“Kiss him now” – The perverse order German soldiers gave to prisoners

“Kiss him now” – The perverse order German soldiers gave to prisoners

Laughter. In a concentration camp, the laughter of the executioners is the most terrifying sound there is. When a guard screams, you know he’s going to hit, but when he laughs, it’s because he’s bored. And a bored SS man looks for a toy. There is no limit to the sadistic imagination. Hitting is no longer enough, killing is no longer enough. You have to get dirty. You have to pervert friendship, fraternity, love.

Tonight’s story is of a macabre theater. An improvised scene in the mud where two childhood friends were ordered to love each other under machine gun threat. Before raising the curtain on this stage of absolute humiliation, I ask you to subscribe. This is your way of saying no to cruelty. Activate the bell and tell us in the comments where you are watching this video from. From Marseille, from Moscow, from Quebec? Your presence is our bulwark against oblivion.

Get ready. What you are going to hear is an indelible stain on human consciousness.

Part 1: The Christmas Banquet

“What is going to happen to us, my friend? I’m so tired.”

My name is Julien, I am 91 years old. I never watch romantic comedies on television. As soon as I see two people kissing on screen, I have to close my eyes. I feel nausea go up, a taste of bile and cheap schnapps. For me, kissing is not an act of love; it is a weapon of massive destruction.

It was the 24th of December 1943. The Mauthausen camp was under the snow. A gray snow soiled by ash from the ovens. For us inmates, it was a night like the others. Hunger, cold, fear. But for the SS, it was Christmas. Heiligabend, the holy night. They had organized a party in the big guard barracks. We heard music, German Christmas carols—Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht—which reached our rotten benches like an insult. They had drunk a lot, and as always, alcohol wakes up the beast.

Around 10 p.m., the door to our block opened with a smash. The cold set in, followed by three SS officers. They were red, laughing, uniforms unbuttoned. One of them, Scharführer Weber, held a bottle in his hand. Weber was known for his creative sadism. He didn’t just like killing, he loved to play.

“Get up, rats!” he yelled. “It’s Christmas! We need volunteers for the nursery.”

Nobody moved. We knew that volunteer meant victim. Weber swept the dormitory with his flashlight. The beam stopped on me, then on the man next to me, Gabriel. Gabriel was my best friend. We grew up in the same village in Normandy. He was engaged to my sister, Marie. He was big and strong before the camp, and he saved my life ten times by sharing his bread ration. He was my brother.

“You and you,” barked Weber. “The two inseparable ones, the ideal couple. Get up.”

We stood up, shaking in our striped shirts that were too fine. “Come!” said Weber with a pasty smile. “We’re bored there. We need entertainment. We need romance.”

They pushed us out. We walked in the snow, barefoot in our clogs. Gabriel squeezed my arm. “Hold on, Juju,” he whispered. “Whatever he does, don’t respond. Play dead.”

We entered the guard room. The heat hit us. Hellish heat, saturated with cigar smoke, the smell of roast, and alcohol. There were about twenty soldiers. They were sitting around long tables, eating, drinking. When we entered, silence ensued, then laughter burst.

“Ah, here are the artists!” shouted Weber.

He pushed us to the center of the room. There was an empty space like a dance floor surrounded by the executioners’ tables. There were two of us: filthy, shorn, frightened skeletons in the middle of these well-fed men who celebrated the birth of Christ. Weber climbed onto a chair. He raised his bottle.

“Comrades, for Christmas, I brought you a gift. It is said that the French are the great specialists of love, right? Courtly love, romanticism.”

The soldiers applauded, stamping their feet. Weber got down from his chair and approached us. He smelled of alcohol full in the nose. He looked at Gabriel, then me. “They’re cute, right? It looks like Romeo and Juliet.” He burst out laughing at his own joke. “Except that here it is Romeo and Julien.”

He took out his pistol, a black Luger, and placed it on the table in full view. “Come on!” he said. “The music!”

A soldier put a record on the gramophone. A waltz by Strauss, The Beautiful Blue Danube, an elegant, airy music. Weber beckoned us with his riding crop. “Dance.”

I looked at Gabriel; he was white.

“Dance!” yelled Weber, slamming his crop on the table. “A waltz like in Versailles.”

Gabriel took my hand. His hand was rough, cold. He put his other hand on my waist. It was grotesque, it was absurd. Two dying men in striped pajamas, forced to dance a Viennese waltz in front of drunk Nazis on Christmas Eve. We started to spin. My legs were flagging. I was stumbling.

