Ghost Train of Treblinka:
A Novel
By: Hubert L. Mullins
This is a work of fiction. Names, events
, and some places are purely the work of the author’s imagination and real places listed here within are done so with heavy doses of elaboration to suit the story. Any resemblance to anyone living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright 2019. Hubert L. Mullins. All Rights Reserved.
For more stories, visit my site by clicking here.
For my son, who lets his dad peck away at a keyboard all day . . .
And for my wife, who understands her husband can’t hear a thing when he does it, and loves him just the same . . .
Author’s Note
Many of the events referenced in this story are true. Treblinka was an awful place where a great many awful things happened. My story, while aiming to be frightful, could never come close to the level of real-life atrocities that occurred there between 1941 and 1944. It is estimated that 925,000 people perished within its forested border, with only 67 survivors to escape. And as of 2016, none are left alive.
But this is a novel, a story of fiction, and as such, liberties are taken. I mean zero disrespect to any of the victims, or by extension, any surviving relatives. It is not my intention to take away anything from what happened in those sixteen months of terror, but to use the period and the location as a backdrop to serve a story that is set in another time. If anything, I would hope that you take away from this novella that, despite being fantastical, the most horrific parts of it did happen, and I sincerely hope you never forget that.
Hubert L. Mullins
7/19/2019
Treblinka
January 3rd, 1943
When the Entity hovered above the ground, some two-hundred feet in the air, the northern part of the night sky was completely obliterated by a thick, greasy cloud of black. They’d started burning the bodies on giant, open pyres, and the billowing smoke looked like a demon rising from the earth. The Entity hadn’t been awake for long, but the old ways returned to him rather quickly. In all of the world’s history, death was the one thing most common—the one thing that united something as vile and wicked as he, with those common men and women who drew breath.
And the Entity thought this was quite good.
In half a heartbeat he was standing on the ground, but no one could see him unless he so chose it. The hour was late, no more than a few past midnight. Most of the killing took place in the day, and that was the time he normally lingered about, but as the bodies charred and turned black, like long slivers of rot, he smiled. Death fed him.
His hands, metaphorically speaking, didn’t need to get dirty. Not once did he pull a trigger, stab a heart, push someone from a cliff. But he was always there in the aftermath, savoring the aroma as the soul parted from the flesh, tasting it, feeling it warm his insides. He didn’t know what he was, but he did know that as long as there was death, he’d survive.
It had been that way for years—he was there a decade ago when the Chinese floods killed millions, sweeping clean the shanty villages and valleys with mud. He was there during the Spanish Flu, in India and Japan where people coughed bloody phlegm in the streets. He was even there for the Black Plague, and what a wonderful time that had been! People died in taverns and churches and lodge houses as regularly as the wind blew. He could still taste that meal, a third of Europe falling to ash, enough that it engorged his spirit and left him satiated for years.
Now, it seemed that war was what kept him fed.
The current squabble felt across the globe was ending more lives than any of the conflicts to come before, but they simply weren’t enough. Not many on this earth could put to death as efficiently as biology. But still, he rather admired the Germans and their ovens and gas chambers. No one had perfected killing as much as the Führer and his legion of like-minded monsters.
Like a ghost and shadow, the Entity strolled the camp, feeding on the fear and the freshly killed. The extermination chambers were empty, the diesel tank engines which supplied the suffocating exhaust cold, and a team of Trawniki guards used hoses to wash out the filth from inside. Anyone sleeping within the camp were either Germans, conscripted Soviets, or Jewish slave-laborers. No one came to Treblinka for an extended stay. This place was designed for killing in mind, and that’s what happened moments after they stepped off the trains.
Most of the commanding SS were asleep at such an early hour, warm by their stove fires, but the Entity could always count on seeing Franz Stangl, White Death they called him, walking the grounds, a tiny cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He’d been out a long time, as evidenced by the dusting of snow on his shoulders. The SS respected him, the Trawniki and Jews feared him. His gaze fell through everyone he encountered, as if he didn’t see them, as if he were thinking of new and exciting ways to improve the already lethal Treblinka. A man after my own heart, the Entity thought, had he actually had a heart.
The Entity rarely interfered with the schemes of man. Although he could offer suggestions, he found that nature, as always, did better when it was allowed to work unprovoked. And so the Entity remained in the shadows, watching men do awful things to one another, and tasting the death that came in its wake.
Of all the camps he’d explored, Treblinka was his favorite. Perhaps it was in his weakened state, perhaps it was the nostalgia for such large-scale, efficient killing, but he was growing worried that the hunger would soon be upon him. He was omnipotent, and by such he knew the Russians were pushing from the east and, if the weather worked in their favor, would be here within a year. The Nazis would abandon the camps, most likely hide all the evidence, then turn to whatever front they thought they could win and push back. Either way, the killings would stop. The mass deportation of human cattle . . . would stop.
Nature needed to take back the reins.
