at work there. Those women had to have been in the camp for a while already, as they were clearly emaciated and weak and worked at a snail’s pace. That gave excuses to their guards to constantly beat

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on them in order to ‘motivate’ them. Seeing that, plus what she had seen since her arrival in the morning, Mélanie then understood too well the purpose of all this cruelty: it was not really to force Jewish prisoners to make truly productive work, but rather to decimate them through starvation, overwork and maltreatment. She then wondered about what had happened to all the other Jews from her train who had gone ‘links’ at the morning selection at the train station. She already had a few hypotheses about that but, even for a Demon like her, the most plausible ones were truly cringe-worthy.

‘Bel, Lord of the First Layer, would show more pity to his inmates than these German bastards do to these Jews! At least, the souls being punished for eternity in the Abyss were there because they committed crimes during their physical lives.’ thought Mélanie as she took position over a piece of rock she was to pound with her sledgehammer and reduce to gravel. She was soon swinging her sledgehammer vigorously, cracking her rock into ever smaller bits. Even while restraining her strength, which was equivalent to that of the strongest men ever known on Earth, her vigor and stamina quickly attracted stares from the German guards and from the SS matron, on top of getting glances from the Jewish women around her. In contrast, the woman that was supposed to shovel the gravel Mélanie produced into a waiting wheelbarrow barely had the strength to handle her shovel. The woman, who was in her forties, was frighteningly skinny and her back was bent from the merciless labor. The SS matron then approached and started raining blows of her stick on the poor woman.

‘’WORK HARDER AND FASTER, YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF JEWISH SHIT! YOU WANT TO END UP ON THE PUNISHMENT LIST THIS EVENING?’’

‘’No, please! Not the punishment list!’’ said fearfully the thin woman, who then put as much strength as she could in her work. That was however not enough to satisfy the matron, who kept harassing her at frequent intervals.

Maybe two hours later, as the wheelbarrow near Mélanie was full of gravel again, a false move by the woman driving it made it tip over. One of the Jewish woman present was unfortunate in being right beside when that happened, with the heavy wheelbarrow and its load tipping against her and trapping her right leg, sending the woman down with a cry of pain. Two other women then did their best to pry her leg loose but were too weak to manage to right the wheelbarrow up. As more women tried to help, and with the SS matron throwing invectives and blows around to make the work resume, Mélanie quickly stepped up to the upset wheelbarrow and, with one hand, grabbed it and put it

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back on its wheel with little apparent effort, worried that the trapped woman could have suffered a broken leg. For her, that feat was insignificant, as she could easily lift up to a half ton, but for both the inmates and the guards, that was simply herculean. As Mélanie was sweeping away the gravel to uncover the inmate’s leg, the SS matron approached her and tapped her on the shoulder with her stick.

‘’You, get up! What is your name?’’

‘’Lilie Lorenz, Frau43!’’

‘’Lorenz, hey? How come you are so strong?’’

‘’My father was a very strong man, Frau.’’

‘’I see! Alright, get back to work!’’

Reluctantly leaving the wounded woman, Mélanie returned to the block of rock she had been pounding to pieces. When two other inmates pulled the wounded woman free, it was to find that the latter had a broken ankle, as Mélanie had suspected. Despite that wound, the SS matron then forced the woman to return to work, but the unfortunate inmate just couldn’t walk anymore despite heroic efforts. To Mélanie’s fury and disgust, one of the SS soldiers then came up and coldly shot the wounded woman dead with a bullet in the head, then ordered two other inmates to drag the body out of the way. With growing anger and hatred in her, Mélanie forced herself to hide her emotions and continued working until the end of the afternoon, when work was stopped and the women were formed up five abreast to walk back to the camp, bringing their tools back with them. Two more women, veteran inmates with barely skin and bones left of them, fell behind during the march, too weak and exhausted to continue on with the group. Again, a SS soldier shot them dead, then ordered other prisoners to load the bodies into wheelbarrows in order to bring them back to the camp.