“Faster!” shouted a soldier.

We were spinning. My head was spinning. The shame burned my face harder than a fever. I felt Gabriel’s short breath. “Forgive me!” he whispered at each turn. “Forgive me!”

But the dancing was just the warm-up. The music stopped. Weber applauded slowly. “Not bad,” he said. “But the dance is for children. Adults do other things.” He approached us, eyes shining with a perverse cloudiness. “You are close, both of you, right? I see you at camp, always together. Always sharing bread, touching.” He turned towards his comrades. “It seems he likes him. It seems like he’s dying to say it.”

He came back to me, his face two centimeters from mine. “Prove to him your love, Frenchman.” He jabbed Gabriel. “Kiss him.”

Time froze. The noise from the room faded, replaced by a dull hum in my ears. Kiss Gabriel. Gabriel, who had held the hand of my sister Marie in the village church. Gabriel, with whom I had played marbles, fished for trout, and shared my first adolescent secrets. It was moral incest, a desecration. I stayed motionless, arms dangling, staring at the ground.

“I can’t,” I whispered.

Weber sighed, a comedy of disappointment on his red face. “You can’t. Oh, what a shame! He is shy.” He turned towards the other soldiers. “He is shy.” The laughter increased. Some banged on the table with their beer steins.

Weber regained his seriousness in a fraction of a second. The clown mask fell, revealing the killer. He lifted his Luger. He didn’t point it at me. He placed the cold barrel directly on Gabriel’s temple. The metal pressed into the thin, gray skin of my friend. Gabriel closed his eyes, a tear tracing a clean furrow on his dirty cheek.

“You have three seconds, Julien,” Weber said calmly. “One.”

I looked at Gabriel. I saw his Adam’s apple move. He swallowed his saliva. He was terrified. He wanted to live. Even at the cost of his honor. He wanted to live.

“Two.”

Gabriel opened his eyes. He stared at me. It wasn’t a look of reproach; it was a look of plea. Do it, his eyes said. Please don’t let me die here in the middle of their laughter.

“Three.”

I threw myself forward. I caught Gabriel’s face in my dirty hands. I felt him under my skin, his nascent beard which stung, and I crushed my mouth against his. It wasn’t a kiss; it was a shock, a collision. His lips were frozen, dry, damaged by the wind and dehydration. They tasted like salt, dried blood, and turnip soup. Our teeth collided. I felt his short, panicked breath enter my own mouth. I wanted to vomit. My stomach twisted. I betrayed my sister. I betrayed our friendship. I defiled everything that remained sacred.

The room exploded. This was not applause; it was the howls of animals, whistles, loud laughter. “Wunderbar, wonderful! Even stronger!”

I wanted to pull back. I wanted to break the contact, wipe my mouth, scream in rage. But Weber grabbed me by the neck. His leather-gloved hand closed around my neck like a vice. He kept me glued to Gabriel.

“No, no, no,” he whispered in my ear, his alcoholic breath burning my skin. “It’s too chaste. It’s a grandmother’s kiss.” He pressed the gun barrel harder against Gabriel’s temple, to the point of whitening the surrounding skin. “I want to see passion, Frenchman. I want to see tongue. I want you to slip him the tongue like your fiancée. Otherwise, I shoot, and I will shoot him in the mouth. It will make a nice exit hole.”

I felt Gabriel shaking all over his body. He clung to my striped jacket so as not to fall. He half-opened his lips. He invited me in. He opened the door of humiliation for me to save his life. I closed my eyes so hard that stars burst beneath my eyelids. I thought of Marie. I thought, Forgive us. It’s not us. These are bodies that obey.

And I obeyed. I pushed my tongue into the mouth of my best friend. I explored this intimate, warm, living cavity. Our saliva mixed. It was the most violent act I had ever committed. More violent than a punch. The soldiers howled with laughter. Some took photos with their small Leica cameras. The flashes crackled. Click, click. Our shame was immortalized.

Weber was laughing so hard that he cried. He released my neck, but he kept the gun pointed. “Look at them, they like it. I knew it, all Frenchmen are fairies.”

He took a step back, leaving us mouth-to-mouth, entwined in the middle of the dance floor. I detached myself from Gabriel brutally, and we looked at each other. There was drool on his chin, on mine too. We were red with shame, red with anger, but we were alive. Weber wiped his eyes. “Ah, it feels good to laugh. Thank you, ladies.” He put his pistol away.

