November 23, 1942
The Old City of Haifa,
British Mandate of Palestine
Anne stood in the shadowed corner of the dimly lit room, watching with cold detachment as the OVRA agent her Lehi cell was assigned to assist knelt beside the captured British officer, tending—if one could call it that—to the man's wounds. The room stank of blood, sweat, and burnt flesh, and the air hung thick with the coppery tang of suffering.
She recognized the officer. Even after all this time, his face was seared into her memory. He had been among the governor's staff in Haifa, one of the clean, well-dressed men who had looked on impassively, even amused, as her father was hanged in the town square—strangled slowly as the crowd, corralled by British police, watched in terrified silence. She remembered that day as if it had happened moments ago: her father's boots twitching above the dusty ground, the way her mother screamed, the way she—had felt the scream catch in her own throat and never quite leave.
And yet now, she cursed herself.
Not for what she had done to him—no.
But for revealing she was fluent in German.
That careless admission had sealed her role. She had been assigned as a translator for the OVRA agent—codename Carnicero, "the Butcher"—a former SS agent now turned Italian asset. Schlomo, her cell leader, had told her flatly: "He's renounced Nazism. He's useful. You don't have to like him. Just translate. That's all."
So she did. She followed orders.
She was a cog now. One of many.
The cause was all she had left.
"You can still live," the Butcher said now, his voice thick with a Teutonic accent as he addressed the British officer. His English was precise but slow, heavy like machinery grinding into motion. "Tell us who the traitors are. We know there are still Mapai and Haganah cells hiding in this city. Working for the British. Give us their names. Their locations."
The officer met his gaze, defiance flickering behind his bloodshot eyes. There was fear too—undeniable, human—but he had not broken yet.
And then the Butcher laughed. A deep, mirthless laugh that chilled Anne more than the scream that followed.
"Good," he said softly. "It wouldn't be any fun if you gave in too soon."
He turned his head slightly, eyes falling on Anne. "Feuerzeug," he said in clipped German—lighter.
Without a word, she pulled the silver Zippo from her coat pocket and tossed it to him. He caught it with a practiced flick, lit it, and then slowly pulled a combat knife from the sheath at his belt. The flame crackled as he held the blade above it, heating the steel until it glowed a dull, menacing red.
A minute passed. The heat from the blade was palpable even across the room. Anne could see the officer's body tense, his breath coming in shallow gasps. His torso was a ruin of blood and broken flesh, laced with cuts both old and new. He had been in their hands for only twenty-four hours. But Butcher worked fast.
"Please," the officer whimpered, his voice barely audible. "I'll tell you anything. Please..."
The Butcher paused, as if savoring the moment.
"Ohh," he murmured with mock surprise, "will you tell us where they are? The Haganah, the Mapai?"
His voice was almost gentle, conversational, disarmingly polite.
"I'm telling you…" the officer began, desperation rising. "I don't know what you're talking ab—"
"Liar!" the Butcher screamed, and Anne flinched before she could stop herself.
Without hesitation, the red-hot blade came down on the officer's forearm—not a stab, but a slow, deliberate branding. The man's screams echoed through the walls like the howling of an injured animal. Not even the radio could fully shut it out.
"I don't know! Please!" he shrieked.
Butcher pulled the blade away and followed with a vicious right hook that connected with the man's nose, breaking it with a sickening crunch.
He stepped back, letting the officer slump forward in his restraints. Anne's eyes followed him as he crossed the room to a table near the wall. There, a folder lay next to a notebook and a pen. She had seen it before—carefully compiled intelligence, observations, names.
The officer's face was a swollen mess. Blood dripped steadily from his nose and scorched cheek. He turned toward Anne, eyes glassy with tears and pain. There was something in his expression—pleading, searching. A man begging for a shred of mercy, a human connection.
She felt nothing.
No hatred. No rage.
No pity.
The same nothing she imagined he had felt when he'd watched her father kick and choke on a British rope.
Then the Butcher returned. He opened the folder and laid the contents before the officer.
