Sci - Fi Short Stories

OUR HERO - Übermensch

Munich, Germany - 2013.  Three weeks later.

Things changed a lot after that sad memory had been revealed in that small laboratory in Munich.

Dr. Stein wanted to go further. He was positive that there was more than that; he was intrigued about why Mengele had kept that particular boy preserved in a tank. That bit was still unclear, but in Tatjana’s opinion, that did not matter. After recognizing that Dr. Stein would not give up, Tatjana quitted.

She went to England to relax; England was her favourite place in the world. It made her think, and that was exactly what she started to think.

The Holocaust was one of the cruelest episodes in History, and Tatjana had read about it, seen movies about it, and grown up getting all kind of information about it. But never in his life she had experienced such thing; a livid memory from a boy who lived it, who was killed by the Nazis. That would be in her memory forever. She still found it surreal how little Rene had been able to have such memory, so livid, so fantastic… It broke her heart.

As she walked down the streets of Rickmansworth, she stopped to stare as a store, distracting herself for a minute. That was when her eyes stopped on a particular piece of clothing: a Supermen underwear set.

She smiled sadly; the hope of a Superman from a little agonizing boy touched her very deeply. What had the Holocaust been? A great example how the human kind had been corrupted, distorted and lost its values.

Tatjana ended up entering in the store and buying the underwear, and she felt better about herself. People who claimed to kill people in the name of God. Much wrongdoing had been done in the name of God. That was plain bullshit for Tatjana. People needed more super heroes. The world needed more supermen to save everyone who needed.

She walked down the street a bit more, and entered a café, ordering a big Ice Coffee. Sighing, Tatjana thought how wrong the world had been. How utterly wrong things were.

And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.

Her cell phone rang, waking her up. Tatjana Baumann opened her eyes lazily, putting her long auburn hair away from her face, trying to reach for her cell phone on the bedside table of the hotel room. It was still night, and she had no idea who could possibly be disturbing her.

“Perfect.” She thought.

It was a text message from Dr. Stein. Only four words: “Please check your emails.”

That made her angry; but as ever, curiosity won her over. She sat up, yawning. She no longer worked with Dr. Stein, so that was very unusual and strange. What did he want to tell her?

Tatjana stood us, and as she was wearing nothing but the newly acquired Supermen underwear, she reached for her robe that was carelessly hung on a chair. Still tried and sleepy, she turned her laptop on and opened her mailbox. There were about twenty unopened messages from friends, family and job offers. She ignored them all; they could wait. As her hazel eyes found Dr. Stein’s name, she immediately clicked on it.

And its content completely shocked the young scientist.

“We found this today. It’s a box containing Rene’s personal things. I thought you would like to see it. – Franz.”

He had photographed the box, legitimizing it. The items were photographed individually, all of them labeled and inside a plastic bag. There were Rene’s stripped clothes from the concentration camp, an old page of a comic book of Superman, a small dirty blanket…

“Oh my God…” she whispered.

The last item was the strangest one, the only inexplicable item on the inventory, that did not match to the usual belonging of an eight year old Jew in Auschwitz.

A silver penknife with the words “USA Marine” inscribed on it.