But the evening was not over. The kissing was just the aperitif. He made a signal to two other guards. “Bring the table.” He looked at us with a smile which promised hell. “Now that you kissed, you have to consummate the marriage.”

The blood left my face. I looked at the wooden table they installed in the middle of the room. I understood. He didn’t just want a kiss. He wanted a complete show. He wanted us to simulate the act, or worse, to actually do it.

Gabriel faltered. He whispered, “No, Juju, not that. I’d rather die. Let him kill me.”

But Weber had heard. He approached sweetly, happily. “Die? It’s too easy, Gabriel. If you refuse, it’s not you I’m killing.” He pointed his finger at me. “It’s your little wife. I’m going to kill him slowly. I’ll start with the knees.”

The trap was closed. Each of us was the hostage of the other. There are no heroes when you have a gun to your temple. There are only survivors. Gabriel looked at my legs. He knew that Weber was not bluffing. He knew that if I got shot in the kneecap, I wouldn’t be able to walk anymore. And at Mauthausen, the one who no longer walks leaves for the gas chamber the next morning. So, to save my legs, Gabriel sacrificed his soul.

“Okay,” he whispered, his voice breaking. “Okay, we’ll go up.”

We climbed onto the massive wooden table. It was high. We dominated the room. We were on a stage under the harsh light of the suspended lamps. The heat rose towards the ceiling. It was hot, sultry, tropical, which contrasted with the cold of our emaciated bodies.

“The pants,” Weber ordered, tapping his crop on the wood. “We don’t do that fully dressed.”

My hands were shaking so much that I couldn’t undo the string that served as a belt for my striped pants. Gabriel helped me. His cold fingers brushed my waist. We dropped our pants to our ankles. The room burst out laughing again. But this was no longer the amused laughter of the beginning; it was a mocking, disgusted laugh. We were naked from the waist down. What they saw were not the bodies of men; it was pathological anatomy. Our thighs were only femurs of gray, parchment-like skin. Our buttocks had disappeared, melted by starvation. Our hips protruded like razor blades. We were two skeletal insects exposed to the view of these fat and sated men.

“My God, my God!” shouted a soldier, spitting out a piece of bread. “It’s disgusting! They look like two corpses kissing.”

Weber was no longer laughing. He observed with clinical fascination. “Come on,” he said, “get into position. You, the big one, lie down.”

Gabriel lay on his back, on the hard wood of the table. He put his arms over his eyes so as not to see, to disappear. He cried silently. His hollow chest lifted with his sobs. I stood above him. I was petrified.

“Get on him, Julien,” commanded Weber. “Pretend. But do it well. I want to see movement. I want to hear the wood creak.”

I started to kneel between my best friend’s legs. I put my hands on his skinny shoulders. I felt his heart beating frantically under his skin like a trapped bird. Boom, boom, boom.

“Action!” Weber yelled.

I started to move. It was mechanical, a grotesque simulacrum. I was rocking back and forth on top of Gabriel without really touching him, just enough to create the illusion. It was the loneliest moment of my life. There were two of us, but we were alone in the world. I fixed my eyes on a knot in the wood of the table near Gabriel’s ear. I focused on this black knot. It’s an eye, I thought. It is the eye of God, looking at us and crying.

The soldiers were having fun. They started throwing things at us. Pieces of bread, cheese rinds, corks. A cork hit me in the face.

“Faster!” someone shouted. “Go on, Frenchman, make him scream.”

I picked up the pace, tears streaming down my cheeks, mixing with the sweat of fear. I murmured apologies over and over, a mantra of madness. “Sorry Gaby, sorry, Gaby, I love you my brother. Pardon.”

Gabriel removed his arm from his eyes. He looked at me. His eyes were empty. The light had gone out. He didn’t see his friend Julien anymore. He saw an instrument of torture. He opened his mouth and let out a moan. No pleasure, no pain—just pure, absolute shame.

“Yes!” shouted Weber. “That’s it, that’s what I want to hear.”

Suddenly, a soldier, drunker than the others, got up. He took his full mug of beer. “They are thirsty!” he shouted. “They need to be refreshed.” He threw the beer. The amber liquid and ice hit us. It flooded the table, soaking our shirts, sticking to our skin, mixing with the filth. It smelled of hops and yeast. A party smell at a crime scene. I slipped. My knees slipped on the wet wood. I fell heavily on Gabriel. My weight, even light, took his breath away. Our bodies collided, bone against bone. A sharp pain.

