Author: Jessie-chan
Pairing: Orlando / Viggo
Rating: R
Warning(s): AU
Summary: Orlando is a Holocaust-era Jew who goes into hiding with a gentile in Germany. As German Nazi soldiers search the room he stays in, he hides in a small space behind a closet wall and thinks on the danger he is in--and of the loving embrace of his gentile's arms.
Disclaimer: I don't purport to know Orlando or Viggo. Hell, if I did, I doubt I'd be able to sweet-talk them into a situation like this... ^_^
Feedback: Welcomed, appreciated, and I swear I'll fawn all over you if you do ^_^
Beta for the revision: Grey and Ethan
Archive: I hereby bequeath permission to archive this to Characters in Bloom and Love & Beauty, Elegance & Strength. Anywhere else, I beg you to ask.
Author's Notes: This is a careful revision of "In the Space Behind the Closet Wall," which was originally posted to various Yahoo groups on March 12, 2004. The story caused quite a bit of controversy when posted--I received several flames via e-mail, but I simply brushed them off and decided to not let them bother me.
In a similar vein, I think this story isn't written to really be enjoyed--in the words of one person who gave me feedback, "I liked the story, but I didn't enjoy it." It handles a very serious matter, one that I felt was, admittedly, controversial, but I felt it needed to be shared.
My thanks to Ethan, the language whiz, for the translation of several key statements into their respective languages. However, these are not direct translations--the program I am using does not allow for accent marks, so I had to leave those off.
In the Space Behind a Closet Wall
The space behind the closet wall was dry and dusty, and it was all I could do to keep from sneezing. Coarse wood scratched my left arm slightly, and the cold wood of the floor was smooth beneath my sweaty palms. The blackness inside of the small space was suffocating, and I could feel myself growing claustrophobic the longer I stayed in here. I longed to find my way out, but the sounds on the other side of the wall quickly vetoed any ideas that came to mind.
Harsh German voices struggled to speak the melodic Danish language. "Du er bestemt ingen gemmer her ovre? Vi har indkomne meddeler at en ubekendt pagaeldende er bleveet set i og omkring jeres hjem."
Another, much smoother voice easily and rapidly replied. "Ikke, ingen gemmer her ovre. Jeg er en Tysk borger. Jeg elske mig landskab og sig love. Ja ikke ophold sig."
I couldn't help but grin to myself, despite the fact I had no idea what was being said. My gentile knew German fluently; he was probably merely using his native tongue to annoy the soldiers stamping about the house.
"Sprichst auf deutsch!" I heard someone order gruffly.
I had never seen a German SS officer, but I guessed that he was the one who gave the order for Viggo to speak German; the Germans hated to have to adjust their typical routine for someone who was only trying to annoy them.
I began to breathe a little easier. This brilliant hiding place Viggo had constructed would be difficult to find. The false wall he built cut the closet in half, and underneath the shelves running down the wall was a small square that slid away, just large enough so I could fit through, yet small enough that I had to crawl. The little door wasn't visible once the square was slid into place.
I heard the closet door open, and I froze. The footsteps had drawn close while I wasn't paying attention. I held my breath and struggled to remain completely still as I heard someone moving the things on the shelves around. I clenched my teeth and rested my head against the wall behind me.
As the footsteps moved away, I slowly let out the breath I was holding. My limbs began to shake as the terror hit me in a flood. In that one moment, the events of the past three years flooded my mind, and it was a struggle to not scream and bang against the wall in a plea to be let out.
The proclamations. The Fuehrer had released so many of them, I could hardly keep track of them all. Jews could no longer go to public beaches and parks. Jews could no longer attend theatres. Jews were no longer allowed to use public transportation, drive cars, ride bicycles. Jews had to register with the city halls in their towns. Jews had to sew a yellow Star of David onto all their clothes.
Jews began to be taken from their homes, often under the cover of darkness. Children would come home from school to find their entire families gone. Wives would return from the market to discover their husbands and children missing, the house in disarray. Entire families would disappear overnight, taken from their homes and shoved into filthy German cars, in which they would be taken to a train, shoved inside even dirtier cattle cars, and taken to work camps.
Of course, the Germans dressed this fact up in the clothing of lies, telling the families they would receive plenty of work, nice food, and high payment. But the Dutch radio broadcasts out of Britain, which Viggo translated for me, said things differently.
On cold nights, Viggo and I would stand on a chair and listen to the radio hidden behind a panel in the ceiling, Viggo's quiet voice softly translating what was being said from Dutch to German, so I could understand what was being said. The Dutch newscasters would tell terrible stories of the work camps. They called them "todeslager," death camps. They said that Jews were taken to these camps, and those old enough and strong enough to work were put to work. They were often worked to death and very rarely fed. Those who were too young or weak were culled from the others, and they were taken to their deaths.
