Why I Couldn’t Kill Hitler

You don’t know me, but I love you.

We’ve never met, but I know everything about you.  I know the way you stretch and yawn in the morning, and the face you make when you’re grumpy, and the kind of tea you like.  I'll hold the colour of your eyes when no one else in the world remembers your name, and I know you'd understand that reference, because you introduced me to that book.

It was another lifetime. We worked together and lived together.  I didn’t realise how special it was till it was gone.  I didn’t know it wouldn’t last forever.

You’ll never know that, because I’ll never tell you.  I won’t send this letter, or any of the hundreds of others I’ve written to you.  I can’t.  I couldn’t bear for you to know what I’ve done.  I just pretend to tell you, over and over, so that for a brief moment, I can pretend that you’d understand, and you’d forgive me, and we could be together.

We won’t ever be together, and you wouldn't ever understand, like you wouldn't ever forgive me, but at least you’ve alive.

We were both physicists.  We met at university, and were lucky enough to find a job together afterwards, studying time.  It took twenty, thirty years, but we did it; eventually, we learned how to time travel.

I know how that sounds.

I’m not going to tell you how we did it.  Suffice it to say, it couldn’t have happened without both of us, working as one, devoting all our time to the study.

You had a specific reason.  Killing Hitler.  You had relatives who’d died in concentration camps, and your goal was to go back in time and prevent the second world war, prevent the horror suffered not just by your family but by millions of others.

My reason was less noble; I wanted to succeed because you did, and I love you.

We did it eventually.  There was a lot more to it than killing the man himself, of course.  We had to go right back to the First World War and make careful changes in order to fix Germany’s economy.  We had to lance the boil before it had a chance to fully develop.  Otherwise, someone else would have arisen to take his place, and it would have been different, but it would have been just as bad.  We couldn't measure how long it took; either years or no time at all, really.  To go back and forth and carefully make all the necessary changes.

When we finally succeeded, when we came back after making the last change, you weren’t here.  You never had been.  Your parents had only met in the first place because of the way your grandparents had escaped, and where they’d ended up afterwards.  Without the war, they never met, and you never existed.  You and millions of others were simply never born.  

The entire world was different.  There was technology which didn’t exist without the war, medical advances that we’d never been pressured to develop.  There were people who hadn't ever been born because their parents had been slaughtered.  I didn't care about any of it.

I can’t live in a world without you.  Even if I have to live in a world without you by my side, I can’t live in a world without you in it.

So I undid what we’d done.  It only took one simple step; I went back and doctored my own university application, so I went somewhere else and we never met.  You never found that job posting without me buying that one specific journal, and I purposefully ignored it.  Without us, they didn’t succeed.

I can’t be with you without giving you everything you want, and I can’t give you what you want without killing you.  Worse than killing you. In that world, I was the only one who knew you’d ever existed.

I sentenced millions of people to death.  I know.  In many ways, I’m worse than the man we set out to defeat, because at least he believed he was doing the right thing.  I don’t.  I sentenced the millions who died in the holocaust to a death I could have prevented.  I killed the millions of people we’d brought into life by preventing that war.  I let Germany’s economy be ruined when I could have prevented it, and caused people starve to death when I could have saved them.  When I already had saved them once.

I could argue that I also saved all the people who were only alive because of the war.  I could argue for the medical treatments we developed throughout that war and the people they’ve saved.  I could argue for the internet and the shared knowledge we have because of it, something that only exists because of the code and communication requirements of that war, but I know – and you’d know, if I ever told you any of this, which I won’t – that none of that was the point.

I couldn’t.  I couldn’t sentence you to not existing.  I just can’t.  No matter how much you’d tell me that it would be worth it to prevent that horror.  I love you, and I can’t, and I’m sorry, but I can’t.  

 

I just can't.