The group returned from the quarry only to be in time for the start of the evening roll call. First, the inmates, both male and female, were lined up five-deep along two sides of the central courtyard, with the men and women well segregated. Then, while everybody waited for the SS officers to show up, the guards forced the prisoners to take a number of stress positions, including squats with both hands clasped over the head. Those prisoners who could not hold their position were then beaten with rifle butts and truncheons. After maybe two hours of that regime, the SS officers finally deigned to

43 Frau: Madam in German. Miss would be Fraulein.

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show up, at which time an agonizingly slow count of the prisoners was made, then repeated. Those who had died during the day were also present in the ranks, held up by living inmates. Mélanie ended up supporting upright the poor woman who had her ankle crushed at the quarry and who had then been shot dead, something that further increased her furious wish for revenge. A Succubus was normally not a fighter, preferring to use subterfuges, deceptions, lies and seduction to attain her goals. However, half of Mélanie/Delicia’s blood came from an archangel who had previously fought Demons before falling from grace. That part of her blood was now screaming for justice and revenge as she held up the pitiful body of the dead woman while the Germans took a sadistic pleasure in making the prisoners’ suffering linger, their stomachs empty and their bodies close to total exhaustion. After three long hours standing in the open, the inmates were finally allowed to go to their barracks, where they were each given a small portion of moldy bread and a cup of water as their supper. More than a few of the women in Mélanie’s barrack, which was packed with over 700 inmates, went to sleep crying from either hunger, despair or both.

At around eleven at night, with the other inmates sleeping in a near comatose state around her, Mélanie quietly left her bunk as if to go use the nearby latrines. Instead, after checking that nobody could observe her, she became invisible, then teleported out of her barrack, intent on exploring the camp in detail. Bypassing the barracks full of inmates, Mélanie first concentrated her attention on the buildings used by the German staff and guards, noting in her mind where the guards were accommodated and where their armory was. Next were the various administrative buildings of the camp, including a big warehouse which contained all the clothes and personal effects confiscated from the prisoners on arrival. She recoiled with horror and disgust when she found in one office of that warehouse thousands of gold teeth which had been pulled out of the mouths of prisoners. Where those prisoners had ended became too evident when she jumped to the other, bigger camp, named Birkenau. Situated about two miles away from the first camp, Birkenau had a much larger prisoner capacity and also had what appeared to be two large, separate heating plants with multiple smokestacks. Intrigued by those plants, Mélanie teleported to the nearest one, still under an invisibility cloak. What she found were a row of steel oven doors, like the ones you would find in a coal-burning plant, next to a red brick cottage with its windows bricked shut. Checking first that no German guards were nearby, she went to one of the oven doors and opened it

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as quietly as she could. One look inside the oven made her recoil at once: the oven was half full with partially cremated human bones and skulls! Feeling for the first time in her life like she could throw up, Mélanie took a minute to regain her composure, then opened in turn the other ovens, finding them equally full of burned human remains. With horror and disgust quickly being replaced by hatred towards the monsters who could do such things, Mélanie then went to the nearby brick cottage. There, in an adjacent wooden building near the ovens, she found something that brought tears of sorrow and anger to her eyes: piled high in trolleys on wheels parked overnight, were the bodies of thousands of men, women and children, all naked and with their dead faces expressing suffocating deaths. She even recognized some of the victims as having been with her on her train this morning. Entering the brick cottage, she found the inside gutted empty, with the empty space equipped with long rows of shower head-like sprinklers connected to a network of lead pipes. There was however a stinking odor permeating the inside of the cottage and Mélanie was too happy to leave the building while trying to trace where the pipes originated. She found their source in a locked wooden hut just outside of the cottage, a hut that she easily entered by temporarily adopting an ethereal form. Inside, she found that the pipes were connected with receptacles in which some kind of chemical product could be introduced. Along one of the walls, she saw a pile of cardboard boxes bearing markings in German, along with the universal sign for a toxic product. Approaching the pile of boxes, she read one of the stickers.