Toward the end of his stroll, just before he retired to his lair, the Entity moved up the rail line, toward the Malkinia junction. Treblinka was the northernmost of the three death camps built in the last couple of years, and it was also the most expertly hidden. Legitimate Polish trains used the route all the time, never once noticing the spur line, never once realizing that just beyond the trees there was a camp. And in that camp, death found almost fifteen thousand souls per day. A train came each morning, sometimes two. Franz Stangl ordered the gassing at breakfast and by the time he had his poached egg and blood sausage brought to his quarters for lunch, the killing was done for the day. But the burning, so late into the Nazi’s desire to hide their crimes, never ceased.
A train was coming along the track as the Entity moved northward. Even the humans would have known it had they walked along the metal, balancing foot over foot with arms held out like a bird, just the way the entity had seen children do ever since train tracks first threw down across the land. The vibration was evident that a long trainset of cars would soon present itself. As he met up with it, some four miles up the path past the faux train station at Treblinka, he found it was a steam engine—as they all were—and it was pulling a total of forty-nine cars. The engine looked like a giant, rolling coffin—a sleek testament to men’s ingenuity. These passengers were lucky—they were in third-class passenger wagons complete with commodities not often seen in train cars bound for Treblinka—window slats and seats. Still, they were crammed inside so tightly that people were stacked like chairs. Most of the trains to enter the camp were made up of freight or cattle cars. In the warmer months it wasn’t uncommon for the majority of the prisoners to already be dead upon arrival.
The conductor slowed the train, and a puff of steam hovered in the air above it. As the Entity stepped aside, he could se
e the men operating the engine—two of them—simply sit back, breathe tired sighs, and then begin chatting quietly. This was normal—the camp trains had to sometimes stop to let legitimate trains pass first. After all, Operation Reinhard was Hitler’s big, elaborate secret.
As the Entity surveyed the train he tasted the fear and uncertainty grip each and every one of those aboard. There were over four thousand sweaty, but cold Poles, ranging from young children to the elderly. In his omnipotent mind he could delve into the heads of them all, pulling out memories, thoughts, wishes, and hopes. If he cared enough to be sadistic he would replace those with horrid images and premonitions of what was to come. But tonight he didn’t. Tonight he was tired, and weak, and wanted to be off to his lair. Later, he would return and feed from those before him—how he loved the taste of their deaths as their souls seeped away, how their bodies, sometimes upright in the crammed gas chambers, would release a final puff of breath as the Trawniki pulled them to the pyres.
Scared voices spoke silently. Though it was dark, a starless sky even if half of it was blotted out by the oily billow of smoke, the whites of eyes and sheen of teeth could be seen. Glass was not a luxury of this train, and cold lips chattered while expelling little puffs of steam. None of them could see the Entity, but he was entranced in their fear—it was almost as delicious as their deaths would be at sunup. He found himself slowly wafting down the line, taking in their faces so that it might satiate him for a few hours until a proper meal could be had.
They were all wondering why the train had stopped. None were in good spirits, but then again, how could they be? Some of them had already died—the train probably left the Warsaw Ghettos a couple of days ago with the promise they’d be heading to work camps across the Bailystok line. Never were they given food or water and this particular train was open to the elements. The Entity tasted the scant few inside the cars who’d perished, but it wasn’t as delectable as he’d hoped. They’d been dead for hours and the freshness had dissipated.
As he made it to the twelfth car past the engine he found himself face-to-face with a child. The adults crowding around turned dull eyes out to the blank, dark countryside but the child—a little girl no more than five who’d never known life outside a ghetto—was looking right at him. Sure, he’d been put to sleep many times, but he’d been around since the beginning of time, and now, in the heart of Poland during the second great war, a human was seeing him without his consent.
He didn’t know if he could speak. That wasn’t an ability he possessed. Whenever he influenced the mind of a human, it came to him as an internal monologue, but the humans always heard and they always obeyed. Now, he was feeling something he hadn’t known in his lifetime. In his mind he willed the girl to look away, to forget what she saw, but somehow, miraculously, she refused.
This anomaly stunned the Entity for a moment, and just before he’d made the decision to retire to his lair, the little girl’s arm shot through the opened portal and took hold of him. He had no arms, no legs, nor head, nor body at all. What he had was a consuming, flowing darkness that men could only feel, not see. He was as substantial as the smoke coming from the pyres burning Jews just miles down the road. And still, somehow, this child had grabbed him.
That was the moment the Entity understood the feeling that had washed over him like some kind of holy reckoning. He’d been all-powerful, omnipotent. The alpha and the omega. The beginning and the end. But now . . .now he understood.
He was afraid.
Berlin
January 7th, 2019
If anything had surprised him at all in his two-week jaunt across Europe it was that the nightlife operated in a much different way than his Salisbury, North Carolina back home. After dark, his town all but shut down, businesses pushing forward the curtain as if they were hiding some deep, dark secret. In truth, it was just the opposite, and, as one might suspect, his hometown was as boring by the day as it was at night.
Not like here at all.