The laughter increased in intensity. It was the highlight of the show. The fall of the clowns. “Look at that. They don’t even stand up. It’s pathetic!”

Weber approached the table. He wiped away a tear of laughter. He banged his riding crop on the table right next to Gabriel’s head. Smack! Gabriel jumped violently.

“That’s enough!” said Weber, suddenly tired. “The show is finished. You are poor lovers. You have no stamina.” He looked at us with deep disgust. As if we were responsible for this masquerade. As if we were the perverse ones. “Get over it and disappear out of my sight before I vomit.”

We got off the table. We pulled up our beer-soaked pants with the slowness of old men. We did not look at each other. We did not touch each other. Shame had erected a concrete wall between us.

“Out!” yelled a guard, pushing us towards the exit.

We ran towards the door. The cold of the night seized us from the threshold. The snow was still falling indifferently. The thermal contrast was brutal. Our clothes, soaked with beer, started to freeze instantly on our skin. We walked in the dark night towards our barracks.

The silence between us was deafening. Usually, we supported each other. We walked arm in arm. That evening, we walked a meter apart from each other. I wanted to tell him something. I wanted to say, “We are alive.” But the words were stuck in my throat. You cannot console someone who has just been symbolically raped in front of twenty witnesses.

We entered the block. The familiar smell of death welcomed us. We returned to our bench. Gabriel went to bed. He turned towards the wall. He pulled his mythical blanket over his head. I reached out my hand to touch his shoulder. He flinched. He cowered. I removed my hand. I understood at that moment that Weber had succeeded. He hadn’t killed us physically, but he had killed our friendship. He had killed the image we had of each other. He had transformed brotherly love into something dirty, sticky, smelling of beer and fear.

I lay next to him without touching him. Outside, the SS were still singing Stille Nacht, sweet night, holy night. For us, it was the longest night in the world, and I knew that the next day, when the sun would rise, I could never look Gabriel in the eyes again without seeing the black knot in the wood of the table.

Part 2: The Aftermath

The next day, the sun rose on a layer of fresh snow. The world was white, pure, immaculate. But we were dirty. The smell of beer had dried on our clothes, creating a stiff, sticky crust. A sour smell that reminded me of every move the night before. Gabriel didn’t speak to me when he woke up. He didn’t speak to me during the roll call. He didn’t talk to me during the walk to the quarry.

Mauthausen was famous for its Stairs of Death. 186 steps irregularly cut into the granite. Our job was to go down to the bottom of the chasm, load a block of stone weighing 20 to 40 kg on our back, and go back up. It was a physical ordeal. But that day, the weight of the stone was nothing compared to the weight of silence between us. Usually, we went up together. I got behind Gabriel. If one of us faltered, the other supported him discreetly with a hand or shoulder. It was our survival pact.

But that morning, Gabriel accelerated. He wanted to put distance between us. He didn’t want to feel my breath on his back. My breath that, a few hours earlier, was in his mouth. I saw him in front of me. He stumbled. His legs, which had trembled on the banquet table, were now trembling with the effort. But he refused to turn around.

At the lunch break, I tried to approach him. He was sitting on a pile of pebbles, staring into the void. He held his ration of black bread in his dirty hands. He wasn’t eating. I sat next to him, not too close.

“Gab!” I started, “Eat.” He didn’t move. “Gab, listen to me. We don’t care. They were drunk. It was theater. This does not count.”

He turned his head towards me slowly. His face was turning gray. His eyes were surrounded by black. But what froze me was the total absence of emotion. He looked at me the way one looks at a wall.

“That doesn’t count,” he repeated in a blank voice. He spat on the ground. “I feel your tongue again, Julien.” He rubbed his mouth violently with the back of his sleeve until his lip bled. “I feel it. It’s like poison. How am I going to kiss Marie after that? Eh? Tell me.”

“Marie will understand. She will know that we didn’t have the choice.”

Gabriel let out a dry laugh, without joy. “Marie. Do you think I’m going to tell her? ‘Honey, to survive, I humped your brother on a table in front of Nazi swine.'” He shook his head. “No, I will never be able to touch her. I am tainted, Julien. I am dirty inside. They turned me into this.”