‘’Zyklon B pesticide. Do not inhale the vapors or ingest. Highly toxic.’’ Reading the ingredients and formula of that pesticide, Mélanie saw from her old classes in chemistry that it was a highly lethal cyanide-based chemical compound. She now knew how all those poor French Jews had died today. It took all of her will not to unleash her demonic powers right now and go make the human monsters who had committed such crimes pay at once. Opening a box that was already half empty, Mélanie saw that it contained small plastic bags, each of them containing dozens of pills. Without thinking further, she grabbed one of the small bags and stuffed it in one pocket of her camp fatigues before leaving the hut and continuing her exploration of the Birkenau camp. Three hours later, not long before the scheduled waking up time of the prisoners, she was back in her crowded double bunk and pretended to go to sleep. In reality, the nightmarish images of what she had seen during her exploration of the camps stayed inside her mind, preventing her from finding true rest.

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04:30 (Berlin Time)

Sunday, August 9, 1942

Women’s barrack block, Auschwitz concentration camp Occupied Poland

‘’WAKE UP, JEWS! TIME FOR THE MORNING ROLL CALL! COME ON, SCHNELL!’’

Brutally awakened by a horde of SS matrons and by female ‘blockowas44’, the prisoners ran outside as quickly as they could to avoid the truncheon and stick blows, lining up in the courtyard for the morning roll call. Again, some inmates had to help support a few dead ones who had died during the night. Again, Mélanie volunteered to help hold up one of the unfortunate souls. By now, she had taken a decision and had a plan of action in mind. From what older inmates had said to her yesterday, she knew that on Sundays the inmates spent the day cleaning their barracks instead of going to work. She would thus have plenty of time to put her plan into work.

To her surprise, she found her fictitious name of ‘Lilie Lorenz’ being called up at the end of the head counting. Leaving the ranks, she was taken in charge by a SS matron and an armed soldier, then led towards the infirmary of the camp, situated in Block 10. She stopped briefly in front of the entrance to the infirmary building, looking at the red cross symbol on it.

‘’I don’t understand: I am not sick today, Frau.’’

‘’Doctor Schumann asked to examine you, Jew: that is enough reason to be here.’’ replied the SS matron. ‘’Now get in!’’

Still escorted by the matron and the SS soldier, Mélanie was brought into what looked like a private medical examination room, where a man in his late thirties and who was wearing a lab coat over his SS uniform was waiting, along with a female nurse. A mean smile appeared on the face of the German doctor as he eyed Mélanie.

‘’Aah, so this is the famous Lilie Lorenz I have been hearing about since yesterday? How old are you, girl?’’

44 Blockowas: Polish nickname given to the selected female inmates who served as auxiliaries to the SS inside the barracks of a concentration camp. Many of those blockowas were originally petty criminals who often proved quite sadistic in their behavior towards the other inmates.

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‘’I am eighteen, Doctor.’’

Schumann nodded once, then looked at the SS matron and soldier.

‘’You may leave: the hospital staff will take care of this prisoner from now on.’’

‘’Jawoll, Herr Sturmbannführer!’’ replied the soldier while giving the Nazi salute. He and the matron then turned around and left, leaving Mélanie alone with the doctor and the nurse. Schumann had the nurse close the door of the examination room first, then spoke to Mélanie in a neutral tone.

‘’I will need to examine you, girl. Remove your clothes!’’

Mélanie obeyed him at once, ending fully naked as she stood in front of the doctor, who couldn’t help eye with lust her perfect body.

‘’You are indeed a fine-looking human specimen, Miss Lorenz. Where were you born?’’

‘’In Strasbourg, France.’’

‘’In Alsace, hey? Then, you could well have some Aryan blood in your veins.’’

‘’Not a chance!’’ replied Mélanie at once in a defiant tone, both surprising and angering Schumann.

‘’Careful, girl! Stay polite or you will get punished. Now, the guards who saw you work yesterday reported that you possessed incredible strength and stamina. You do look very healthy and fit, but you are not that muscular. How would you explain your strength?’’