"We've been following you for days," he said calmly. "You and your unit. We know you're MI6. We know you're in contact with Mapai and Haganah. You've met them. You've given them funds. Weapons. Escape routes. Not just you—your fellow agents too. We know everything."
He leaned in close, grabbing the officer's chin with his right hand, the knife—no longer glowing, but still dangerously hot—in his left.
"If you lie again," he whispered, pressing the flat of the blade against the man's cheek, "next time I'll start with your eyes. Or maybe your genitals. That always sends a message."
The officer's breath quickened. Panic overtook him. "Okay… okay," he whimpered. "I'll tell you. Please…"
The Butcher turned back to Anne, then gestured at the table. "Start writing," he said in German. His tone was pleasant, even courteous. But she knew better. She had learned to hear the menace beneath it.
She moved wordlessly, retrieved the notebook and pen, and sat. Her hand trembled slightly as she braced it on the table, though not from fear—just exhaustion.
"Start from the beginning," the Butcher said. "No lies. No omissions. We will keep you alive until we find our targets. Then, we let you go. But if we find even one falsehood... we will send OVRA agents to Britain. We will hunt your family. Wife? Children? Parents? Siblings? Cousins? All of them. OVRA always collects its due."
The officer nodded through tears, and the confession began.
Anne wrote, dutifully, mechanically. Names. Locations. Contacts. Safehouses. Every Mapai sympathizer, every Haganah operative, every Irgun traitor who had made peace with the British while they claimed to fight for the Jewish people's freedom. She wrote it all.
"They will join us or die as traitors," Schlomo had told her once, eyes ablaze with manic fervor. At least he still felt something. She was no longer sure she did.
After thirty minutes, the notebook was full. She tore out the pages, handed them to the Butcher. He accepted them with a nod of thanks.
"You've done well," he said. "Go get some rest. Tomorrow, you'll be hunting with your cell."
She didn't reply. He left.
She turned to the officer. He had slumped forward, exhausted, half-conscious. She picked up the gag and shoved it back into his mouth. He mumbled something through it—words she didn't care to hear.
"The only time you speak to the enemy outside of interrogation," Schlomo had told her during her first month in the field, "is when you're putting a bullet or a knife into him."
She'd had to do self-criticism that week for the infraction—a humiliating ritual where each member stood before the others to confess faults and failures, to seek forgiveness, and to pledge to be better. She hated it. The way they cried together. Hugged each other. Then went out the next day to kill again.
But it worked. It made them loyal. Fanatical. Desperate for approval, desperate to win.
She crossed to the radio and turned down the volume. The old broadcast ended, and she switched to another frequency until she heard something strange and sweet—Sinatra. A love song. Gentle, longing.
She hummed softly to herself as she opened a letter—a worn, crumpled envelope from her cousin in Switzerland. She read and reread the lines by candlelight, each word a relic from a lost world.
"There's a home for you here."
She looked up. The officer was slumped again. She crossed the room and slapped him hard, rousing him. A tactic, Butcher had said. Sleep deprivation. "To break the spirit. To make them beg for clarity, for silence."
"Sleep again," she said in accented English, "and I'll cut a finger off."
He stared at her now with the same terror he gave the Butcher.
She knew, in that moment, she was no different.
Just younger.
She sat back down, humming Sinatra, as she reread her cousin's letter for the fourth time.
And outside, somewhere in the night, Haifa pulsed with secrets and sins.
The low hum of the radio still played behind her, Frank Sinatra's voice drifting like smoke through the dim, dust-laden air. Anne sat slouched in the wooden chair, her eyes flicking from the crumpled letter in her lap to the British officer tied in the corner, barely conscious, his skin slick with sweat and blood. The iron stench of human suffering clung to the room like mildew.
The silence was broken by the creak of the door. It opened slowly at first, then all at once, as if someone had burst through it in a fury barely contained. Anne stood quickly, stuffing the letter into her coat. Her hand hovered near the small pistol holstered under her belt as her eyes locked with the figure that entered.
It was Ludwig.
