THE SENTENCE
Tom Mazanec

   He found himself floating, or perhaps hurtling, down a long Tunnel.
In the distance was a hazy Light, growing larger and brighter with
each passing moment. Strange, it seemed to be brighter than the sun,
and yet it did not hurt his eyes. Soon, it covered the entire space
in front of him. Then, without verbal words, the Light spoke to him.
   "Why should you be allowed to enter, you who have taken the lives
of so many?"
   "I did what I did for the glory and salvation of the Fatherland.
I had to save the Master Race from pollution. Those whose lives You
say I took were nothing more than vermin."
   "They were far worthier than your so-called Master Race. For twelve
years you helped turn half your planet into a hell. I ask again, why
should you be allowed to enter?"
   "I need give no apology to the likes of You. Killing filth is an
honor, not a crime. A thousand years from now, I will be praised
as the greatest hero of Aryan history!"
   "A thousand years from now your name will be as accursed as it 
was the day you died, died the death of a coward who took his own
life rather than answer to his fellow man for his deeds. But now
you will answer to Me. What men think of you means little here,
what the Truth thinks of you matters all. Answer me, why should
you be allowed to enter?"
   "What I did was an act of mercy! Far better to die than live as
a stinking Jew!"
   "Very well. You will be shown the same mercy which you showed onto
your victims. You will be given the honor of experiencing your 
handiwork...forever."
   He found himself in an alley. Something was wrong...he realized
he was in a dress. The next moment he realized that he was a woman.
   "Hey, you're a pretty one, for a pig." The two men grabbed him/her
and tore off his/her clothing. The experience of being raped was
even worse for the fact that he was in such a different body, a
*woman's* body. Afterwards, he/she was kicked and beaten until
the blackness of death descended.
   He was in some small shop...the reflection on the counter showed
an old man. As he moved he realized that he was that old man. Three
young toughs broke in the door and began vandalizing the store.
   "Please, leave me alone. I've done you no harm." he found 
himself saying. He tried to demand the youths leave, but he could
not control the body, although he felt every moment of terror. 
The man he had become tried to run out the back of the store, but
one of the youths smashed in his head with some heavy blunt object.
This time there seemed to be an explosion of light...
   At first the deaths were rather random, as he passed through the
mid-Thirties and into the late Thirties. As the frequency of the
killings increased, his apparent motion through time slowed down,
although he was hardly in a condition to appreciate the passing
scenes of history. When he went through Kristallnacht, it took him
hours to experience dozens of deaths. If he were to spend an
average of ten minutes dying, for each of 6 million Jews, that
would take over a hundred years...
   Perhaps the worst thing, worse even than the fact that he could
not change the actions of any of the victims whose lives he was
thrust into, was that he could not go insane. Hundreds, even
thousands of times his mind snapped, and was instantly restored.
Over and over he retreated into mental catatonia and over and
over he was yanked out again.
   The Einsatzgruppen arrived in due course. Again and again,
he had his body's possessions snatched, it's clothing snatched,
and then the bullet in the skull. Later came the carbon monoxide.
The agonized effort to breath, and the far more torturous headache
the gas caused, seemed to go on forever. And there were many
thousands of times to go through that "forever".
   He found himself turned into old men, young men, women, girls.
He was even forced to die in infancy, countless times.
Once the mother of the baby he became smothered him to death,
as they hid in a haystack, because he would not stop crying.
   When the camps appeared, his deaths began to take much longer...
often hours. Chelmno, Sobibor, Maidanek, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, 
Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka...he had to die of typhus, with
the nausea and fearful chills and fever...of exposure, literally
freezing solid in sub-zero weather...as an experimental animal,
strapped to a table and cut open, without anesthesia, by men who
called themselves "doctors"...strangling on Zyklon-B (once, for
some reason, the gas did not kill him and he awoke in the 
crematorium, burning alive). So many who died so slowly...
it would not be a century, but a millennium, to go through it all.
Locked in a burning synagogue, he would only suffer moments, but
the dying in the camps took eon long horrors. Starvation was the
slowest and most physically painful of the ways to die.
Worst, somehow, at least for him, were the ones who died working in
forced slave labor. Somehow that slavery was more painful than the
physical suffering. Hung, shot, bludgeoned...tuberculosis,
pneumonia, scarlet fever, dysentery...as a child, as a grandmother,
as a crippled father seeing his children die before him...the
war years crept on like some glacier of blood.
   And then the Reich was ending...and then it was beginning anew.
Again the rape in the alley, the toughs in the store. He had begun
his second millennium of enjoying his Final Solution from the inside.
Then, in due course, came the third millennium, and the fourth,
and fifth, sixth, seventh...

DRIZZLE DRAZZLE DRUZZLE DROME
TIME FOR THIS ONE TO COME HOME