‘’Easy: I am not a Human.’’ said Mélanie, a smirk on her lips. Her eyes were however as cold as ice as she stared hard at the SS doctor, who suddenly felt uncomfortable.

‘’Not a Human? What do you mean by that, girl?’’

Before answering that, Mélanie raised her left hand, pointing it at the German nurse and saying two words in Abyssal.

‘’Magic Missile!’’

A salvo of two speedy red dots of light shot out of her extended fingers and struck the nurse, who let out a short cry of pain under the impact before crumbling to the floor like a broken puppet, dead. Before Schumann could get over his stunned surprise, Mélanie took three quick steps and grabbed him by the throat, crushing his larynx with her right hand while lifting him clear off the floor without any apparent effort. As the SS doctor desperately tried to gulp some air while attempting to break free from her herculean hold, Mélanie changed into her natural demonic form of Delicia the Succubus. The terrified

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Schumann now looked down at a 183-centimeter-tall naked woman with shiny reddish-brown skin, a pair of huge feathery black wings in her back, a pair of small horns on her forehead, claws on her fingers and toes and red eyes which shone like pieces of hot coal. Delicia then spoke with contained hatred and disgust in her voice.

‘’Just what I said, asshole! I am from Hell and to Hell you are going!’’ Gradually increasing the strength of her grip on his throat, she made Schumann’s strangling a slow, painful one, with the SS doctor dying after nearly one minute of agony. Slowly putting down the doctor’s body, so that it wouldn’t make noise by falling on the floor, Delicia, keeping her demonic form, then looked around for some possible weapons which could supplement the sharp claws on her fingertips and toes. Finding a collection of razor-sharp scalpels in one drawer, she grabbed the biggest one and held it in her left hand.

‘’Well, time to start administering their just punishment to all these German bastards.’’

She was about to walk out of the examination room when she remembered the small bag of Zyklon B pills in the pocket of her fatigues’ trousers. After a short hesitation, she recuperated her trousers and put them back on, but stayed topless.

‘’Hell, a Jewish Demon will probably scare even more the Germans than just a simple Demon. Besides, somebody else needs to learn about this gas chambers monstrosity.’’

Going first under a cloak of invisibility, Delicia walked out of the examination room and closed the door behind her, so that the bodies inside would not be discovered at once by passing Germans: she wanted to preserve the element of surprise for as long as possible, in order to kill as many Germans as she could. Clearing the infirmary block of its Germans was obviously her first task before going to other buildings in the camp. Going to the next door in the hallway she was in, she found a long room where a number of medical beds were set, with lockers of medical supplies and trolleys supporting instruments around the beds. One male SS doctor and three nurses were busy in that room, examining or watching five men and two women lying in bed. Approaching silently the doctor, Delicia felt mounting revulsion and anger when she saw what he was doing and heard what he was saying to the nurse assisting him: the poor inmate being treated was not a victim of some accidental injury or disease, but rather the subject of some sick experiment about genetics and reproduction. The doctor was in fact in the process of

