New Release- On Orders Of The Commandant by Mark Williams

Available from 5 Prince Publishing www.5princebooks.com  books@5princebooks.com 
Genre: FICTION / Historical /Thrillers
Release Date: November 6, 2014
Digital ISBN 13: 978-1-63112-069-5 ISBN 10:1631120697
Print ISBN 13: 978-1-63112-070-1 ISBN 10:1631120700
Purchase link : http://www.5princebooks.com/buy-links...

On Orders Of The Commandant 
On Orders Of The Commandant is an historical novel, set inside a 1940's concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland. 
It is the story of four men who are imprisoned. 
In their afterwards struggle, they deal with several issues-desolation, losing their family and freedom-but more importantly are confronted with the knowledge of a machinated plot intended by an SS First Commandant right under their noses. 
A plan is conceived, after having an underground exit pointed out to them, to escape the concentration camp itself.

About Mark Williams 

Mark Williams spent two years at Washtenaw College of Ann Arbor, Michigan. His interests are writing, reading and music.


https://twitter.com/@Emawms08Mark


Excerpt of On Orders Of The Commandant 
Chapter One

Feb 24th, 1943

Jozef Hansi, a Gypsy, came home from work where he worked as a plumber. He had good news that day as he stepped out from his truck. He readily walked into his ghetto apartment building with a tool chest in one hand and a big wrench in the other. As he got to the steps of his apartment, he even began to dance with the wrench hoisted in the air.
But he quieted down.
Maybe so he could make a quiet entrance in the room and sneak a surprise kiss on his wife, Ceija. Times had been tough, moving into the Ghetto, but things had just begun to start looking clearer with his job and being with his family. The clear sky outside was very appropriate indeed. He sneaked inside only to hear the sound of an explosion...screams. Tiger I heavy tank shrapnel.  A nightmare coming true before his eyes. He could not bear to look in the room down the hallway, but his feet took him there anyhow.
The door had been blown open only to be filled with the shocked looks of neighbors.
A young German soldier rushed in.
Jozef and the others would have to pay for being Gypsies.
One blow to his head and then another and another. A neighbor watched, grief-stricken, the last sight Jozef saw as his vision fades.

*****

Miklos Nakache, a Hungarian, was different from Jozef. He was a career criminal. He had never been caught, but his day was bound to come.
Because of his stressful lifestyle, he drank alcohol regularly and was beginning to dabble in a stimulant, Pervitin. He always wore the same Bomber coat even though it was getting too small for him.
The end of the week had come and it was time for his business to take place.
As the man approached, it wasn't the usual Captain from the Polish Home Army. This buyer he had never seen before-which was to make matters worse. No bond of trust had been formed and as the gunpowder sale went on he looked into the person's eyes the whole five minutes.
Something wasn't right. Sure, the buyer had the zlotys, but he didn't look like he was buying.
The deals were exchanged in a vacant ZOW camp and Miklos walked away safely into the night. Still, the nervousness stayed with him. He went home and spread the zlotys on the table like a child. He also brought out his last capsule of tablets, more toys to add to the collection. He drank and tried to put the night's events behind him, as if that truly kept them from happening. He was still nervous and the more he thought about the recent deal, the more nervous he became. That's when the door burst open and men in Fedoras and leather trench coats filed in. The Gestapo.

*****

Schalek Rumkowski, Polish, deserved to be an inmate. He was the worst kind of criminal.
A rapist. His victims were hurt and scarred for life. He was relentless and unable to control his desires.
His first rape happened as a Nazi-appointed councilman. In the Lodz Ghetto he had raped a Jewish girl from the city. The night was full of beer and pranks. With the voice in his head that cheered him on that night, it allowed him to accept rape. As long as he didn't get caught, as long as nobody told. Soon he had gone out to rape and waited for girls in bushes like a tiger stalking its prey. First one...two...three, and then ten.
By the time his years as councilman ended, he had lost count. He began to get rougher with his victims and one night in the German Peoples Ward, a girl was killed. A police search began. He looked innocent and no one suspected him, but clues at the scene of the crime left him the perpetrator.
Soon all the rapes of women were revealed.