Seventeen years old. Explosives expert. Pale, wiry, all sharp edges and raw nerves. He'd only been in Haifa a week, transferred from Acre after a bombing went wrong. He hadn't said much since arriving—just enough to follow orders, just enough to be trusted. But now, his face was a canvas of anguish and barely suppressed rage. His chest heaved, his fists clenched at his sides.
"Ludwig?" Anne asked in hebrew, stepping toward him. "What happened?"
His lips trembled. He looked around the room, eyes darting to the prisoner, to the blood on the floor, to the folder still lying open on the desk. Then, slowly, he turned his gaze on her, and she saw something fracture behind his eyes.
"It's him," he whispered.
Anne's brow furrowed. "Who?"
"That OVRA agent," he said, voice rising with each word. "The one you're working with. The German. The one they call Carnicero. The Butcher."
Her blood ran cold.
"I've seen his face before," Ludwig said, stepping closer. "Not here. A little over two years ago. In the Netherlands. He came to our town—under a different name. SS. He spoke Dutch with a strange accent. He came with others. They raided our neighborhood. Said it was retaliation for resistance activity. I watched from under the floorboards while they shot my father in the back. Then my mother. Then my little sisters. All of them."
He swallowed hard, his jaw shaking.
"I remember his voice. His laugh. He laughed when my baby sister cried out. He laughed." He looked at her, pleading now. "I thought he died in the war. But then I saw him. Here. Working with us. Torturing for us."
Anne said nothing at first. She felt her stomach knot, her skin go clammy. She thought back to Carnicero's cold eyes, the casual way he'd heated the knife, the precise brutality he employed like a master craftsman. And then she remembered the moment he looked at her—when he asked for the lighter with that dry, almost bored authority. She wasn't surprised anymore. She sighed and shook her head.
"I need to be sure," Ludwig said. His voice broke, but he caught himself. "I need you to find out. I need you to talk to him. Make him slip up. Say something only he would know. Something from that time. If he's who I think he is, then I want you to let me kill him."
Anne looked away. Her eyes fell on the officer again, barely conscious, his breathing ragged and shallow. Her mind swam.
She thought of her father's broken neck swinging from the gallows.
She thought of Schlomo's words: "They will join us, or they will die as traitors."
She thought of the cell's weekly self-criticism sessions, the laughter through tears, the embraces after confession, the way they bled for one another not just out of ideology—but out of loss. Out of love.
She looked back at Ludwig, saw the desperation carved into every line of his face.
"All right," she said finally.
His eyes widened.
"I'll find out," she continued. "I'll make him talk. If he's the one who murdered your family, then do whatever you want. I'll cover it up."
"Thank you," Ludwig whispered, trembling.
"But if he's not him," Anne warned, her voice sharpening, "if there's even a shred of doubt, you don't touch him. We need him. He's a monster, but he's our monster now. You understand?"
He nodded, though his jaw was still tight.
Anne stepped forward, placed a hand on his shoulder—brief, cold, but grounding.
"I'll handle it," she said.
And with that, she turned, walking back into the flickering darkness of the interrogation room, the radio still playing Sinatra's love song behind her like a cruel joke, the lyrics a relic from a life that felt centuries away.
Tomorrow, she would see the Butcher again.
Tomorrow, she'd ask questions.
And tomorrow, perhaps, she'd find out if she was working beside a murderer worse than even she had imagined.
And if he was—
She would let Ludwig have his vengeance.
Anne left the room shortly after and closed the door behind her with a quiet click.
Ludwig didn't look up. He was already sitting in the chair she had vacated, elbows on knees, eyes locked on the broken prisoner as if he could burn the truth out of him by sheer force of will. Anne didn't say anything—just gave a small nod.
She turned away.
The corridor was dark, lit only by flickering bulbs that buzzed overhead like angry flies. She passed the weapons cache, the maps, the radio room. The walls were cracked and peeling, the hallway soaked in the stench of rust, cordite, and fear.
She reached her cot in the back room—a space barely wide enough for a bedroll, a crate she used as a table, and a battered locker. She sat down hard, pulled the letter from her coat pocket, and unfolded it again with trembling fingers.