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cutting off the man’s testicles, which appeared horribly burned, like most of the man’s groin area. Delicia’s bet on seeing that was that those burns had been intentionally inflicted by the German medical staff. A mighty urge to administer justice, similar to the urges her father Gideon had told her about when she was still a toddler, filled Delicia as she got really close behind the SS doctor. Raising her scalpel, she put her arm in front of the doctor’s throat, then pressed the blade against his left jugular before slashing his throat wide open. The SS man tried to scream in pain but only managed a gurgling sound as blood filled his mouth and sprayed out from his opened throat. Extending one arm across the bed, Delicia then grabbed the front of the nurse’s jacket and pulled her towards her before stabbing her in the heart with her scalpel, driving the blade deeply in her chest. Letting go the dying woman, Delicia then turned towards the two remaining nurses in the room, who were now staring at the dying doctor and nurse with horror and incomprehension. Walking quickly to the nearest of the two, Delicia stabbed her in the left eye, driving the scalpel deep inside her brain and killing her nearly instantly. The remaining nurse then started screaming hysterically, but her scream quickly ended in a gurgle when Delicia slashed her throat open. Knowing that armed guards were now bound to rush in soon after hearing the nurse’s ultimate scream, Delicia posted herself in ambush near the door of the room, still invisible. Two SS soldiers effectively rushed in less than a minute later, alerted by the German nurse posted at the reception area of the infirmary. Letting both soldiers run inside first, Delicia went to the second soldier to enter and stabbed him in the back, pushing her scalpel deep and puncturing his heart. The other soldier turned around on hearing his comrade’s grunt of pain but froze with incomprehension when he saw him crumble to the floor without apparent reason. That reason however became most apparent when Delicia appeared right in front of him and ripped his rifle out of his hands before grabbing the front of his vest and staring hard in his eyes with her blazing eyes.

‘’Let me show you how I do sexual experiments on you fucking SS bastards!’’ Her clawed right hand then solidly grabbed the soldier’s testicles and pressed, then pulled with inhuman strength, ripping them off along with parts of the uniform’s trousers. The soldier tried to scream but the sudden, excruciating pain left him unable to utter a sound and he passed out, his eyes and mouth wide open. Letting that soldier die by massive bleeding from his wound, Delicia pulled out the long bayonet sheeted and hooked to his belt and tested its sharpness, smiling with satisfaction when she found the long blade to be quite sharp indeed.

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‘’Aah, that should work even better than that scalpel. A fine time indeed to practice my blade work.’’

Before leaving the room, she took the time to recuperate the Mauser 98K rifle that had belonged to the second soldier, along with his belt, with its ammunition clips holders. Donning the belt around her waist, she slung the rifle across her chest, keeping the long bayonet in her right hand, then became invisible again before walking out in the hallway. She found a nurse and a SS matron, partly hiding behind a corner while looking anxiously down the hallway. Those two were the next to die, stabbed in quick succession by Delicia. It took her only six minutes to complete her tour of the infirmary block, killing in the process a grand total of four doctors, nine nurses, three soldiers and one matron. With her hatred and rage still strong, she looked out through a window to decide where she would strike next, smiling devilishly as she eyed the administrative reception building near the main gate of the camp.

‘’Time to register those SS bastards…for entrance to Hell! Lucifer would be so proud of me right now if he could see me.’’

To her utter surprise, a deep, powerful voice then struck her mind.

‘’GO AHEAD AND SEND THOSE GERMANS WHERE THEY JUSTLY BELONG, DELICIA! I WILL BE READY FOR THEM!’’

‘’Thank you, Great Master of the Abyss! I will do my best to honor you today.’’ replied Delicia, feeling immense pride, before walking out of the infirmary building and stepping resolutely towards the reception building, her bayonet firmly held in one hand.

10:56 (Berlin Time)

Auschwitz train station

The engineer and assistant-engineer of the locomotive pulling the long line of rail cars full of Soviet prisoners of war were left puzzled when they stopped their train along the quay of the Auschwitz train station: there was not a single person in sight. Normally, at least fifty SS soldiers and officers would be on hand to receive and select the prisoners for either work or extermination. Since their train had arrived on schedule, it was also not as if nobody knew it was coming. Just after the train screeched to a halt, a quick series of internal explosions blew out the windows of the passenger car in which the SS soldiers escorting the Soviet P.O.W.s rode, with a few bodies also being blown out through the windows. The two locomotive men, close to panic, didn’t have time to

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decide what to do before they got stabbed to death inside their locomotive by an invisible attacker. Calmly stepping down from the locomotive, Mélanie, back in human form but still wearing only her stripped camp trousers, plus her ammo belt, rifle and bayonet, went to the escort’s car to make sure that no guards had survived. She had to finish off two wounded SS soldiers before she could concentrate her attention on the prisoners brought on the train. Going to the first car full of prisoners, she unlocked the doors and slid them open, then backed off by a few feet to let the men inside come out. There were quite a few surprised exclamations in Russian when the prisoners inside the car saw an extremely beautiful, topless girl with a rifle waiting alone on the quay. That made Mélanie smile before she shouted out in Russian.

