by Ruta Sepetys
The German High Command had quickly organized a massive water evacuation. They called it Operation Hannibal, after one of the greatest military strategists in history. An enormous convoy of ships would be dispatched to the West. Ambulance trains loaded with wounded German soldiers barreled toward the ports. Goya, Ubena, Robert Ley, Urundi, General von Steuben, Hansa, Pretoria, Cap Arcona, Deutschland, and Wilhelm Gustloff—ships all designated for evacuation from various ports.
This would be my first-ever journey at sea. My maiden voyage had already presented its challenges. I noticed an unbecoming rash had appeared on my hands and in my armpits. I blamed the Communists.
The sailors continued to speak of evacuation plans. I sensed my input was needed.
“There is not enough time,” I remarked to one of my superiors. “To register and board hundreds of thousands within a matter of days, I don’t think it’s possible, sir.”
“You will make it possible” was the order.
I looked across the dock, imagining the scene. The entire population would be driven to the coast. The ports would be mayhem. German soldiers would have priority, of course. Desperate refugees would be selected, registered, and processed to board the ships. Thousands had already arrived in ox-driven carts piled high with their belongings. They were haggard, falling asleep in the snow. I saw a man so hungry he was eating a candle.
“Please, sailor. Help me,” they would plead as I walked by.
I would do something this time.
Maybe.
For some.
I sang my melodious list of enemies. Yu-go-slav!
I imagined myself home in Heidelberg when the war was over. Crowds of women and children would flock around me while I doled out oranges from burlap sacks.
Yes, Hannelore, it is dangerous. I have been selected for a very important mission to disinfect this land. But we heroes eat danger atop our porridge for breakfast. It is nothing, dear one.
Nothing. If the evacuation failed and the ports were bombed, more than half a million people would die.
A thundering boom echoed near the water. Someone screamed. Desperate. Panicked. Strangled with fear.
My fingers twitched. A tingle ran up my spine.
emilia
The Prussian knight walked ahead. He had secrets.
I had secrets too.
My legs ached, tired of walking. I missed school. I loved my desk, my teachers, the smell of freshly sharpened pencils waiting patiently in their box.
I had arrived at school that day, anxious for the math exam. Mama used to tease that I was all nature and numbers, like my father. As I approached the school yard I saw it. Our desks and chairs were stacked in the back of an open truck, our textbooks smoldering in a heap. One of my teachers ran toward me crying.
“Hurry, Emilia, go home. They’ve shut down the school.”
“But why?” I asked her, moving closer to the truck. “Wait, I have things in my desk.”
“No, run home, Emilia!” she sobbed, tears streaming down her face.
The Nazis claimed I didn’t need an education. Polish schools were closed. Our desks and equipment were taken to Germany. Would a German girl open my desk and find my treasures inside?
The Nazis said the people of Poland would become serfs to the Germans. They thought we only needed to count and write our name. My father was part of the Lwów School of Mathematics. He would never agree with children not being taught reading, writing, and arithmetic. They had burned our books in the Polish language. But I had learned to read very young. They could never take that away from me.
I continued walking, thinking of food, rest, a soft bed, and a warm blanket. I would settle for hay and a potato. Snow was falling, making everything appear fresh. The white snow covered the dark truth. Pressed white linen over a scarred table, a crisp clean sheet over a stained mattress.
Nature.
That was something the war couldn’t take from me either. The Nazis couldn’t stop the wind and the snow. The Russians couldn’t take the sun or the stars.
I dropped back slightly and stepped into the trees, thinking I would feel better if I relieved myself. The knight continued walking. I was crouched on my heels when I saw it. A uniformed soldier slipped out of the trees behind the knight.
He had a gun.
He was pointing it.
I jumped up and screamed.
Bang.
florian
Bang.
I saw the girl first, legs apart, gun drawn. Then I saw the soldier between us, writhing on the ground, a bullet torn through the shoulder of his coat. His pistol lifted, but I shot first.
The gunshots bounced hollow in my head. I scanned the woods. Were there more? I kicked the pistol away from the soldier and quickly fleeced him of his ammunition, food, papers, and canteen. This was bad. Very bad.
“What’s wrong with you?” I whispered to the Polish girl. “He was German, not Russian.” I looked around quickly. “Hurry. Someone heard those shots.” I piled up the supplies. “We have to run. Put these in your pockets.” I held out the items to the girl.
But the girl didn’t respond. She stood, cemented in shock, pink gloves on the gun, her body trembling.
The Russian pistol fell from her hand and dropped into the snow.
joana
We marched up the hill toward the estate. Tonight we would have thick walls, a warm fire, and a solid roof to shield us from the snow.
“Just as I remember it,” said the shoe poet. “Extraordinary! We shall walk around back. I expect that’s where the kitchen entrance will be.”
I painted a visual for Ingrid. “It’s beige sandstone. Large tall windows across the front and upstairs. The entry door sits in a diamond-shaped alcove.”