She read it slowly this time. Every word like a thread winding around her heart. A home in Switzerland. His aunt, uncle and cousin still alive. Cousin Bernhardt who taught her to skate. There was still someone. Something.
A home, she thought.
Her breath hitched.
She remembered how she had shown the letter to Schlomo just a week ago, beneath the orange tree in the courtyard while the sun bled across the tiles.
He had smiled, that rare, warm smile he only showed when he wasn't planning the next raid or when he talked to Anissa.
"That's good," he'd said. "That's very good. Hope keeps your hand steady. Makes you fight harder."
She had looked at him, skeptical. "Is that why you fight, Schlomo? For hope?"
He'd laughed. "Partially. Mostly for revenge." Then he softened again. "But yes. Hope too. I want a world where our people can have a home."
He'd leaned in and whispered like a secret: "Anissa and I… we're going to get married. When this is all over. We'll run away. Maybe Brazil, maybe Colombia. Someplace green. Somewhere quiet."
She had smiled, surprised. "Does she know that?"
"She will one day," he'd said, grinning.
Then he pointed to her chest, where the letter rested.
"Hold onto that. Hold it like a weapon. There will be a future."
Now, in the dark, alone, Anne covered her face and wept.
Not the controlled tears she sometimes allowed herself in the shower or under the desert stars, but great, heaving sobs—silent, aching, and bitter. Her ribs ached with each breath, her eyes burning from more than just grief.
She thought of Margot. Of her mother. Of her father, whispering lullabies to her when she was sick with fever as a child. All gone. All gone except this—this paper, this promise, this scrap of a world that might still exist.
She wanted to live.
God, she wanted to live.
To go to Switzerland.
To find Bernhardt.
To skate again.
To eat a peach and sing in the snow.
To wear a red dress and laugh without guilt.
Her fingers moved of their own accord. She reached into her satchel and pulled out the battered black diary, its pages already stained with blood, dust, and dreams. She opened to a blank page. Picked up her pen. And began to write.
----------
Monday, November 23, 1942
Today I helped to torture a man.
I watched the British agent scream and shake and sob. I felt nothing. Then I felt everything.
I told myself it was for the mission. That pain makes men speak. That monsters deserve no mercy.
But he wasn't the monster. Not the real one. That one might be the butcher, the man that tortured him, and me, who stood and watched.
I still don't know if I believe in good or evil. But I know I want to live. I want to breathe cold air and taste real food again. I want to fall in love. I want to skate across a frozen lake and fall laughing into the snow.
I want to go home. Even if it's only a ghost of one.
For the first time since Margot died, I believe there might be a future. Not a clean one. Not a peaceful one. But a future.
A twisted kind of hope, maybe. But it's mine.
--------
She set the pen down. Her hand trembled.
Then, for the first time in months, Anne Frank folded her hands and prayed. Not for victory. Not for vengeance. But for life.
"Please," she whispered into the shadows. "Just let me live."
And somewhere, beyond the iron doors and blood-streaked halls, a new day crept toward them.
November 24, 1942
The Old City of Haifa,
British Mandate of Palestine
The sun had already begun to set, casting long, bruised shadows over the stone courtyard. The call to prayer drifted in faintly from somewhere across the rooftops, blending with the sound of boots scuffing against dirt, the occasional crackle of a radio, the low murmur of voices behind doors that never stayed closed for long.
Anne sat on a crate outside the holding room, her diary open on her lap, her fingers ink-stained and shaking slightly.
She began to write:
---
Tuesday, November 24, 1942
We spent the morning chasing a ghost. A Mapai courier—young, fast, and smarter than he looked. He led us through the alleys like a rat that knew every tunnel. We caught him in an abandoned bathhouse by the port. He tried to swallow his notes. But Schlomo shot him in the leg, and I dug the wet paper out of his throat before he could choke on it.
He screamed the whole way back. They always do.
We're running out of sedatives. So Butcher used a belt and salt water this time. It worked. Eventually.
----
The holding room smelled of copper and ammonia.