‘’YOU MAY ALL COME OUT: THE GERMANS AT THE TRAIN STATION ARE ALL DEAD!’’

As the first Soviet prisoners climbed out of the first cattle car, Mélanie went to the other cars, opening their doors and inviting the men inside to come out. A total of over 3,000 men, many of them weak from lack of food and water, disembarked from the cars, looking around them in confusion. Mélanie then shouted again in Russian.

‘’ARE THERE OFFICERS AMONG YOU? I NEED TO SPEAK WITH THEM! IF THERE ARE, COME TO ME AT ONCE!’’

After some hesitation, a total of 23 men came to Mélanie, looking at her with a mix of admiration and confusion. One of them, a tough-looking man in his thirties, finally spoke to her.

‘’Could you tell us what is going on here, girl? And who are you exactly?’’

‘’My name is not really important. Know that I arrived here yesterday from Paris, as part of a contingent of French Jews destined to be slowly exterminated in this camp. However, the Germans didn’t count on my true nature and I massacred this morning the Germans in the main camp of Auschwitz, just south of this train station. I then collected their weapons and ammunition, which are now stored inside the station’s terminal building. Those weapons are now yours for the taking.’’

‘’Your true nature? I don’t understand, girl.’’

Mélanie smiled benevolently to the man before starting to shape shift in front of the Soviets. Her shape shifting powers as a succubus basically allowed her to change into pretty much any medium-sized humanoid form that she wished to become, including that of a man or boy. This time, in order not to scare or repulse the Soviet prisoners, she

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mostly stayed in her form as Mélanie, but added her pair of black feathered wings in her back, drawing a concert of exclamations.

‘’Consider me as an avenging angel, sent to make these SS Germans pay for their abominable crimes. While all the Germans in the Auschwitz camp are now dead, killed by me, I have not had time yet to exterminate the Germans in the bigger camp of Birkenau, to the west of the train station. That camp contains tens of thousands of suffering prisoners, many of them Soviet. What I propose is that you arm the men you can right now with the weapons I collected in Auschwitz and go free the prisoners in Birkenau. I will help you do this by taking out in advance the guard towers and machine gun positions in the bigger camp. You will also be able to use the trucks parked outside the guarded perimeter of the Auschwitz camp to transport your men. However, you better act quickly, before the Germans understand that something is wrong and call in reinforcements from other places in Poland and Germany.’’

‘’And then what?’’ asked another, younger Soviet officer. ‘’What are we to do after that, so far behind enemy lines?’’

Mélanie gave that man a sober look.

‘’Then what? If you do nothing, the Germans will disarm you, then will exterminate you like vermin. If you fight on, you will have a chance to kill hundreds of Germans and save tens of thousands of your compatriots and other poor souls suffering here. Then you will be able to fight your way back towards the Soviet Union. Isn’t that better than simply playing the lamb to be slaughtered?’’

‘’Fighting is indeed better than letting ourselves being slaughtered.’’ said resolutely the first officer to have spoken. ‘’You said that you have stashed weapons in the train terminal?’’

‘’Yes, along with as much bread as I could find in the kitchens of the camp. You can also loot the weapons from the dead guards who were escorting your train: I blew them up with grenades just as your train was stopping.’’

The Soviet officer nodded his head, then presented his right hand.

‘’I am Major Mickail Baranov, of the Third Guards Infantry Division. I would still be honored to know your name, if you would tell it to me.’’

