The lice have begun to itch again, in my underarms, groin and scalp. I take my hat off to scratch my head, and Bill and I try to flick the little devils out of the knitting before I put it back on. I’m sorry they’ve infiltrated the hat Bill made me.
When the church goes quiet, I pray for us all, for strength to endure, and my mind drifts to Scotty, to all he achieved in his life—how he saved his sister and her children, how he saved me. I give thanks for him.
Despite the hardness of the pew, the hunger that gnashes at my insides, the itching of the lice and the coldness of my damp clothes, I fall into a dreamless sleep. Perhaps that’s how my prayer is answered.
In the morning we are given another loaf of hard black bread to split among six. Ralph and Max discuss the logistics: how they are managing to bake bread and distribute such large quantities of it to hundreds of thousands of evacuated men, and how long it can continue.
Bill opens a tin of condensed milk and pours some onto his bread. I drink my three spoonfuls of the sweet, sticky cream, but keep my bread in my pocket to eke out throughout the day. As the afternoon passes, the white of the fields meets the white of the sky with no horizon line. Buzzards circle overhead, and I think we are walking carrion.
Over the next few nights, we sleep in different places—a village hall, a factory, a cowshed. One night Bill and I bed down with pigs in their sty. It’s the warmest we’ve been for days.
In every village the local people come out to watch us pass. Prisoners barter cigarettes, soap and chocolate for bread or sausage. My companions decide we should keep our cigarettes and soap until our food parcels run out. They are more valuable currency than gold coins sewn into the hems of our clothes. The food from our parcels is rapidly diminishing. Even carefully rationed, it doesn’t go far among four.
When the snow starts to fall again, we walk with our heads down to stop it blowing into our eyes. Even with my neck bent, I can’t keep my eyes open properly. The guns sound more distant now, and all I can hear apart from them are the wind and the trudge of footsteps and beyond us the great uncaring silence of nature.
One house we pass has logs piled up outside it and smoke rising from a chimney. It’s almost unbelievable that on the other side of that wall are warmth, company, family, food. I wonder if the people inside look out at this line of straggling, starving wretches, or if they just keep the curtains closed and face the fire.
At Strehlen there’s a church with an onion dome, like in Vražné, where we were married so many hundreds of years ago. But no priest comes to help us.
On the sixth night, the tall guard tells us we won’t be locked in; we must bed down where we can. We cram into a drafty toolshed, but it’s so crowded, we have to sleep sitting up. Bill removes his boots to look at his blisters. His feet are raw and bleeding, and he decides to leave his boots off for the night. “The air might do my feet good,” he says doubtfully.
But after a few minutes, he sees the pinkness of his feet turning white and pulls his bloodstained socks back on. From his pack he takes a second pair, which he knitted himself and which are rather misshapen but still warm. As he yanks them over the first pair, I see another man eyeing the socks as if they’re gold nuggets.
“Give you a hundred cigs for those, mate,” he says, but Bill refuses, tucking the blanket around his feet to prevent the socks from being stolen as he sleeps. I sneak a look at the man’s feet and see he is only wearing fuss-lag and wooden clogs. Bill sees that too and ties his boots to his wrists by their laces.
It’s so cold in the shed that by the morning the wet leather of Bill’s boots has frozen like iron, and he can hardly force his feet back into them. It’s snowed again in the night, and I clutch Bill’s arm as I realize some prisoners were forced to sleep outside. Most of the mounds of snowy clothing don’t move.
Twenty-four
The endless line of men winds through open country where the wind has bent trees into strange shapes. We can see the snaking line of prisoners miles ahead of us—black shapes shuffling against the snow. Sometimes up ahead we see the dark silhouettes of buildings or church spires, and hope flickers for a few minutes. Perhaps we’ll be allowed to rest here. Perhaps there’ll be bread.
In some villages, the women come out to line the road with buckets and pans of soup or acorn coffee, which they set up on chairs beside the road and hand to the first lucky prisoners who pass by. Sometimes it’s just hot water, but we’re grateful for anything warm. Our guards mostly ignore the women and let us pause for a second or two to drink whatever’s on offer, though occasionally there’s the stain of coffee or soup in the snow, and we know that a guard farther ahead has overturned whatever the woman had made. Once we see small pieces of vegetable from soup spilled in the snow, and men scoop them into their tin cups to warm later or pick them out to suck frozen as they walk.
