Last week's task was a simple one. The prompt was "Write about anything you want," so I wrote nothing, rather taking the easy out by submitting a small piece of a novel I had published. The word-count limit for the group in these matters is 800, to which we generally strictly adhere. With the outbreak of the virus and closing ourselves away, attendance to the meetings has been small (2 to 4 persons on a Zoom.com link). This being the case, my word count for the day was a wopping 1,550. Well, here at The Zone I am not so constrained and will place the entire segment from which I had copied my entry. Olympus, and the House of Tchrlok is a bit of a hefty read and this is such a small bit of the whole, now expanded to the full 2,302 words.

MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 1946 CE . . .

The French prosecuting attorney faced the tribunal. “With the authorization of the court, I would like to proceed with this part of the presentation of the French case by bringing forth a witness who, for more than three years, had lived within the confines of German prison camps.”

For much of the world, Monday, January 28, 1946, started pretty much the same as the Monday before. In a certain war-recovering community in southern Germany, it was another day under a world’s closest scrutiny. The many wooden chairs and tables creaked under the many observers, and a cough echoed faintly around the large, crowded room. Softly clearing his own throat, the prosecuting attorney watched his witness walk slowly past the defendants’ dock. She felt that she had paused there a moment, though she merely slowed her pace, looking to them, and knowing that, in this moment, the hundreds of thousands who had been so needlessly, so horrifically killed, were gazing now upon them, their murderers, through her eyes. Drawing a deep breath of determination, she walked up the three steps and into the witness box. Settling into the chair, she lifted the translation headphones from the hook, fitting them over her ears.

The United Kingdom’s president of the Military War-Crimes International Military Tribunal regarded the woman over the gold rims of his glasses. “Would you, please, stand up?” he requested in English. “Do you wish to take the French oath?”

“Yes,” she murmured in French, rising to her feet and nodding to the tribunal.

“And will you tell me your name?”

“Marie Vincent LaRoche,” came her quick, uneasy reply.

“Repeat after me: I swear that I will speak without hate, or fear, that I will tell the truth, all the truth, nothing but the truth.”

Mme. LaRoche nodded again to him, repeating the oath in French.

“Raise your right hand and say, ‘I swear.’”

She raised her hand. “I swear.”

“Please, sit down, and speak slowly,” the president stipulated. “Your name is…?”

“LaRoche, Marie Vincent.”

The prosecutor leaned to the lectern, glancing to his notes. “Is your name Mademoisellé LaRoche?” he asked.

She regarded the man she had been working with over the past few weeks, now standing before her, some distance away. “Yes.”

“Are you the widow of Monsieur LaRoche?”

She focused her attention upon him, not the muttering crowd in the background. “Yes.”

“You were born in Paris, on 8 October, 1911?”

Mme. LaRoche again nodded in the affirmative. “Yes.”

“And you are of French nationality?” the man asked. “French born, and of parents, who were of French nationality?”

“Yes.”

“You are a deputy in the Constituent Assembly?”

“Yes.”

The prosecutor nodded to her. “You are a Knight of the Legion of Honor?”

“Yes.”

He looked to his notes. “You have been decorated by General Legentilhommé at the Invalidés?”

“Yes.”

“Were you arrested and then deported?”

She nodded her head that she had been. “Yes,” she whispered.

Glancing to the Tribunal, he then said, “Will you please give your testimony?”

Sitting straight in her chair, Mme. LaRoche cleared her throat. Many papers rustled across the great room, and a reporter coughed another distant echo.

“I was arrested on 9 February, 1942, by Petain’s French police, who handed me over to the German authorities six weeks later. I arrived on 20 March at La Sante prison, in the German quarter. I was questioned on 9 June, 1942. At the end of my interrogation, the Germans wanted me to sign a statement, which was inconsistent with what I had told them. I refused to sign. The officer who had questioned me threatened me, and when I told him I was unafraid of death … rather, of being shot … he said, ‘But we have at our disposal means for killing that are far worse than merely shooting.’ …And the interpreter said to me, ‘You do not know what you have just done. You are going to leave for a concentration camp in Germany. No one ever returns from there.’”

