Sieg Heil
by Akurei Nagisa

Author's Notes: Standard disclaimer...Magneto belongs to Marvel and Kids' WB and not myself,nor do any other X-Men: Evolution chara depicted here. Don't sue me, you will get no money. Bwah.

This fic is angsty as all hell and deals with mature themes. Don't like, don't read. If you do, review it. Or I'll cry. ;_;

Prologue: Work Sets You Free

They had been the first thing he had seen as he entered that place, those three words. Like Dante's carvings on the gates of Hell, they were there as if eternal, engraved crudely in wrought iron. Somehow that did not diminish their bitter irony or the terror they carried. Perhaps their builder had meant them to be profound and beneficent, moved by justice, but they were as cold and empty as this place, such a mirror of Hell it was not to be imagined.
Those three words would be with him forever....burnt into his mind like a brand, a dark mantra to haunt his dreams.

ARBEIT MACHT FREI.

Young Erik Lehnsherr, no more than twelve years old, looked around in terror at the place he had entered, surrounded by men in black uniforms with skulls on their caps. Demons in the shape of men, their boots polished to a killing gloss.

And beyond them...were these even *people*? Erik openly gawked at the skeletons behind the barbed wire, in clothes little mnore than filthy rags of blue and white, their skin stretched taut on their bones. All of them looked more than half dead.

Was this what he was to become?

The thought was cut off as the Schutzstaffel men halted them, shouting, and went amidst with the crowds with whips, dogs, and guns. Erik noticed with mounting alarm that they were separating people randomly...breaking families, friends, people apart, and those that weren't fast enough they beat mercilessly.

Erik clung to his mother, whispering
And she held him close, weeping softly at their ruined life....they had lived through the humiliation and the taunts. The taking of their shops. They had lived through Warsaw...to come to this.

The SS reached them, and the two commandants began conversing rapidly in German. Erik caught only small portions of what they spoke...but they seemed to be speaking of his parents...

And he heard the word , and his blood ran cold. He knew what that meant. His parents weren't going into the camp.

They were going to the right side. The bad side. You didn't come back from there. No one came back...except as a trail of black smoke leaving the giant crematorium nearby.

And as the SS men reached their decision, they took Erik, pulling him away. Frantic, the Lehnsherr boy leapt from their grasp, falling in the mud. One of the Schutzstaffel hit him with a club for that, kncking the wind out of him.

Erik's father held back his screaming wife as she reached out for her son, for the elder Lehnsherr knew that the SS men would only draw their guns and begin killing if the situation got worse than it already was. But his wife reached out as if posessed, screaming her son's name over and over.

:ERIK! ERIK!!!

Mamusu! Talusu!!!

More black-coated men came, huge dogs with them, barking...finally, Mrs. Lehnsherr ceased her struggles and simply sobbed in her husband's arms. And Erik's father looked back at his only son...

And he mouthed in Polish...

Erik watched in shock and horror as his parents walked on towards their inevitable, painful death...and inside the Lehnsherr boy, his mind snapped like a rubber band stretched to breaking. He pushed against the vice-grip of the angry Schutzstaffel, who hit him and cursed him...but Erik was beyond pain.

The iron gates closed with a terrible clang. And in desparation, Erik reached out his hands. His will, his whole mind, was bent solely on the opening of those gates. He had to open them. Had to.

~OpenopenopenopenopenopenOPENOPENOPENOPENOPEN!!!!~

And as he reached out...the doors bent. The wrought iron drew toward him, as if he were some inexorable force, pulling them, straining them, reaching out to pull the gates in in a doomed and fruitless attempt to rescue the two people he truly loved. Yet they did not break.

The metal bent, and strained, and twisted like the torments of Hell were upon it, but it would not break. It refused to break, though the little boy's will bent upon it with all the force of God's.

And finally the SS broke from their stupor, and a subcommandant slammed his rifle butt into Erik's head, bringing him to the cold earth. There he lay, bleeding slightly, choked sobs coming from him.

He had failed. His mother and father, his beloved ones, were dead, and he had not been able to save them. They were gone, and it was his fault, all his fault...

Poor little Erik Lehnsherr didn't know that this would be only the beginning of his nightmare.....