*****

Henri Lebowitz, a Polish Jew, was a mathematical physicist. He knew everything about the usage of numbers. He attended Lwow University and managed to win the prestigious Franklin Medal. Henri often went to sleep on a desk full of books and sleepless nights. He was smart and if there was an easier way he would do it, being the physicist that he was, he would. After that, he won the Max Planck Medal. Pretty impressive.
After a year or two though, his medal went unnoticed.  He had attained an Alma Mater and Professor of Physics position within the University. But after a while, his school room became a plain regular room. The German administrators from upstairs were always putting paper work on his desk. This was worse than his days back in college!
Resentment began to build.
Henri would be made an example of.

*****

As Jozef stepped off Convoy No. 8, he wore a tattered shirt and cheap pants. His wife had been dead for days. How dreadful. He waited in line for the selection process just outside the base camp for the decision and strained to keep the sweat beads from falling down his head. A Kommando had been calmly checking through people's belongings.
Jozef wondered what he would eat for lunch.
“Go right,” ordered an SS-TV guard.
Minutes later, Jozef was in Block 16, scanning it with his eyes. This was it. No turning back.
The Registrar, seated at the edge of a black desk, looked at him as if to say ‘Be prompt’.
Jozef gathered himself.
The Registrar flipped through the paperwork. To him he was probably just another face he had seen a thousand times. The Registrar asked him a couple of questions, as if quizzing him. “According to Kripo paperwork, you lost your temper and assaulted an SS guard.”
“No,” said Jozef. “I never hit him.”
Jozef could only wonder why...Why?
Henri felt out of place when he stepped off Convoy No. 8. He was still wearing a college sweater over a properly fitted white collar. He had had it made. Could his parents find him? Could his girlfriend find him? She had always told him that he was in over his head.
The University, had they made some sort of charges against him?
The train ride over to the concentration camp had been very quiet, and some people had even dropped dead of typhus.
The Nazi’s were a master of diversion.
“This is not a holiday resort, get in line,” said an SS-TV guard as he lumbered inside the camp.
The statement ‘Work Makes One Free’ had been crowned in iron over the gates. Henri read the statement which had been written in German. It seemed so final. His heart began to sink, almost in pain.
As an SS-TV wandered nearby, Henri gave him his final 2 zloty note; the Kommando would have stolen it anyway. An educated fool.
The SS-TV nodded his head, glared at Henri and then ordered him to the right.
Miklos walked off Convoy No. 8, still wearing his bomber coat. The day had come when he was finally caught, but days spent in a prison would be hauntingly different than inside a concentration camp.
And Miklos had been caught red-handed.
The Gestapo held the evidence. He did not hold a job, so it was obvious how he made his bones. Time and time again, he had gotten away, but now that all meant nothing. One was all it took. One bullet. One million. One time.
“Step forward,” said an SS-TV.
Miklos, in his bomber coat, faded pants and black hair, tried to win the guard over. He snorted.
“Right,” ordered the SS-TV.
In his eyes, he was just trying to avoid another fiasco. As he looked around the concentration camp, he noticed that no one was there for him. No family. No friends.
All his Pervitin friends were somewhere getting it or selling it.
None of them cared. Miklos sighed and looked around, knowing he was about to do something he did not want to do.
Schalek was a wealthy man who had done terrible things and some of the Rapportfuhrer SS knew it. He had been made out to be a monster in the Bibuta. He had no choice but to agree. What other choice was appropriate? He was a Rapportfuhrer SS dream come true, and the Kommando would have a field day.
Only outside Convoy No. 8 did Schalek realize how big a mistake he had made. The concentration camp was a big change from the dark councilman office where the rape had occurred.
Someone shooed him. Was the friend or family of a victim there and looking at him coldly? He couldn't bear to look anyone in the eye except the SS-TV.
“Right,” said one, very routinely.
Finally.
“Ok,” he hushed back.
Schalek had the feeling of being in a motor car with no breaks. Even the SS-TV had looked at him with contempt. He became nervous. The car was driving faster and faster with no breaks and it would only stop one way.