Ingrid clutched my arm. “I don’t like it,” she whispered.
“What’s not to like? It’s shelter.”
Ingrid’s nostrils pulled at the surrounding air, but she did not reply.
We made our way around the back of the manor house and entered through a snow-covered garden hedge. Poet’s feet stopped short. Tall glass doors with shattered panes stood open into the garden, torn damask curtains flapping like a loose tongue in the wind. The courtyard was littered with clothing, broken crockery, shoes, books, and various personal items. A baby carriage lay mangled on its side, dusted with snow.
The wandering boy stepped in close. I put my arm around him.
“Sorry, but what did we expect?” Eva laughed. “Servants waiting outside in a receiving line?” She shrugged and walked inside.
Eva was right. Nothing was intact anymore. The entire region was broken, bombed, and looted. How could we have expected anything different? The cold wind blew, banging the crippled doors as we went inside.
The main floor of the house was divided into five large rooms with high ceilings, all connected by tall double doors. Standing in what had been the garden library, we could look through the door and see across to the opposite end of the house. Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the library walls. The books, raped and rummaged of their dignity, lay in heaps on the floor. We stepped over the books and through the doorway.
“Let’s choose a room to sleep in, close off the doors, and start a fire to warm up the space,” commanded Eva. She stopped midway through the house. “This’ll do.”
“Where is the kitchen?” I asked. “Maybe there is food or drink.”
“Yes,” Eva sighed. “A drink.”
Eva instructed the shoe poet to collect any wood or paper he could find for the fireplace.
“Not the books. Please, Poet,” I whispered.
He nodded and patted my arm. “We won’t disturb their things.”
I set down my bag and walked through the house, admiring the ravaged ghostly splendor of each room in its panicked disarray. I reached the end of the main floor, the din
ing room, and saw a small silhouette. The wandering boy stood next to the long dining room table, his head bowed by an overturned chair. I approached quietly and looked over his shoulder.
A basket of mossy bread in the center of the table was crawling with brown mice. Flowered china bowls skinned with half-eaten soup sat on a dusty tablecloth, the spoons still in them.
They hadn’t even been able to finish their dinner.
florian
I dragged the dead German into a wooded thicket and covered him with snow. But what if someone found him? I gripped my pistol and searched through the trees for light. Using the scent of fire as a guide, I walked quickly through the forest. I should have known. It had been too quiet today. The Polish girl saw the gun and thought he was going to shoot. She thought she was defending me.
The girl followed. When I looked to the right I heard her breathing stop, trying to swallow the tears. My sister, Anni, did the same thing the day Father sent her away up north. She did not want to cry. She held her breath in one hand and her suitcase in the other.
The memory brought pain to my stitched wound. I still smelled smoke and hoped it signaled a resting spot. If I couldn’t rest, I wouldn’t get far tomorrow.
We emerged from the woods. The Polish girl pointed. In the distance, a large manor house sat on a loaf of frozen earth. The house was dark, but smoke coughed from one of the center chimneys, grayer than the gray sky.
Was it a trap? The frozen meadow leading to the warm house could be a minefield.
The girl moved close. I shared her concern. What if the house was nested with Germans or Russians? Either would be a problem. The Russians would kill me or take me hostage. The Germans would demand to know why I wasn’t in uniform.
I didn’t want to imagine what they would do to the girl.
“We’ll follow the tree line until we’re closer,” I whispered. “We’ll see who’s there.”
One thing I knew for sure—we would not find a kindly old couple enjoying an evening pipe and needlepoint in the drawing room.
emilia
We walked toward the large house. With each step, I felt increasingly ill.
I shot him.
I shot a man.
The knight saved me and now I had saved the knight. Why didn’t that make me feel better?
The sound of gunfire had ripped a seam in my mind. Discarded memories were now leaking, dripping through.
Boots. Screaming. Glass shattering. Guns firing. Skull against wood.
I tried to push them away.
Please go away.
I couldn’t make them stop. The memories rolled at me, faster. Faster.
All the little duckies with their heads in the water
Heads in the water
All the little duckies with their heads in the water
Oh, such sweet little duckies.
A searing pain tore through my body and I collapsed in the snow.
joana
The shoe poet sat by the glowing fireplace, polishing his boots with lampblack he had scraped from the hearth. The wandering boy watched intently at his side, mimicking the strokes on his own small ankle boots.
The fire cracked and popped, rolling waves of heat in front of my face. Glorious. I wrapped the scarf around my head and buttoned my coat.
“If I can find an oak tree, I can boil the bark to treat some of the blisters,” I told Poet.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“Rest. You’ll need your strength for the days ahead.”
“I’m fit as a lad, my dear girl.” He pulled up the leg of his wool trousers to reveal his bony knee. It was covered in white. “Shoemaker’s secret,” he whispered to the wandering boy. “There’s mercury in white shoe polish. Fights off the arthritis. Fit as a lad, I am.” The wandering boy pulled up his pant leg to inspect his own tiny knee.