The Mapai agent hung from the ceiling by his wrists, his breath shallow and wet, blood crusting beneath his nose and around his fingernails. Anne stood beside a rusting table, jotting notes into a ledger as Butcher worked—the same quiet rhythm as always. A bucket. A cloth. A dull blade. Nothing fancy. Nothing poetic.
Just pain.
She didn't look at the prisoner. Not anymore. She only looked at the information: names, dates, handoff points, numbers.
But as Butcher stepped back to catch his breath, she broke the silence.
"You have a Dutch accent," she said lightly, almost conversationally, as if they were sitting in a café, as if he weren't standing ankle-deep in blood.
Butcher paused. He rolled his shoulder. Wiped his hands on a towel.
"You've a good ear," he replied, his voice low and even. "Yes. I was stationed in the Netherlands."
Anne's pen stilled over the page.
"Amsterdam?"
He nodded. "For a while."
She tilted her head. "Where?"
"South," he said, his eyes distant. "Near the Singel. Close to where the flower market was. There was a little shop… candies, mostly. Run by an old man with a limp."
Anne's mouth dried.
"I know that shop," she whispered.
He looked at her then, really looked at her. "You do?"
She nodded. "He used to give free caramels to children on Fridays."
"He did," Butcher said, smiling faintly. "Those were my favorite."
Anne smiled back before she could stop herself. A reflex. A ghost of a girl long buried.
"I liked the orange drops," she said. "And the hazelnut clusters."
Butcher chuckled, just once. "Too sweet. They stuck to your teeth."
There was a strange silence then. A thread stretched tight across memory and bloodshed. Two people standing across a gulf of fire, staring at a bridge neither of them meant to build.
Anne's voice dropped, curious now.
"What were you doing there?" she asked.
He turned away. Pulled a cigarette from his coat. Lit it.
"I was with the SD."
"What did you do?"
"I kept order."
"You killed partisans," she said quietly.
He exhaled slowly. "Yes."
She said nothing. Just watched the smoke curl toward the cracked ceiling. Watched his hands, remembering the way they moved when he beat a man half to death, how steady they were.
"What's your name?" she asked.
He looked at her.
"Your real name," she added, before he could lie.
He paused, long enough that she thought he wouldn't answer.
Then:
"Klaus."
She didn't blink. Didn't write it down.
She just nodded.
"Thank you. Anne."
She said nothing more. Just closed her notebook and stepped outside, the door swinging softly shut behind her.
Later that night, in her room, by candlelight, Anne opened her diary again.
---
Klaus.
The Butcher has a name. A real one. He liked caramels. He smiled at the memory of a shop where I once stood holding my sister's hand. Where we bought sweets for Shabbat. He laughed. I laughed. It didn't feel real.
He killed partisans. Maybe neighbors. Maybe friends. Maybe people who had no names left.
But he remembers the same streets. The same bridges. The same old man with the limp and the jars of candy behind glass.
He is a monster. But he was there. In my city. My memory. And now he's here, in the blood and dirt, just like me.
I memorized his name. I don't know why. But I won't forget it.
Klaus.
The man who broke bones with precision. The man who once stood in the same candy shop as me, and walked out into a different kind of future.
Now I'll tell Ludwig. And if he killed his family he'll be dead within the week.
---
She paused.
Then added, in smaller handwriting:
---
Is this what war does? Takes children and turns them into killers, and killers into men who remember chocolate?
---
She closed the book gently.
Tonight, she wouldn't pray.
She would dream.
Not of hope.
But of memory.
And of names.
Always the names.
November 25, 1942 – After midnight
The Safehouse, Haifa
British Palestine
The hallway was cold, narrow, the whitewashed walls humming with the sound of distant voices and the flicker of bad wiring. Anne walked slowly, deliberately, her boots heavy on the stone floor. She passed the supply closet. The communications room. Then finally, the cell on the far end—where Ludwig had been keeping watch.
She found him seated on a metal chair, hunched forward, his eyes locked on the closed door of the adjacent room. The prisoner was inside—unconscious, tied to a pipe, beaten but alive. Ludwig didn't notice her at first. He was gripping the edge of the chair so tightly his knuckles had gone white.