Edmund Riley sat at a small bistro table outside a coffeehouse, undeterred by the cold weather. He was bundled tightly, having planned this trip months in advance and knew the winter could be harsh in many of the stops. But he hardly noticed the chill in the air as he watched the bustling nightlife of Germany’s capital city. True, he’d only been here for one night—having arrived by train from Hamburg just that morning—but he was certain the city never slept.
Within the narrow gap of buildings he spied no fewer than three stores, a restaurant, a nightclub, and a park. On down the street was a dimly lit cemetery, the massive headstones leaning to and fro like drunken golems. There were people everywhere—hundreds of young, vibrant men and women like himself who just wanted to live life and have fun on a cold, winter night. He could get used to this kind of place but alas, he’d be leaving on another train in the morning. As luck would have it, he wouldn’t be traveling alone.
A girl had just brought him a steaming cup of coffee—it smelled wonderful but he wasn’t much of a coffee drinker. He wanted something with a little more kick but that would have to wait until his friends came along. For now, he was content to people-watch, sipping his bitter drink, and playing with the little device he’d pulled from his backpack beneath the table.
It was a camera, but such a word hardly described the piece of expensive technology he held across his lap. It looked more like the P.K.E. meter on the Ghostbusters movie, minus the moving wings on the sides. This camera had a handle and a large viewscreen but it didn’t take normal photos; this one took infrared shots that made a person look less like a body and more like a Picasso painting of reds and yellows and oranges. Impractical as it was for most things, Edmund was still glad he brought it along.
He surveyed the area and pointed the viewfinder across the street and up toward the second story of a stark, white building. Although the device couldn’t see heat through the walls (something Edmund wasn’t sure even existed but something he was absolutely sure he couldn’t afford), it could still pick up through the windows.
No sooner had he moved the wand up to the third floor did the viewscreen change from a dark array of blues to a bright, pulsing red and orange. It took a moment of fine-tuning but once he had the image in focus he almost fell out of his chair. Edmund worked hard to keep his hand steady and not laugh at the same time.
There on his viewscreen were two hot shapes, red pulses that moved in concert with one another. The top shape moved forward as the bottom shape moved back, but even though they weren’t clearly-outlined people, it was easy to see what they were doing. Edmund could almost hear the couple’s moans as the one on top gyrated back and forth, his head moving from orange to red in such a pattern that it had to be the beating of his heart. Despite the chilly wind, Edmund could feel the flustered heat rising to his face.
His thumb moved up to hit the record button, for surely his friends would want to see this later, but just before he could tap it, the couple having sex completely disappeared from the screen, only to be replaced by a much larger mass of orange and red. Edmund moved his chair back when he realized someone was standing just in front of him, looking at him with an icy stare that didn’t understand, but knew it couldn’t be good.
The first thing Edmund noticed after the questioning eyes was the large, white letters on the man’s vest that read POLIZEI. His arms were thick, but it was hard to tell if the officer was muscular or just beefy since he had on a coat. His hat was white with a dark blue bill that made him look like a navy officer. Edmund’s eyes, as they always did when he saw a cop, drifted down to the man’s sidearm.
“Sorry,” said Edmund, immediately shutting down the device and placing it on his lap. “It’s new. I mean, I paid almost five-hundred dollars for it and I just . . . wait, can you even understand me?”
Throughout Edmund’s whole spiel, the officer simply stood in an imposing manner, arms crossed over, listening to the American explain himself. At the end, Edmund wondered if he’d just broken some sort
of Peeping Tom law, one that would be far more severe than those back home. Flashes of a harsh, German prison flooded his thoughts and his fingers shook as the real world—not the one his family had painted for him with money and privilege—threatened to swallow him up.
“Officer! Officer?” a voice from inside the café said. Edmund turned to see the doors pushing open, the smell of coffee and his friends—Bill and Sophie—come storming out. The policeman turned interested, yet stoic eyes toward them. Bill was clutching his cellphone.
“He is an American and is taking pictures for his school newspaper,” Bill lied, speaking directly into his phone. He held it up for the officer to hear, which had now been translated into German by way of a handy app that Edmund wished he’d known about when he’d traveled through Paris and was flirting with a beautiful Japanese girl at a bar.
The lie held and the policeman, after glancing skeptically at Edmund, simply nodded and walked off, slowly meandering down the street toward the cemetery.
“Why in the world did you come to Berlin to spy?” asked Bill. Edmund was on his feet, hugging his friend across the distance of the tiny bistro table. Sophie just looked on with a smile, her hands stuffed into her jacket pockets.
“Damn, it’s good to see you, buddy!” said Edmund, taking a seat again. “How long has it been?”
“Eleventh grade,” Bill said, certainty in his voice. He turned to his girlfriend and said, “You remember Sophie, right?”
“Sure,” said Edmund, shaking her gloved hand. It was weird and strangely grown-up for twenty-year-olds to be shaking hands, but here they were.
“How was your flight?” Edmund asked, taking his seat again.
“Not to be rude, but could we go somewhere for food?” asked Bill, to the point. “We’ve not even been to the BnB yet and we’re starved.”
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