Poet smiled and patted the boy’s head. The old man was still full of energy. He refused to buckle under the burden of grief and loss. “Be careful out there, Joana,” he told me.
I walked through the darkened shell, back to the library with its smashed glass doors. A book lay open, its pages flipping in the icy wind. I bent to pick it up and the name on the cover daggered me with guilt.
Charles Dickens.
Grandma had given The Pickwick Papers to both Lina and me for Christmas.
Lina.
What had I done?
I set the book on a table and walked out into the cold, making my way toward the trees. Two dark figures sat in the snow halfway between the forest and the estate. I looked closely and saw blond braids blowing beneath a pink hat. It was the Polish girl and the young man with the shrapnel. I made my way toward them.
“Were you following us?” I called out.
“Hurry,” he shouted. “Something’s happened to her.”
I ran. Emilia sat in the snow, her chin dropped to her chest.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her. She didn’t respond.
“I think she’s in shock. She shot a soldier in the woods. She won’t move,” he said.
I knelt beside her. She quickly wrapped her arms around her body, trying to inch away from me. “It’s okay, Emilia, tell me what’s wrong. Let me help you,” I said. “Let’s go inside.”
She wouldn’t move. Instead, she lay down in the snow and started to unbutton her coat.
I helped her with the buttons, then sifted through her many layers of clothing.
I gasped when I saw it.
“Oh, dear God.”
florian
We brought her into the house. My stomach pushed up into my throat. The Polish girl was my sister’s age. What had human beings become? Did war make us evil or just activate an evil already lurking within us?
The day was a loss. I had left ahead of the group, yet they had arrived before me. Pathetic.
My senses were so misaligned that I was nearly killed in the woods.
And now the fifteen-year-old kid who saved my life was probably going to die.
The pretty nurse tended to the girl, whispering. I watched her. After several minutes, the nurse appeared at my side. Her fingers grazed my shoulder. “Come away from the fire,” she said.
“I’m cold.”
“You’re cold because you have a fever. Come away from the fire.”
She led me past the man they all called the shoe poet. He and a small boy were in their stocking feet. Their boots, arranged in a row against the wall, shone to mirrored perfection.
The little boy waved at me. “Hallo, I’m Klaus!” he announced. I gave him a discreet wink. He smiled.
“Sit down here,” said the nurse.
I felt uncomfortable with her, yet somehow relieved she was there.
“What did you say your name was?” I asked her.
“Joana. What did you say yours was?”
I opened my mouth but caught myself. A hint of a smile pulled at her lips. Was she laughing at me? Would she still be laughing when she realized that I had taken something from her suitcase?
“I want to see the stitches. Take off your shirt,” she said.
Inappropriate jokes ran through my mind. But she wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were fixed on the Polish girl and the fold between her brow deepened.
“Will she make it?” I said, unbuttoning my shirt. I wished I hadn’t asked. I couldn’t afford to care about the girl. She was just another tragedy of war.
The nurse turned to me. “Since her survival depends on you, let’s see how you’re doing.” She carefully peeled back my bandage. “Hmm, not as bad as I expected.”
“I can’t take care of her. I’m already behind schedule.”
She knelt in front of me. I could barely hear her. “The Russians have this region surrounded,” she said. “There are only two escape routes, through the port at
Gotenhafen or the port at Pillau. We’re all headed the same way. It will be safer if we travel together.”
Her cold fingers whispered across my chest as she buttoned my shirt.
She had no idea. It wasn’t “safer” for anyone to be with me.
joana
“He’s cute,” said Eva, stretching her mammoth feet by the fire.
“He’s young.”
“Too young for me, yes, but not too young for you. What is he, nineteen, maybe twenty? Look, he’s staring at you.”
I glanced over at him. He looked away. Eva’s estimation of his age seemed correct. And Ingrid had been right. His eyes were gray. My record with boys was not exactly successful. I seemed to have a talent for picking the wrong ones.
“But something’s not right with him,” said Eva. “Maybe he’s a spy.”
Ingrid’s words echoed back to me. He’s a thief.
Eva leaned back in a broken chair. “But even a spy can keep a girl warm, you know.” She surveyed the room. “The Nazis destroyed this place. It must have been beautiful.”
I nodded.
She let out a laugh. “They certainly don’t trust the old Prussian nobles now, do they?”
Eva was right. Prussian Junkers didn’t quite blend with other Germans. “Junker” meant “young gentleman.” The Prussian aristocracy was serving in the German army, fighting for their land and titles. But some of their ideologies didn’t align with Hitler’s. Back in July, Prussians were involved in an assassination attempt on Hitler. The plot failed and the Junkers were executed.
“So what’s wrong with the girl?” asked Eva. “Exhaustion? Or has she realized that her father won’t be doing any more math? Sorry.”
I shook my head. “I want you to speak to her privately. I need details to try to help her. Can you do that, Eva?”