He looked at his piece of bread, then with a slow and deliberate gesture, he let it fall in the mud. It was the ultimate gesture of renunciation. Throwing away bread at Mauthausen meant signing your own death warrant. It meant saying, “I don’t want any more fuel for this broken machine.”

I picked up the bread hurriedly. I wiped it. “You are crazy, eat! If you don’t eat, you die.”

And then, speaking calmly, he looked me straight in the eyes. “You know what’s worse than dying, Juju? It’s to live with that. To live knowing that they crawled on me, that I made moans for their amusement. I saw your eyes last night, you were scared. And me too. We sold our dignity for three more minutes of life. It’s too much to pay.”

He stood up. “Don’t follow me anymore. Don’t touch me anymore. I don’t want to see you anymore. You remind me of my shame.”

He left towards the staircase. I wanted to hold him back. I wanted to shout to him that he was my brother, that I loved him, that we were victims. But the guards were already screaming. “Los, work!”

The afternoon was a nightmare. I was watching Gabriel from the corner of my eye. He was going up the stairs like an automaton. He wasn’t protecting himself anymore. He was no longer sparing himself. He sought total exhaustion. He was looking for the breaking point. On this trip, maybe the hundredth, I saw him waver. He was almost at the top. He was carrying a huge block with sharp edges. He stopped. He did not slip. I was just behind him, three steps down. I saw his feet; they were stable. He is the one who let go. He released his muscles. He let the stone win. The stone slipped from his back. It hit his thigh, knocking him off balance. He fell backwards.

“Gabriel!” I yelled.

I dropped my own stone and threw myself forward to catch him. I managed to grab his striped jacket. The fabric was old, threadbare. We remained suspended for a moment, frozen in a precarious balance above the void. Gabriel was hanging, held only by my tense hand on his collar. He looked up towards me. There was no gratitude; there was anger.

“Let me go!” he hissed. “Let me go.” “Never! Get back up! Help me, I don’t want to go back down there.” “I don’t want to go back to that bed, Julien. I don’t want to be your wife anymore. Let me go!”

He started to struggle. He kicked into the void to free himself from my grip. He wanted to fall. He wanted to crash 100 meters below on the hard granite floor to clear the image of the wooden table. A Kapo arrived running, alerted by the disorder. He raised his club.

“What is going on here? Get back up or I’ll throw you both down!”

I gathered my last bit of strength. I pulled Gabriel towards me. I hoisted him onto the step against his will. We fell on top of each other in the middle of the staircase. I had saved him again. But when he got up, he glared at me.

“You stole my exit,” he spat. “You forced me to stay in the shit with you.”

He grabbed his stone and continued to climb. I remained seated for a second, my heart pounding. I had just saved the life of my best friend, and in exchange, he had given me his hatred. Weber had won. He had managed to break an indestructible bond. Gabriel no longer saw me as his savior, but his jailer, the one who prevented him from dying to escape the shame.

They say that man can get used to everything—to the cold, to the hunger, to the blows. But there is one thing we don’t get used to: self-disgust. It’s an acid. It gnaws the stomach, it burns the veins, it extinguishes the will. After the incident on the stairs, Gabriel changed categories. He became what we called a Muselmann in the camp, a Muslim. This strange term designated those who had given up, those who turned in on themselves, their gaze empty, indifferent to their own fate, waiting for the end. They didn’t wash anymore, they no longer picked off their lice, they no longer fought for a crumb of bread.

Gabriel no longer spoke to me. In the evening, on the bench, I felt his body shrinking away as soon as I moved. He had drawn an invisible border in the middle of our rotten layer of straw. A barbed wire border, made of shame.

Part 3: The End

One night, I heard his teeth chattering. He was shaking so hard that the entire structure of the bed was vibrating. I reached out to touch his forehead. He was burning up. Typhus, the scourge of the camp. It had arrived with its red spots, its delirious fever, and its inextinguishable thirst.

“Gabriel,” I whispered. “You have a fever. Take my jacket, cover yourself.”

I took off my striped jacket to put it on him. He pushed back the fabric with a sudden gesture, almost violent. “No!” he grumbled, his voice thick. “Don’t touch me. You’ll freeze to death, idiot. Let me help you.”

He opened his eyes in the darkness; they shone with a crazy glow. “I don’t want your warmth, Julien. Your warmth is dirty. Everything that comes from you is dirty.”

These words transfixed me. It wasn’t the delirium of fever. It was the raw truth of his wounded soul. He didn’t see me as his childhood friend anymore. He saw me as his accomplice in humiliation. I reminded him of the table, I reminded him of the beer. I reminded him of his own mouth, open under threat.