‘’I am Mélanie!’’ answered Mélanie while shaking the man’s hand. ‘’I have enough weapons to arm over 200 men inside the terminal, including a few machine guns and plenty of ammunition. You will find fourteen trucks parked outside the main gate of the nearest camp. Be aware also that many prisoners are presently away from the

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camp, working under guard at various work sites. Those work parties normally return to camp under escort late in the afternoon, but they may come back sooner when they start hearing gunfire. By the way, I cut the telephone lines coming out of both camps: that should give you a few precious extra hours to do what needs to be done. I would suggest that you now select the men you have who are still the most fit and arm them in priority: you will have to make every captured weapon and bullet count.’’

‘’All good, judicious counsels, Mélanie. Thank you for your divine help. I will now organize my men for the incoming fight.’’

‘’Excellent! In the meantime, I will start to thin out the guards at the Birkenau camp. I will see you there.’’

Mélanie then flew off with the help of her wings, followed by the incredulous eyes of the Soviets, going towards Birkenau. She then disappeared from sight, becoming invisible. Major Baranov made the sign of the cross on seeing that.

‘’God is truly on our side today. Let’s make the most of this providential help, men.’’

21:28 (Paris Time)

Mélanie’s bedroom, ‘Mille et Une Nuits’ cabaret

Paris, Occupied France

When Mélanie jumped back to her bedroom in her mother’s cabaret, she was half-covered with blood and still wore only her stripped camp trousers. She however no longer had her captured German rifle and web gear, as she had given them to a Soviet man before leaving Poland. Morally and psychologically exhausted by all that she had seen and felt during the nearly five days she had spent outside of France; she slowly sat down on the edge of her bed and closed her eyes as they filled with tears. So many innocent people had died around her during those days, while many more were going to die in the next few days as well. Major Baranov and his men were probably also going to die in the days and weeks to come, hunted down by the German forces which were sure to respond soon to the destruction of the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps. At least, they would then die fighting, rather than being simply slaughtered like cattle by the Germans. With luck, they would be able to evade the Germans long enough to go hide in the thick forests of Southern Poland, where they would be able to fight a partisan war with the help of the local Polish population.

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Mélanie was still tearful when her mother found her fifteen minutes later, having heard sobbing from inside the room. Marie’s first look at Mélanie was enough to alarm her and make her hurry to her.

‘’Mélanie? My God! What happened to you? Where have you been all that time?’’

Looking up at Marie, Mélanie wiped her tears with the back of her left hand before answering her.

‘’I went to Hell…a Hell made and run by the Germans.’’

She then spent a few minutes to tell a horrified Marie about what she had seen in Auschwitz. Her story left Marie speechless for a moment but it didn’t prevent her from hugging gently her adoptive daughter. She finally was able to speak to her in a soft voice.

‘’My poor Mélanie! What you did was very courageous and selfless indeed. You did the right thing over there.’’

‘’It is true that over 700 SS men and women have now paid for their abominable crimes, Mother. However, still too many of them live on. This I make as a solemn vow: I will hunt down and kill every SS, SD and Gestapo man or woman whom I will find from now on in Paris. The same will go for the dirty French traitors who will collaborate with them.’’

From the contained hatred in Mélanie’s voice, Marie understood that her daughter fully meant her words. She however felt that she had to return her to the reality of their particular situation in Paris.

‘’What if some SS officer visits our cabaret as a customer? You are not going to kill him here, do you?’’

‘’Not here, no! However, that will be the last night of that SS officer, as I will then go kill him away from the cabaret.’’

‘’I…I can understand your point of view, Mélanie. You do look terrible. Why don’t you go have a nice long shower, then have some sleep. We will talk further about this tomorrow morning.’’

‘’I think that I will do just that, Mother. Right now, I am in no mood to entertain any German, even if he is a most decent man at heart.’’

Getting up from her bed, Mélanie took one small plastic bag out of a pocket of her blood-spattered trousers and put it on her dresser, then shed her trousers before heading out

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to the upper floor bathroom. After a short hesitation, Marie went to the dresser to go examine the small bag, reading for herself the inscriptions in German on it.

‘’Zyklon B pesticide. Do not inhale the vapors or ingest. Highly toxic…’’