The Pilot's Girl: An utterly heartbreaking World War 2 historical novel (Hanni Winter) by Catherine Hokin

Author:Catherine Hokin [Hokin, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800197022
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2022-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

21 DECEMBER 1948

He’d had to steel himself for this one. The first night he had gone out to do it, he had failed and come home without a tick to add to his list. The second time, he had stumbled again and taken the woman he had chosen as his Aunt Bettina’s twin instead.

It’s not because I’m weak; it’s because children are different: children are not meant to die.

Tony fervently believed that. The Nazis hadn’t – they had shown no more compassion to the children that they had murdered than the adults, sometimes less if the horror stories about drowned newborns and toddlers thrown alive into ovens were to be believed. That was what got him through the task in the end – knowing that his hesitation proved that, although he was a killer, he was better than them.

Tony knew what the Nazis had done to children: they were not the kind of details that, once learned, anyone could forget. He had listened in disbelief to the numbers of the dead being announced in hushed tones on the radio stations which carried reports from the Nuremburg trials. Over a million youngsters – and the clerks tasked with the terrible job nowhere near finished counting – murdered because they had been born Jewish or Romani or some other race or religion that didn’t matter to the future as much as being ‘pure Aryan’ did. Or because they were not up to National Socialist physical and mental standards.

Tony had read the accounts of the T4 programme, the murder of the disabled by gas or by starvation or by lethal injection. He had also read the reports from Auschwitz and Josef Mengele’s twin-obsessed laboratory there. About the experiments to alter eye colour; about the surgeries to test a small body’s capacity to navigate unrelieved pain; about the dirty needles which were stuck into tiny arms and legs in order to fill them with disease. He had read about everything the Nazis had done; the reports were like a drug to him. Tony knew just how cruelly the Nazis had treated the youngsters they had branded as ‘other’. They had shown those children as much contempt as they had shown the adults who had tried to protect them. His reluctance to take a barely begun life came out of the horror of the too many who had already been lost.

But the job still had to be done.

It had, thankfully, been one of his quickest. The child hadn’t suffered, and he looked angelic in death. Tony settled the boy’s head as gently as he could onto the cushion he had placed in the crook of the sofa and folded the little hands across a jumper that was too thin to withstand the bitter cold currently gripping the city. Then he paused and closed his own eyes and reordered his thinking.

Not ‘the boy’: that doesn’t honour either of them. This is for David.

As hard as it had been to carry out, this death mattered too much to have gone undone.

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