“So, you were then taken to prison?” the prosecutor asked.

“I was taken back to La Sante prison, where I was placed in solitary confinement. However, I was able to communicate with my neighbors, through the pipes and windows. I was in a cell near to Georgés Politzer, the philosopher, and Jacqués Solomon, who was a physicist. Monsieur Solomon was son-in-law to Professor Langévin, a pupil of Curie, one of the first to study atomic disintegration.”

To her right, and to the left of the prosecutor, were gathered the collected leaders of Hitler’s Third Reich, sitting on long benches at the wall in two neat rows, and surrounded by the white helmets of the Special Military Police detail. The one called Rudolf Hess, a former SS general and deputy führer to Hitler, watched her, with his wild eyes, his hand cupped to the translator earphone, intent upon her every word. At his side, Hermann Göring, reichsmarschall of the Luftwaffe, met her searching gaze with an unmoving look of apathy, possibly ignoring the woman’s testimony by leaving his translation headphones resting in his lap, though she thought it more likely he merely hated her words, and was quite capable of understanding her French. She was sure he must be listening, hating her voice, wishing she was dead and buried somewhere, with all those countless others.

In the prisoner dock, the Third Reich defendants appeared subdued, but angered, all within a neat little fence, and all surrounded by frail, human guards. The impression was one of snarling wolfhounds held at bay with flimsy leashes, guarded by sheep. Watching her assailants gathered there before her—these so-called defendants in the International Major War Figures Trial—a frightful chill ran up the woman’s spine. She wondered why there were no iron bars to cage the viscous beasts she again faced. Still, and as forsworn, the young woman did continue.

“Through the piping, Georgés Politzer was able to inform me that, when he was interrogated and tortured, he was asked whether he would write theoretical pamphlets for National Socialism,” she said. “When he refused, he was told that he would be in the first train of prisoners to be shot. As for Jacqués Solomon, he was also horribly tortured, then thrown into a dark cell. He was later released for a few minutes, on the day of his execution—so he could say goodbye to his wife… She, too, was under arrest at La Sante. Hèléne Langévin-Solomon told me, in Romainvillé, where I found her after I left La Sante, that, when she went to her husband, he cried, saying, ‘I cannot take you into my arms—because I can—no longer—move them.’ ” She turned her tearing eyes to the tribunal. “Every time the internees returned from questioning, one could hear moaning through the windows, and they all said they felt paralyzed.”

Her own eyes moist with her emotion, she gave her lips a nervous lick, looking out again to the devil’s box, where the monsters of Hitler idly sat. Her eyes faltered over these villains, and she returned them to the relaxing, yet determined image of the French prosecutor.

“Several times during the five months I spent at La Sante, prisoners were taken to be shot,” she continued, her voice becoming as passive as she could muster, while remaining strong and clear. “When I left La Sante, on 20 August, 1942, I was taken to the fortress of Romainvillé, which was a camp for prisoners. There, I was present on two occasions that prisoners were taken. 21 August, and 22 September. Among the prisoners taken away were the husbands of the women who were with me, and who left for Auschwitz. Most of them died there.” She looked again to the arrested Nazi officers. “Usually, these women had been arrested only because of the activity of their husbands. They, themselves—had done nothing.”

The Prosecutor patiently turned a page in his lengthy notes. “When did you depart for Auschwitz?”

“I left for Auschwitz on 23 January, 1943, arriving on the 27th…”

Fräulein Wilma Höhn stood at the tall double doors, gazing back into the large, crowded courtroom, with all its paper rustling, pen and pencil tapping, and whispering, wondering if any truly heard the words of Mme. LaRoche. There was relief, though, when she looked to the bench, where the judges were, of course, quite intent upon her every utterance. She turned and stepped through the doors, reaching into her handbag for a cigarette and box of matches, and then standing beside a military policeman in the corridor, while she struck up the fire.

A suited man hurried past her, clutching a sheaf of papers, scuttling his way into the courtroom, his obvious determination winning a smile from Wilma. She looked at the soldier, who granted her a glimmer of a smile as well.

“Busy day,” she commented.