The following days were a long agony. Gabriel could no longer stand up for the roll call. Normally, those who do not get up are taken to the Revier, the infirmary, which means death by injection. But I bribed the block leader with my own ration of bread so that he let him rest at the back of the barracks. I hid him under dirty blankets. In the evening, I came home exhausted from the quarry, starving since I no longer had any bread, and I ran towards him. He was losing weight visibly by the day. He was nothing more than an assemblage of sharp bones under gray skin. I brought him water. He barely drank. He looked at me with infinite sadness.

“Why are you doing this?” he whispered. “Let me go.” “I won’t leave you. We swore to return together for Marie.”

At the mention of my sister’s name, his face twisted in pain. “Marie.” He closed his eyes. Tears flowed down his temples, getting lost in his dirty ears. “Don’t tell her. Never, Julien. Swear it.”

“What?” “Never tell her what we did. Don’t talk to her about the table. Tell her that I died a hero. Tell her I was shot while trying to escape, or that I froze to death giving my coat to an old man.”

He grabbed my wrist with surprising strength. His dirty nails dug into my flesh. “Invent a beautiful death, Julien. I beg you, don’t let the image of the table get into her head. If she knows… if she knows that I… that I loved that… to survive… I will die a second time.”

“You didn’t like it, Gabriel. It was theater. We were obliged.”

“The body does not know how to differentiate,” he whispered. “My body reacted, Julien. I was scared, and my body reacted. I’m a monster. I don’t deserve Marie.”

He let go of my wrist and turned towards the wall. That was the secret that killed him. It wasn’t just the act; it was the physiological reaction of fear and stimulation. This biological betrayal that the executioners knew well and exploited. The shame of the erection of fear. Weber had won all the way. He had soiled Gabriel even in his deepest intimacy.

The last night arrived quickly. Outside, the wind was howling. Gabriel was breathing hard. A liquid rattle was coming out of his chest. I approached him. I wanted to take him in my arms. I wanted to rock him like when we were children and he broke his arm falling from a tree. But I didn’t dare. I knew that my touch burned him. He started to become delirious. He was talking to Weber: “No, officer, I cannot. He’s my brother.” Then he spoke to Marie: “Your dress is white. So white. Don’t come any closer. I have mud on my hands.”

Around three o’clock in the morning, he had a moment of lucidity, the calm before the end. He turned his head towards me. His eyes had regained their former color, this sweet nut brown that I knew so well.

“Juju.” “I’m here, Gab.” “Do you remember the river? The Sioule, we fished for crayfish.” “Yes, I remember it. We will return there.”

He sketched a faint smile. “No, water is too far away.” He took a difficult breath. “Forgive me, Juju, for having hated you. It wasn’t you, it was the reflection. I hated my reflection in your eyes.”

“I know, Gab. I know.”

He searched for my hand. I hesitated. I was afraid that he would push it away again. But he insisted. His cold hand sought mine. Our fingers intertwined. Not like forced lovers, but like found brothers.

“Promise me,” he said in a last breath. “Promise me that you will wash all this, that you will forget, that you will only keep the river.” “I promise.”

He squeezed my hand one last time. Then his grip loosened. His eyes remained open, staring at the wooden ceiling of the barracks. But there was no longer any shame in his eyes. He was gone. He had crossed the wall. He was free.

I stood there holding my friend’s dead hand in the stinking darkness. I didn’t cry. I was dry. I looked at his lips. These lips that I had kissed by force. They were blue, motionless. Weber had stolen his last living kiss from me, but I had recovered his last handshake.

In the morning, when the Kapos shouted “Raus!”, I carried him out myself. I dropped him on the pile of corpses behind the block. It was snowing gently. The flakes rested on his face, hiding the grime, hiding the misery. He was becoming white again; he became pure again. I turned around; I walked towards the roll call. I was alone now. Gabriel had died of shame. And I had to live with the memory of his taste on my tongue. A memory that even the river of our childhood could never wash away.

Part 4: The Lie

I returned to France in May 1945. The train arrived at the Gare de l’Est. On the platform, there was an immense crowd—women, mothers, children holding up photos, looking for a familiar face among the ghosts in striped pajamas descending from the wagons. I saw Marie straight away. She wore a blue floral dress. She was thin, her features drawn by anguish, but she was beautiful, so beautiful. She was looking for two faces.

