The Colossus by Ranjini Iyer

Lindstrom.
    I may not see Lars again. It’s hard not to grieve.
    I wonder if my team at Berliner have found the answers Lars and I didn’t. Have they figured out why the animals developed all the unexplained conditions? And why is the contagious nature of the bacteria being ignored?
    Forget it, I tell myself. The past is gone.
    February 10, 1942,
    Today as usual, the shrill whistle woke me at 6:00 a.m. I reached for the aluminum bowl by my sliver of a pillow. Clutching the bowl to my chest, I stepped out for roll call into the bitter morning. We lined up for breakfast. I got my morning ration—watery turnip soup and a two-inch long piece of hard, yellowing bread.
    Lowered nutrition is key to the Indus pill experiment.
    I walked to my usual spot, from where I have a clear view of the SS clubhouse.
    “You’re not on the membership list this month, either,” a boyish voice said.
    Ernst. Dear Ernst Frank, my constant companion and comfort these days. He plopped himself beside me and smiled through the grime and dirt that lined his handsome face.
    Ernst Frank is a happy-go-lucky man-child, barely twenty. A peddler of dubious herbal cures during peacetime, Ernst managed to convince the SS that he had a marketable skill, and was therefore allowed to stay alive at Krippenwald, where he quickly charmed a shoemaker inmate into taking him on as an assistant.
    His honest manner and ability to laugh at his circumstances won him my friendship. But it is his willingness to suffer through painfully detailed stories about Berliner and my work that has endeared him most to me. That and his unconditional camaraderie.
    Poor Ernst lost his wife and two-year-old daughter to the gas chambers a year ago. He spent months after their deaths trying to kill himself. Following a third attempt involving a makeshift noose that broke before it could do harm, Ernst had a change of heart. The best thing he could do for his beloved Inge and baby Sophie was to go on, he decided. Now what Ernst yearns for most is to have a child, hopefully a daughter, who will become the center of his life. Never again will he find himself helpless as he did when his loved ones were carted off in front of his eyes to the gas chambers, he rants and swears.
     
    Ernst took a whiff of his bowl and declared the toilet water in it to be delicious. How I envied his ability to smile through his pain.
    A whistle sounded. The soup guard called out, “Herr Doctor!” I didn’t respond. Why would I? I wasn’t Herr Doctor or Herr anything here. “Doctor Rosen,” the guard called in a singsong voice. He was smiling. Had Peter Schultz been able to exert some influence? Were they going to release me? I stood up and went to him.
    The idiot asked about my Indus pills and congratulated me on their success. When I turned away, he struck my cheek with his leather whip, called me a Jew swine, and dismissed me.
    I returned to Ernst, lowered myself to the ground, and raised my bowl to my lips to finish the last dregs of the tasteless soup.
    Ernst put a hand on my injured cheek. He looked livid, but only for an instant. He asked why the guard had called me. I told him the guard had asked about the pills my company had made. I would tell Ernst the truth. I just didn’t feel like it yet. I was too ashamed.
    Ernst tore off a piece of bread with his teeth. He said they call the pills the “profit maker.” And asked me if I knew why the camp inmates’ nutrition had been reduced.
    Ignoring his question, I asked him when he had taken the pill.
    A year ago, he said. And his fever occurred a month after he took it. I asked him if he knew if the others who had taken the pill had gotten fevers. He said that fevers and colds occurred in many inmates. But disease isn’t uncommon here.
    I asked if they had been given more than one dose, and he said they had. But the fevers had only happened the first time. It was obvious he wanted to know why I was asking all this. I promised to tell him, but right