It's On Earth, Too by Mathias Nelson
The sky is white and the clouds are black and everything is shaded gray. Our families are spread out, at other camps, probably already dead: gassed, starved, burned, shot, thrown in a pile of bones where German children play king of the hill. Five soldiers take turns pushing their machine guns in our backs and kicking dirt at our stumbling feet. They lead me and another prisoner to an empty ditch, gun butt us in. The soil swallows our toes and we are rooted on this murdered land. The other prisoner stands before me, naked, stooped with his ridged spine sticking from his back like some meek prehistoric dinosaur, face mangled and swollen, no front teeth, black dirt stuck under the grooves of each rib, pendulous lip dry and cracked as his soul in this gray ocean of now where we are constantly drowning.
There is no breeze, yet I shake naked with fear.
"Kampf zum Tod, für das Leben," a soldier says from above, which means, "Fight to the death, for life."
I raise my head. The soldiers grin down on us. They're young and no longer affected by murder. A chubby soldier with flushed cheeks removes his toothpick and chucks it down on the prisoner. It hits him on the head and the soldier guffaws. The prisoner listlessly looks up, gives a weak, black grin to the soldier, then flutters a wink at me. He reaches down and scoops the rusty metal bar the soldiers placed for a weapon. I don't stop him from taking the bar. I no longer care.
"Do it," I say and spread my arms. "I do not care."
Then, with every last semblance of energy he has left, he jumps up like a crazed chimp and hits the chubby soldier's ankle with the bar. It rings off bone.
"Yarrrr," the soldier groans and drops to a knee.
The four others unload their guns. The prisoner's eye explodes. His chest opens. I see the heart of a man. He pivots and falls. The soil grows darker and swells with life.
The chubby soldier mumbles something, and the others laugh.
"Es gibt keine Sieger," he says. "There are no winners."
They scowl down on me, point their weapons. A smoky cloud passes over head, carries dead breath in its bosom. I stare up at the soldiers, their faces pallid at the foot of this cloud.
"Hell," I say and spread my arms again as if to hug their bullets.
They glance at each other, scrutinize me. One nods at another and two jump in the ditch. They push me out. I look down into the ditch at the dead prisoner. His eye looks unflinching and relaxed at the sky. The death cloud has moved. The soldiers kick me back to the shelter to wait with the others where invisible flames tickle our pits and moan low.