“Always something new to submit, ma’am…” he thoughtfully replied. “…Always someone arriving late—always someone with a marvelous, new idea, be it for the prosecution, the defense—or the news reels.”

“Yes, I—suppose…”

“Pity they didn’t get him, though.”

“‘Him?’”

He nodded to her, looking a bit puzzled he should need to identify the missing defendant. “Hitler, ma’am. Dragging in his henchmen is one thing, but—boy, that would have been something…”

“Yes, it would have.” She dropped the match to the wood floor. “I’m afraid Adolph Hitler is already dead,” she said, chasing the smoking match down with the toe of her boot.

“What?” The look he gave her was now one of definite surprise. “I thought he escaped—to South America.”

She shook her head, no. “Suicide, with his wife, Eva Braun, in his Berlin bunker, April 30, last year.”

“You’re sure—um, ma’am?” He shook his head. “I mean, I hadn’t…”

“I—have to go.” She smiled a glance to the sentry. “Excuse me.”

Wilma walked toward the wide stairway, and proceeded down to the main doors of the Justizgebäude. She knew he would be there again, her conscience. He was always there, whenever she needed him, day or night. She stepped out on the front steps of Nürnberg’s Palace of Justice, to the whipping wind and biting January cold. A new year, a new nation, and a new world, all at once. And there he stood, just across the road, just as she expected.

On any other street, in any other city, the dark figure, hat drawn low across his brow, his cloak fluttering loose in the winter winds, would have seemed somewhat natural. Here and now, looking so sharp and dapper, he was bound to have been noticed as an oddity, had such notice been permitted. She stood where she was, the closed door to the building at her back, looking at him, with the bombed and fire-gutted remnants of a great city looming as his sprawling, devastated backdrop.

Wilma stepped cautiously down the snowy steps, and along the short walkway to the road, where she paused, awaiting the passage of a small convoy of military trucks. She was then able to cross over to him.

“My Lady,” he cordially greeted.

“I do not—like—this place,” she informed him, yet again.

“This is Your strength,” he reminded her. “It is here, in this place, that Justice shall overcome. This is why You chose to come here, to ensure that…”

“Prometheus…!” she nearly wept.

He regarded her, his black eyes glinting, like cut onyx caught in moonlight. “My Lady?”

She turned back to the Justizgebäude, dropping her cigarette to the snow. “The reason I am here is to determine what it is these lords of justice see as just.”

“And what have You learned?”

“They try,” was her soft reply. She faced again to him. “Oh, they do try. I recall the hateful trials at Athenæ, at Troia, and Spárte—Argo and Knossos… Here, though, is a war that has encompassed the globe—and the crimes found are—beyond barbarous, beyond cruel, beyond heartless…”

He rested his hand to her divine face. “My Lady Themis, what We learn here will shape Our future, as well as the future of Mortal-Man. Decisions formed here will echo through eons to come, for it is here, in this Palace of Justice, that We shall see the birth of a growing, spreading, global morality. It will require a space for contemplation—sometimes violent contemplation—but the following millennium may, at last, see an end to all warring conflict.” He looked across the road to the doors of the palace. “We look to the ancient democracies of Athenæ, thousands of years ago, and then to the testimony of Mme. LaRoche. Her words come softly to Us, sometimes timidly, but always with caution, and We realize she is but a single, frail voice, heroically speaking against a nation’s immorality. Still, while she is but one, she is also one of so very, very many—each so passionately, often unknowingly, fashioning a new path, across a new future, setting all mankind truly free of the bonds of tyranny.”

The goddess followed the god’s gaze across to the sprawling facility. “…I—must now return…”

“As I must now leave, My Lady.”

Facing the building, she held her hand out to him, feeling his warm hand grip hers. “Thank you.”

“Always Your Servant, My Lady.”

She started back across the street, even as the other deity vanished at her back, in a brief flair of sparkles, and a twisting flight of wind-blown snowflakes. Fräulein Wilma Höhn climbed the few steps to the main doors of the vast Justizgebäude complex. She stopped in the large foyer, kicking the snow from her boots, then preceded back up the wide stairway and into the large courtroom.