I hated hearing these stories, and Viggo did, too. Whenever the Dutch newscasters told the stories of the rare few Jews who had managed to escape from these camps and make it to London, Viggo would climb down from the chair and punch the wall in anger. I hated the stories because they made me think of my missing parents. And my sister. We could only afford one space on the last ship to America, and I had forced Samantha to take it, promising her that when I got the money, I'd take the next ship to America, a ship I knew was never going to come.
And then a call-up notice came in the mail. It was then that I realized that no matter how much support I threw behind my home country, Germany would never recognize me as a citizen, and the Nazis would kill me the first chance they had. Though I didn't know at the time that the work camps were really death camps, my instincts told me to not board that train headed to the fort of Breendonck, where it said I would be transferred to Dachau. I ran next door to my neighbor's home; Coen van Hausen was a Christian preacher but also a sympathizer of the Jews. He read the letter, told me to remain calm and stay away from home, and he would find me some place to go.
He found me a home near the border of Germany, close to Denmark, with a gentile named Viggo Mortensen. Viggo was a man who believed the Nazis were wrong to harm the Jews as they were. He had wished to hide a Jew but had not found anyone willing to hide in his home, because the alarm amongst the Jews had yet to be raised. The preacher said that Viggo had asked explicitly for a young man, so he approached the Danish migrant with the idea of housing me and hiding me for an undetermined amount of time. Viggo took up on the idea immediately.
Before we left, Coen made me cut the Star of David off my clothing. Apologetically, he explained that the Star would only draw attention to both of us, seeing as how Jews were no longer allowed outside their homes after dark and we would be traveling under the cover of darkness. I was reluctant to agree; while the felt star itself was rather gaudy, the symbolism behind it--the proclamation of my Jewish heritage and what it meant to me--made me reluctant to cut the threads binding it to my clothes. I was also afraid we would be caught by the Germans and I would be discovered as a Jew. Despite my protestations...
"I cannot take them off! We will be caught! They will kill us both!"
Father Coen forcibly made me cut the stars off my clothing and promised me he would make it up to me.
On the way to Viggo's home, Father Coen and I were almost caught by Hitler's SS, who I knew were less than kind to those breaking the law. However, we managed to reach Viggo's house unharmed. When Father Coen and I first stepped into Viggo's kitchen, the room was pitch black, and it wasn't until after Viggo had closed the door, bolted it, and pulled the curtains shut that he turned the light on, and I was able to get my first look at the man willing to risk his life to hide me from the Nazis.
He was rather tall, with short, brownish-blonde hair and pretty eyes. He was well-built and rather muscular, and he had really high cheekbones and a cleft in his chin. When he first saw me, he swept those pretty eyes of his up and down my body before drawing me into a hug and giving me a gold Star of David on a thin chain. "You will never believe how difficult it was for me to buy this," he said to me in German. "Father Coen told me about the stars, so I wanted to get you one to replace them."
With that statement, he endeared himself to me right then.
The months I spent in his company were hardly dull. He was constantly finding new entertainment, and he was always bringing home books from his job as a librarian. We would often listen to the radio, but when the Fuehrer ordered all radios to be turned in, Viggo promptly found an old one, fixed it up, and hid it in the ceiling before turning in the one we usually listened to. After that, we had to stand on a chair to listen to the broadcasts, but we had no problems with that. Of course, the closeness with which we were standing was a little unnerving, but I had managed to ignore it.
My eyes widened as several thuds sounded from outside the closet wall. It sounded as if someone was either pulling things off of the shelves lining the wall or was banging on the wall with the butt of a rifle. I couldn't hear Viggo; my breathing started to get erratic again. I closed my eyes, attempting to comfort myself and picture the Dane's serious eyes.
What came to mind was almost enough to make me gasp aloud.
His hands. Artist's hands. Long-fingered, slightly calloused. I could almost feel them running down my body again, like they did on that cold night in winter when the entertainment seemed to run out. The darkened eyes starting down at me made my heart quicken, then and now. I clenched my fists and struggled to not make any sound whatsoever as I envisioned those soft lips of his running down my neck, over my chest, pressing against my lips passionately. The phantom feel of nimble fingers touching me nearly drove me up the wall as I crouched in the dark space. A vision of fingers tangled in my hair, tugging only slightly, and the feel of being filled, being completed, flooded my brain. Gentle licks, entwined limbs, arched backs...the thought of the gentle passion of that night was enough to calm me down and relax me.