She saw me. Her face lit up, then instantly darkened when she saw the empty space behind me. I descended the steps of the wagon. My legs were no longer trembling with fear, but with the emotion of reunion. She ran towards me. She held me in her arms. She smelled of lavender and clean soap. I stiffened. Physical contact was still an ordeal, but I let it happen. She took a step back to look at me. She scanned the crowd behind me.

“Julien, where is Gabriel?”

The time had come. The moment of the last test. I had the truth at the tip of my tongue. The dirty truth, the truth of the beer and the table, the truth of the shame that had killed him. I could say, they broke us, Marie. They forced us to do filthy things and he couldn’t stand his own reflection. But I saw Gabriel’s eyes again in the barracks. Invent a beautiful death, Julien.

I took my sister’s hands, I fixed my gaze on hers, and I lied with absolute conviction.

“Marie, he died.” She let out a little cry, putting her hand to her mouth. “But listen to me!” I continued. “He died a free man.”

I invented the story. “It was in January. An old prisoner fell during the roll call. The guards were going to beat him to death. Gabriel stepped out of line. He interposed himself. He hit a guard. He took the blows in place of the old man. They shot him on the spot. He died standing. He didn’t suffer.”

Marie cried, but through her tears, I saw the birth of immense pride. “He did that?” she asked. “Yes, it was Gabriel. He was the bravest of us all. He died a hero.”

She squeezed my hand. “That is my Gabriel,” she whispered, “still protecting the others.”

I swallowed. It had a taste of ashes. I had washed his honor. I had transformed his miserable and shameful death into a golden legend. Gabriel, the Muselmann dead from despair and self-loathing, became Gabriel the martyr. It was my farewell gift.

The years passed. Marie never married. She remained the widow of Gabriel. She kept his photo on the mantelpiece. She told his story to anyone who would listen. The hero’s story. And I nodded, validating every word of the lie.

Me neither, I never got married. I tried, though. I dated women. But as soon as the moment of intimacy happened, it was a disaster. The moment a mouth approached mine, I couldn’t see a loving woman’s face. I saw the hilarious face of Scharführer Weber. I smelled the schnapps. I felt the cold barrel of the Luger on my temple. And above all, I felt the taste of Gabriel’s sore lips. I panicked. I pushed the woman away; I ran to throw up.

The kiss, this universal act of love, had become for me a trigger for violent post-traumatic stress. You cannot heal from that. You don’t start a new life when the very foundations of affection have been dynamited. So I got old alone. I became the single uncle, a little weird, who couldn’t stand being touched. I never told the truth to anyone—not to a priest, not to a psychoanalyst. This is my burden, and this is my penance.

Weber, I don’t know what became of him. I hope he’s dead. But basically, it doesn’t change anything. He succeeded in his goal. He created an invisible wall that separated me from the rest of humanity forever. He transformed love into disgust.

Today, Marie has been dead for 10 years. She left to join her hero in his imaginary grave. I am the last witness, the only one who knows what really happened on that table on Christmas Eve. Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing to lie. The truth liberates, they say. But that’s not true. The truth would have destroyed Marie. She would have soiled Gabriel’s memory. The lie protected love. So, I don’t regret anything.

I look at my old hands. They don’t tremble anymore. Tonight is Christmas. I’m alone in my apartment. I bought a small bottle of wine. I pour two glasses. One for me, one for the empty space in front of me. I raise my glass.

“To you, Gab, to the river, to our secrets.”

I drink. The wine is good. It doesn’t smell like spilled beer. I kept my promise. I kept silent. And in this silence, Gabriel became pure again. The theater of shadows has closed its curtains. Only the two of us are left in the dark, finally at peace.

Humiliation and sexual violence were a common weapon in concentration camps, used to dehumanize prisoners and break the bonds of solidarity. These stories are rarely told because the shame has survived much longer than the executioners. The victims, often heterosexual men forced into homosexual acts or the opposite, kept silent, fearing the judgment of a society that did not understand the absolute perversity of the Nazi system.

Julien wore this secret all his life to protect the image of his friend. If you felt the weight of this silence, if you understand why Julien lied, leave a message. Write the word “silence” in the comments to honor this pact of friendship that survived the horror. And don’t forget to subscribe, activate the bell, and share this story so that we finally understand that torture is not always made of blood, but sometimes of laughter and stolen kisses.

Thanks for listening. Until the next story.