Stalag 5, Ludwigsburg. 1942 - Christmas Eve.

Richter was from Berlin, the fourth child born to a middle-class family. He and his siblings, two brothers and two sisters, had lost contact amidst the chaos and confusion of war. His parents had long since passed away. Old age, he told Erik. Just old age.

“I was a violinist,” he added, much to Erik’s surprise, “in the Berlin Youth Orchestra. Not for very long, because of the first World War, but I wasn’t bad.”

His family had stayed in Berlin during the first War, though his two brothers wanted nothing more than to join the ranks of soldiers marching across France. “All they talked about was the tanks they would drive, or the turrets they would operate. They used to beg our father to let them play with his pistol, but he only laughed and locked it away and told them they could see it when they were older. My sisters, naturally, were unenthused.”

“What about you?” Erik asked.

“Me?” Richter smiled. “I wanted to be a pilot from a very young age. I built model planes from the moment I could understand the instructions, and my father used to take me to airshows when he could afford it.”

When he was sixteen, his parents sent him to a military boarding school. Their intentions were for him to join the Wehrmacht, as it was less elite and more likely for a family of a lower-class background. It was not until he was twenty that he joined the Luftwaffe – and they only let him join because of his inexhaustible knowledge of every plane in the force. He had taken apart and put back together models of each and every one countless times. Until then, he had only flown them in his sleep.

“I don’t think half the pilots in the Luftwaffe knew as much as I did,” he mused. And then, with a laugh, “It must’ve been irritating for my poor flight instructor – Herr Mendl was his name. He was shot down over Paris a few months ago.” He sighed, reminiscing. “I met a USAF pilot when I was twenty-five – we shot each other down, actually. I was on my first solo mission. But he chose to save my life instead of letting me go up in flames as I should have. He dragged me out of my plane.”

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“Who was he?”

“I never knew. He didn’t speak any German and I didn’t speak any English. Hardly a word was said between us, but I figured out from meeting him that everything I’d been taught to believe wasn’t right.”

From there, he’d collaborated more closely with the Allies, had begun working for the Underground and had ended up here, stationed at a Stalag, his only close relation a Jewish pianist from Dusseldorf with not a single mark to his name. Erik knew the only reason he was still alive was because of Richter’s goodness of heart and sense of right. If anyone else had found him, that night in Warsaw, he wouldn’t be alive.

To think that he’d gone through so much and here, in an odd twist of fate, was where he had found himself.

“Enough about me. What’s your story?” Richter leaned back in his chair now. The sky had grown dark, indigo in color. Erik’s story was a longwinded one, but he wanted Richter to know where he was from and where he’d been. It seemed only fair.

“I’m from Dusseldorf,” he began, thinking it a fitting place to start. He’d had two brothers and a sister, all of whom had been murdered at the hands of the SS. “My parents never met that fate, fortunately,” he elaborated. “My mother died of cancer and my father died of a broken heart three weeks later.”

“How on earth did you survive?” Richter asked, a slight crease forming between his eyebrows as he tried to put the pieces together.

“I was at the radio station,” Erik said, his voice choked with shame, “when the SS invaded my neighborhood and shot and killed my only family.”

Richter rubbed a hand over his mouth, shaking his head. “I’m so sorry, Erik.”

“Don’t be,” Erik said, managing a small smile. “I think they’re all better off where they are now.”

With nothing to keep him in Germany and the persistent threat of death if he remained, Erik had fled to Poland in 1940. He’d shared a room with three strangers in Warsaw – all of them Jewish, all of them terrified for their lives. They read newspapers, heard propaganda, watched more and more of their friends and neighbors disappear. There were more gunshots at night, more screams and cries – but when the city finally fell silent, the bomb dropped.

“My roommates all fled after we heard they might bomb the city, but I stayed. Somehow I thought I might have more luck surviving a bombing than being captured by the Gestapo or SS.”

Richter frowned. “How long after that did I find you?”

“Almost a year.”

“You must really have a guardian angel,” Richter laughed, good-humoredly, and Erik smiled.

Although he did not celebrate Christmas, Erik did enjoy the good cheer and general lightheartedness of the camp. The very air seemed to radiate with warmth and briefly, very briefly, Erik felt at home.