“
“Why don’t you speak English?” Wayne said. “This is America, for God’s sake.”
“So, my friend, you prefer to speak English. How come that does not surprise me?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me, dickface,” Wayne said bravely.
Von Helldorf smirked, “Ah, I can see that interrogating you shall be a lot of fun. I have not had a fun interrogation in, oh… a week. It seems that my prisoners usually die just as the fun is about to begin.” The SS Captain paused, then asked, “One last time: who are you?”
Wayne remained quiet.
“You shall be my entertainment for the night.” He turned to his men, “Bring him into the main room.”
The Gestapo men led Wayne up a steep flight of stairs and down a long hallway. Criminals and deviators often received their “just” punishment from the Gestapo in one of the various rooms on this floor of horrors.
Wayne was led past the glass door to one of these rooms. In the room, the unfortunate young lady who had been caught stealing the loaf of bread was present with a few Gestapo men. The buzzing of a chainsaw rang out. Wayne heard the young lady’s screams pierce the air as blood squirted in all directions in the room.
Wayne was shoved into an interrogation room at the very end of the hall.
This special room contained many different torture devices, including some that looked like they came right out of a medieval castle, such as the iron maiden, where a prisoner could be locked in a confining metal device as if a mummy.
Wayne was stripped down to his underwear and then securely vertically tied spread eagle to a lashing rack.
“You do not want to talk; let the fun begin,” SS Captain Von Helldorf said.
Wayne looked around the room in disbelief. He felt as if he had walked onto the set of a Bela Lugosi movie. He realized that the men whom had brought him to this dungeon fully intended to make use of the available torture machines and weapons. Wayne decided he better talk. He didn’t have a high tolerance for pain. He remembered when he broke his arm in junior high and winced, he had thought he was going to die.
“Look, you want the truth, you’ve got it,” Wayne said. “My name is Wayne Goldberg, and I’m a college student. One of my professors invented a time machine. She sent me back in time to kill Adolf Hitler, and then I was brought back to 1995. I don’t know why you’re doing this to me. That’s the honest-to-God truth, I swear it.”
Von Helldorf laughed. “Time machine? As in a device that would enable someone to travel between time periods?”
“Yes,” Wayne nervously responded. “Look, I know it’s crazy, but it’s the truth.”
“Do not waste my valuable time. I will give you points for originality, young man, but none for honesty.”
One of the Gestapo men held a thick leather bullwhip in his hand.
Captain Von Helldorf ordered him, “One lash.”
The Gestapo was only too happy to listen. Wayne received one lashing on his bare back and he groaned loudly.
“You can stop this anytime,” Von Helldorf said.
“I told you the truth. I swear it!”
“Three lashes.” The whip stopped and Wayne felt welts rising on his back as he gasped for air.
“You must enjoy the pain, my friend,” Von Helldorf said. “That is fine with me. I enjoy giving it.” He turned to his trusty man with the bullwhip and said, “Twenty lashes.”
Wayne’s groans turned to screams. Each crack of the leather whip hurt more than the previous one. The pain was intense - worse than anything Wayne had ever experienced in his life. About the time of lash number twelve, Wayne felt his consciousness slipping away.
SS Captain Von Helldorf commanded one of the Gestapo men, “Revive him.”
The Gestapo man picked up a large bucket of ice-cold water and splashed the it onto Wayne’s face. Wayne slowly woke up.
“Are you ready to talk, or shall we continue on?” Von Helldorf asked of Wayne.
In pain and shock, Wayne was ready to tell Von Helldorf anything that he wanted to know. He mumbled, “I’ll talk.”
The Gestapo men untied Wayne from the lashing rack, then seated and strapped him onto a large, uncomfortable wooden chair.
“What is your name?” Von Helldorf demanded.
“Wayne Goldberg.”
“Where have you come from? What underground resistance are you with? Tell me.”
Wayne, obviously, had no idea what the sadistic SS Captain was inquiring about. Wayne had already attempted to tell Von Helldorf the truth, but he didn’t buy it. Wayne knew he had to say something. Anything. He was hurting. “It’s underground in… in…the Bronx.”
“Where is the Bronx?”
“North of the City, near Yonkers.”
“Bronx?” The SS Captain questioned. “Was that not the name of an American city prior to the war?” he asked the Gestapo.
“I believe so, sir. If it was the city that I think it was, it would now be located in Quadrant F-42.”
“You are lying. I do not like liars,” Von Helldorf said aggravated. He slapped Wayne hard across the face. “TALK.”
“I told you the truth. I’m a college student at New York University. My professor there invented a time machine, sent me back in time to 1933 to kill Hitler, I did. And then I came back to this damn nightmare. That’s the whole truth and nothing but the fucking truth,” he raved.
“You refer to places that have not existed for over thirty years. Why? Who has taught you these things?”
Wayne didn’t answer the SS Captain; he just stared blankly.
Von Helldorf was becoming impatient. “The fun has begun to wear thin. Bring over the electrodes.”
A cart with a shock treatment device was brought over. The Gestapo cranked it up and attached the two electrodes to Wayne’s testicles, one electrode per ball.
“Let me tell you something, my naive prisoner. Your kind, no matter what it is,” Von Helldorf worked himself up into a sweat, “Jew, Slavic, Pole, homosexual or any other of the inferior slave peoples that infect the Reich, will be crushed and destroyed. That is the Gestapo’s number one priority.” Furiously he said, “Tell me the truth.”
“I already did,” Wayne frantically said.
“
The Gestapo manning the machine turned a dial a small amount to the right.
Wayne’s body became rigid and his muscles tense as electricity shot through his groin. He bit his lip hard, trying not to scream.
“
The man turned the dial all the way to the right, as far as it would go. All of the three Gestapo men present clearly were amused and received a perverted satisfaction from the proceedings. These mindless robots had no idea of the pain actually being inflicted on their prisoner.
Wayne could not hold it any longer. He shrieked and it echoed off the walls.
Later that evening, the Gestapo men whom had been working downstairs would offer their congratulations for a job well done to their colleague and mentor, SS Captain Von Helldorf. After all, it wasn’t every interrogation when they were able to hear the victim’s screams through the ceiling above their heads.
The jail cellblock contained numerous small cells, however, the cells lacked the usual iron gates that kept a prisoner contained. Instead, the prisoners were confined by lines of red laser beams that ran from the ceiling down to the floor in front of each diminutive cell. If a prisoner tried to escape, that prisoner would be fried to a crisp by the intense heat generated by the laser beam. The Gestapo men always got a kick out of seeing a prisoner, who could not take being locked up anymore or any of the many forms of torture that would be perpetrated on him, commit suicide by throwing himself, or as the case sometimes was, herself, into the scorching red hot center of the laser beam. The small jail cells were devoid of any furnishings, windows, or even a simple piece of plumbing for a basic human need — a toilet.
The cellblock housed six prisoners, four men and two women. These once proud citizens were filthy and had been reduced, by repeated punishments back to a childlike state of mind. Why were some of the prisoners