All four of these men were sent as inmates, to Fort Auschwitz.
It was a two-story, 16 block concentration camp which never smiled. Sixty-five percent of the inmates there were Polish and at least twenty-five years of age. The mood was vile.
The view inside the concentration camp was a courtyard surrounded by the sixteen blocks, a brick execution wall and a wooden guard tower. Around that was an electrical barbed wire fence, a cold reminder of the place which they resided.
For these four new inmates, it was a change between Heaven and Hell. Their lives had been altered and in most people's view, thrown away.
Their independence taken away.
They were as little kids playing in the school yard. Some had heard the stories and seen newsreels; enough to make one wince. The first image coming to mind was the SS-TV. The all-black uniform, peaked cap, both grimacing and sadistic, who fends off of new inmates to torture.
Some of the people, mostly women, children and a few men, were excited upon entering the concentration camp. It had been five minutes since entering and none of them were truly broken in yet. It was a matter of having to deal with and put up with. Why had they been told “Left” by the SS-TV? One of the men was old and belonged in a retirement home. It was hard to tell.
Suspended in lifeless animation.
They were taken to the shower room's outer chamber to undress. It was not your typical shower. It was a disguised gas chamber hiding dummy shower-heads. From the outside, a kind of a clean shower room but a mirror image to what was inside.
Anything could happen at Fort Auschwitz. An inmate could trust no one.
A smiling SS-TV patted the last person on the back who stepped into the shower.
“On behalf of the camp administration I bid you welcome. This is not a holiday resort but a labor camp. Just as our soldiers risk their lives at the front to gain victory for the Third Reich, you will have to work here for the welfare of a new Europe. How you tackle this task is entirely up to you. The chance is there for every one of you. We shall look after your health, and we shall also offer you well-paid work. After the war, we shall assess everyone according to his merits and treat him accordingly. Now, would you please all get undressed? Hang your clothes on the hooks we have provided and please remember the number of your hook. When you've had your bath, there will be a bowl of soup and coffee or tea for all. Oh yes, before I forget, after the bath, please have ready your certificates, diplomas, school reports and any other documents so that we can employ everybody according to his or her training and ability. Would diabetics who are not allowed sugar report to the staff on duty after their baths?”
Trust no one. A smile meant nothing at this house of horrors.
Cyanide pellets, Zyklon B, were dumped in through holes in the shower roof.
The SS-TV easily closed the door and if a person was lucky, the gas would kill them in no more than fifteen minutes.
A two story, wooden bunk bed was given to the four inmates. Just big enough for each one to breathe. Cockroaches climbed the wall. As they neared midday, a mouse began crawling around the bad bread left from yesterday’s food ration.
The turnip soup had been almost unbearable. After a while it became a daily routine, but no one could ever get used to it.
Because of the location of the block, it was always humid. The heat was like that of the Sahara Desert.
Jozef, Miklos, Henri and Schalek each had a hard time their first few days.
Jozef would have to share his bunk with a Soviet soldier, but he was stocky and able to hold his own. With a bald head and piercing eyes, he did not look like a pushover. He stayed out of his bunk and away from the soldier as much as possible to avoid any possible confrontation. Whenever things heated up, he would share a piece of bread or whatever it took to calm him down.
Miklos was a smuggler, but after leaving his wooden shoes unattended for a short while, came back to find them stolen. All he had left was two crumbs of bread. For an hour or two, he looked around and searched but his belongings were gone.
Henri the physicist was wily. He used his wit and charm and soon had friends. He had a fast humor and was very good at imitations. Henri was the type of guy you liked to have around.
Schalek on the other hand, had it worst of all. The one-time rapist had now become the prey. He was given a strange look by some of the inmates. The councilman. He was slim and didn't look as if he could defend himself if the time arose.