"Ludwig," she said softly.
He turned, eyes hollow, almost feverish.
She crouched in front of him. "His name is Klaus," she said.
That was all it took.
The words hit him like a sledgehammer. His shoulders jolted, and then his hands rose to his face. A sound escaped him—half gasp, half sob. He doubled over, trembling.
"Netherlands," she added, quietly. "Amsterdam. He was there."
Ludwig began to shake.
"That's him," he whispered through his hands. "That's him. That's—oh God. It's him. I knew it, I—"
He slid off the chair, collapsing onto the floor, kneeling like a child. His hands clutched at his scalp, his face contorted in a raw, almost animal grief.
"He killed them—my mother, my father, my sisters, he—" His voice cracked, then broke entirely. "Laughed. I saw him through the floorboards. I was hiding like a coward. He—he smiled while they screamed."
Anne felt her stomach turn to ice.
Ludwig buried his face in her lap, sobbing uncontrollably.
"Please," he wept as he glanced at her."Anne, please. You have to let me do it. I need to—I need to make him pay. I see their faces every night. I see their hands reaching for me, burning. I want him to burn. Please, I need this—I can't live with myself. I have to avenge them, please."
Anne hesitated, her arms hovering in the air. And then, slowly, she wrapped them around him. She held him close, cradling his shaking body, the heat of his grief seeping into her like a fever.
He wept like a boy, broken and bare.
And Anne hated him for it.
Not for his pain. But because he could still feel it. Because he hadn't become like her. Because he hadn't shut it all off just to keep breathing.
She hated him because his tears were pure.
And she hated herself for feeling that way.
So she held him tighter.
She pressed her chin to his hair and let him cry.
And in the silence that followed, she stared past him, into the dark corner of the room, and thought: I don't even remember what my mother's voice sounded like.
---
Wednesday, November 25, 1942
Ludwig collapsed tonight.
I told him the Butcher's name. Klaus. I told him he had served in Amsterdam. He knew immediately. Knew it with the kind of certainty that can only come from fire and blood and screaming. He wept. He wept like a child.
He told me what happened. I won't write it down. I can't. But I will remember it. I will remember the way his hands shook. The way his voice fell apart. The way he begged for permission to kill.
And I… I didn't know what to say.
I held him. Because it was the only thing I could do. Because I couldn't speak. Because I couldn't tell him the truth.
That I wanted to feel what he felt. That I missed it. The rawness. The grief. The unbearable, soul-wracking grief that at least meant you still loved something enough to lose it.
All I have left now is a heartbeat and vague hope for the future. And sometimes not even that.
Ludwig is still human. He still dreams of justice. I dream of silence.
But I will give him what he asks.
When the time comes.
And Klaus will burn.
---
Anne closed the diary.
Outside, the night wind howled like a wounded animal.
Inside, Anne sat by the door and watched Ludwig sleep on the floor, curled around his own sorrow like a dying flame.
And she thought, not for the first time, that whatever innocence she once had died in a place with a checkered floor and a diary in the attic.
But something else had been born in its place.
Something colder. Sharper.
And it, too, had a name.
Justice.
November 25, 1942 – Afternoon
Outside Haifa, Near the Carmel Ridge
British Palestine
The sun hung low over the hills, filtered through dust and smoke. The air smelled of orange blossoms and burnt oil. Anne crouched behind a crumbling stone wall, her rifle slung over one shoulder, eyes narrowed at the squat white building across the dirt road. The Haganah safehouse. One entrance. Two windows. One armed sentry.
She had been watching it for an hour.
Klaus stood beside her, arms crossed, chewing on a strip of dried meat. He looked bored. Arrogant. A predator playing human.
Ludwig knelt a few feet behind them, backpack open, checking the wires on a small charge. His hands were steady. His eyes were not.
Anne's voice was quiet. Controlled.
"I'm thinking we go around back once the sun drops. Blow the generator, draw them out. Then move in."
Klaus grunted. "Clean and quick. I like it."
