The Upright Heart by Julia Ain-Krupa

Author:Julia Ain-Krupa [Ain-Krupa, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9900043-9-4
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2016-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

XIII

Anna had only just arrived in Kraków when the streets were renamed. Even the town square was now called Adolf Hitler Platz. As if the country had been stolen from itself, now hiding until the storm would pass. And what if it never did? Then Polish words would be absorbed deep into the earth, sounds blurred and covered. Murmurs emitted in this language built for secrets. These sounds, they roll off the tongue like an endless whisper.

The governor-general of occupied Poland had chosen Kraków as his home base, in part due to the city’s Germanic flare. So much beauty here, he said to himself and to his many colleagues. Such opportunity. So, so many Jews. The Jewish population made up roughly a quarter of the city’s population, and so he fantasized about what their removal could do for this otherwise beautiful town. There was a plan set in motion, though it would never be completely fulfilled. Men stood at his altar, and whatever he said, went.

Niklas might have been the last man you would imagine to be found working under such a high ranking-official, but here he was, sleeping in a room in Wawel Castle, overlooking the Wisła River, which ran through this beautiful city of Kraków, drifting past the ghetto walls, rough within and perfect without.

Raised in a small German town in the north, he had never left his village until Hitler came to power. He couldn’t even read or write, but it was his skill for sweet-talking, his talent for charming people, that helped him to move quickly through the ranks of the new regime. First a local landowner sent him into the Wehrmacht as a soldier, and, before long, Niklas became a close confidant of the governor-general of occupied Poland. This job suited him better than any other he could have ever imagined. It looked clean and respectable on the outside, but there was still plenty of dirty work involved. Having lived the majority of his life isolated on a farm, Niklas had raised countless herds of cows, honing his skills, learning the best ways to care for and fatten the animals before slaughter. He was made for this work.

Though he had spent so much of his young life alone with his parents on the farm, Niklas had a way with people that was unmatched. It was as if he could see into them, identify their greatest fears and their greatest desires, and from that point of understanding, anything was possible.

As a child, he was terrified every time his father prepared the animals for slaughter, but as he grew older and became man of the house, he came to enjoy the contrasts of building life up only to tear it down. There was nothing like the feeling of raising an animal, knowing all along that whenever he wanted, he could simply kill it with a single blow. There was an unknown pleasure that he experienced when encountering another being’s fear. This was power, he long ago realized, an excitement like none other he had ever known.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.