I pulled myself out of these visions to total silence. There was no longer any sound beyond the wall. I held my breath, wondering if I had made some sound that alerted the Germans to the fact that there was someone behind the wall. But no sounds came that indicated this, either. My breathing picked up again, my fear beginning to override my senses; where was Viggo? Why couldn't I hear him?
I shook it off and forced my breathing to slow. It would not do me any good to fly off the handle while hiding in this small space. It would throw everything Viggo had done for me out the window.
After a long moment, soft footsteps thudded across the hardwood floors of the bedroom beyond. There was a rustle, and the sound of objects being removed from the shelves. I clenched my fists, ready to fight if necessary, as the small square slid aside easily, and bright light flooded the space I crouched in. I blinked, trying to adjust to the brightness of it, and then a dark head stuck itself in through the gap.
"Es is jetzt sicher," Viggo said reassuringly in his accented German, holding out a hand. "Sie konnen herauskommen. Sie haben verlassen."
Breathing a sigh of relief, I crawled out of the space behind the closet wall and into Viggo's arms.
~*~
It was in the next year that the war ended, but it was many years later before I went out into Germany's streets again to search for my parents and sister. I hoped against hope that Samantha had returned from America, but I knew she was probably still over there; perhaps she had found happiness during the war, much as I had. I could not find my parents right away, though. It was much later, in 1953, eight years after the Allied Forces declared victory over Germany's Nazi party, that I was allowed to go through typescripts of records and papers from various concentration camps.
I had no idea where to begin; I had never known which camp they had been sent to. But after three months of almost-futile searching, I finally located my mother's name amongst lists and papers from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. She had died of typhus in an epidemic that spread across the entire camp, one week before the Allied Forces liberated the camp. Viggo consoled me in my grief, comforting me as I realized that I would likely never be able to recover my mother's body for burial.
Several months later, I stumbled across my father's name amongst the papers for the Belzec extermination center, which told me he had somehow made his way into Poland. His death was listed as "accidental." When I asked the official monitoring my search what that meant, he said it likely meant he died of intentional carbo monoxide poisoning.
In 1954, I was allowed to travel to the Belzec center in Poland to take a tour. Viggo went with me, and we walked slowly through the tiny camp, my hand a death grip on his. The barbed-wire fence was thick and looked to be difficult to get through, if indeed anyone managed it. Guard towers stood like sentries all around the perimeter of the camp. We were shown the barracks where the Jewish deportees were forced to undress and were shaven of all their hair.
The second part of the camp held gas chambers and burial pits. We had to walk along a long, narrow passage surrounded with barbed wire, which was further covered over by leafy green plants to camouflage the area. As we and the small group we were with walked slowly down the passage, I tried to envision my father being herded down the path; I knew he wouldn't walk quietly to what he must have suspected was his death. As I only half-listened to the guide's explanation for the passage and how the Germans went about murdering so many people, Viggo and I walked into one of the small "shower rooms," I was struck by the monumental horror that must have pervaded the room. I thought of my father and quickly broke down, sinking to my knees on the hard floor. I cried for my father, for my mother, for my sister, for all the women and children and men who died merely because they were born Jewish. And I cried for the innocence I had lost in the war, and the emotional pain I had gone through.
Viggo and I left the camp that evening, silent and drawn, overwhelmed by the sheer emotional beating we had taken.
Two months later, Samantha and I found each other in New York. I was almost thirty, and she was thirty-one. We were amazed at the changes we had gone through in the almost ten years since we'd been apart. She was glad to meet Viggo, and she thanked him profusely for "keeping my little brother safe." I met her husband, the man who had been willing to rent her a room in a small apartment building in New York. Viggo and I managed to find a tiny apartment to stay in while I visited Samantha. On the third day, I reluctantly told her of mine and Viggo's relationship and how it developed over the time I was in hiding; I was worried what she would think, but she only said, "I'm glad you found someone to love, Orlando." She dropped the subject after that, asking about friends and relatives in Germany. I gently broke the news of our parents' deaths to her, and we both cried together.
After the lengthy visit, Viggo and I decided to head back home, healed of old wounds and in pain from new ones. But I knew, as we boarded the plane back to Germany, that we would heal each others' wounds, just as we had done for the past nine years.
Endnotes:
In World War II, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany began to create what they envisioned as the perfect race. The Holocaust was their efforts to exterminate Jews and other people they considered to be "inferior." The Nazis targeted many groups--among them Catholics, Poles, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Communists--but the only ones systematically exterminated were Jews, the handicapped and the Gypsies (the "Sinti" and "Roma").
This story is dedicated to their memories.
Thank you to my friend Ethan; his knowledge of Jews and the Holocaust, handed down from generations before him who experienced it firsthand, was invaluable.