She nodded. "Ludwig, you good with the pack?"
He gave a tense nod. "Wired and ready."
Klaus checked his pistol. "Well then, let's go say hello."
They moved fast. Quiet. Through the brush, up the slope, past a shattered olive tree where a bullet had lodged in the bark. As they approached the building's rear, Anne slowed. She motioned for Klaus to check the door.
As he stepped past her, she reached into her coat.
A long, thin wire.
She moved fast—like she'd done it a thousand times.
The wire slipped around his throat in an instant. She twisted and pulled. Klaus's body jerked backward, his boots scuffing against the dirt. He flailed, arms reaching, voice a gurgling rasp. He elbowed her once, hard—but she held on, biting down, her muscles screaming.
She dragged him down.
He collapsed in the dust.
Unconscious.
Ludwig was already beside her. Silent. Breathing hard.
Together, they dragged Klaus behind a thicket of dry brush.
Anne tied his hands. Tight. Then his ankles. Then stuffed a rag into his mouth.
She didn't say a word.
She didn't need to.
Ludwig just stared at her.
And she nodded once.
That was enough.
He knelt beside Klaus, pulled a rusted trench knife from his belt, and began.
It was not quick.
Ludwig started with the fingers—methodical, almost surgical. Klaus awoke screaming into the rag, thrashing against the cords, choking on pain and dust and blood. Anne watched from a few feet away, her face blank, her hands clenched in her coat.
Ludwig's voice was hoarse. "My sister was twelve. My baby sister."
He carved a line down Klaus's thigh.
Klaus tried to speak. To plead.
Ludwig silenced him with a punch so hard his jaw dislocated.
"My mother begged."
Anne turned her head away but did not stop him.
She had made this decision.
She had let the monster into the room and given the child the knife.
And now the monster bled.
After half an hour, Klaus's screams were only moans. Then gasps. Then nothing at all.
His head lolled to one side. His eyes glassed over.
Ludwig slumped forward, soaked in sweat and blood, shaking.
Anne knelt beside the corpse. She reached into the man's torn jacket.
A leather wallet.
She opened it slowly.
Inside: a photograph of a woman, yellowed and creased. A child. A folded slip of paper. And an identification card.
She stared at it for a long time.
Then spoke aloud.
"Klaus Barbie."
Ludwig flinched. "Barbie…?"
She nodded.
Ludwig sat back, staring at the corpse. His mouth moved, but no sound came out.
Anne stood slowly. Wiped her hands on her pants.
Then turned to him. "He's dead. And you killed him. And maybe that's justice. Or maybe it's just more blood in the river. But it's done. We'll tell Schlomo the Haganah got away, that they killed Klaus."
Ludwig didn't answer. His eyes were empty. He only nodded.
Anne looked down at Klaus Barbie's face one last time.
The man who had hunted her kind.
Now he lay in the dirt like an animal.
And she felt nothing.
No relief.
No triumph.
Just… nothing.
She wrote in her diary that night.
---
Klaus Barbie is dead.
Butchers name. A man who laughed in the streets while families burned. The man who visited the candy shop where I once bought licorice with Margot, and left blood in its shadowed alley a week later.
Ludwig killed him.
I let it happen. I made it happen.
And now the world is minus one monster. And it still feels broken.
But I looked at his face, and I wasn't afraid. I wasn't sad. I wasn't anything.
Does that make me strong? Or does it make me something else entirely?
I don't know anymore.
But I do know this: the past is catching up to all of us. And there will be no heaven for men like Klaus. And not for me probably.
But Switzerland.
Maybe I can still hope.
---
The candle burned low.
Outside, the safehouse slept.
Inside, Anne sat in the dark, holding the ID card of a dead man in one hand and her pen in the other.
And for the first time in a long time, she began to feel like maybe—just maybe—she could keep going.
Because monsters die.
And someone has to be there to make sure they do.
Note: NGL I am invested in the Anne Frank story. She'll have a happy ending, but she needs to wade through hell first. Next chapter we get back to Il Duce and his mad antics
Then our crazy mafioso crusader Franco