One elderly civilian man is handing out newspapers, urging them on men who don’t understand what he’s saying.
“We can’t read bloody Polack,” someone says, pushing them away.
The man tries in German. “For insulation, to line your clothes,” and Ralph takes some, translating loudly for those around us and thanking the man. Behind us the pile of newspapers is quickly depleted. At our next stop we wrap the papers around our bodies, shoving them down the trousers and up under the battle dress. To my surprise I can feel a small difference.
In one nameless ordinary village, a woman swaddled in shawls ladles thin gruel out of a pot, and we stop to fill our tin mugs. When I look closer she’s not old at all, but about the same age as my mother, with prematurely gray hair. She never takes her eyes off me. My friends thank her in English and German, and she replies in Polish. We shake our heads to show we don’t understand. She slowly translates into German. “Perhaps . . . some other mother . . . will do this for . . . my son,” she says. Ralph repeats her words in English. I put my head down, because tears have filled my eyes.
That night—our seventh on the road—we are led again onto a farm, but this time we are too far back in the line to be able to find space in the outbuildings. We drag our sledge from one shed or barn to another, but every inch is taken by exhausted men, crammed and scrunched without space to lie down.
“Move over,” says Bill, but there’s nowhere for them to move to, and as we leave the last building, I begin to panic. As night falls, the temperature drops fast again, and we’ll be the unmoving bundles of rags in the snow tomorrow morning unless we can find shelter. Ralph seeks out the bald guard and pleads with him in German. “Please take us to one of the other billets, the next village, perhaps. There’s nowhere left for us. We’ll all die. Please.”
The guard looks exhausted. I can see ice beginning to form in his one-day stubble. He looks us over and hesitates for a second.
“We can pay you,” says Ralph. “We’ve got some tins left.”
The guard still hesitates. “A hundred cigarettes,” he says at last.
Ralph replies, “We’ve only got a few cigarettes. Coffee, maybe? Please. We’ve come all this way together.”
The guard weighs up effort and reward; then he shrugs and says, “These are my orders. Tell the other prisoners to move up and make room.”
“For the love of God!” Ralph begs. “Even just for two of us? For the boy?” But the guard turns and shuffles away. Ralph swings back to us, desperation in his eyes. “I’m so sorry. He won’t do it for anything but a hundred fags.”
Max says, “It’s good to know my life is worth twenty-five fags.”
The guard disappears into the snow. It’s no good going after him.
“We could maybe build a shelter against a wall of a shed,” offers Bill doubtfully. “We could use the sledge somehow. . . .”
Thin snow begins to fall again, and I make a decision. Checking we’re out of sight of the guards, I stride out toward the farmhouse, the others following behind.
&nbs
p; “What’re you doing?” Bill asks, but I don’t answer.
I knock firmly on the back door. It opens a couple of centimeters, and the light from a kitchen candle falls out into the snow. Through the slit of the door, I can see an old man, skeleton thin, with luxuriant white hair.
I speak very little Polish, but we all understand as he hisses, “Go away!” I’ve blocked the door with my boot so he can’t shut it. He’s muttering something else, about the Nazis. Probably that they’ll shoot him if he helps us, or that they are coming back, having been billeted on him.
“Varshahvay,” I interrupt gruffly in my best imitation of a Polish accent. “Varshahvay.”
He releases pressure on the door a tiny fraction so my foot isn’t so tightly jammed, and he peers out at us in the sliver of light from his kitchen. I point to us and say, “Cztery. Us four. Varshahhvay,” and we can see him hesitate.
He tries to look behind us into the darkness, to see if we are being watched. Then he lets go of the door handle and slips through, joining us out in the yard. The snow is falling thicker as he scans the four of us, and flicks his head to look all around him like a wary bird.
“Warszawy?” he asks, and we all nod.
He reaches back into the kitchen for a shovel and his coat, then scuttles away down the side of the house, and beckons us to follow. Measuring distances from a window with his hands, he stops and begins to clear the snow heaped waist deep against the outside wall. After a few minutes, he’s tiring, though the snow is light, and Bill takes the shovel from him and digs down to ground level. All the time the farmer’s looking around him, terrified. Then the spade makes a hollow sound against a wooden trapdoor, and we scrabble the snow aside, until the door to the cellar can be opened. We grab our kit bags from the sledge, and he hustles the four of us down, as quickly as possible. We half-tumble over one another down the little ladder onto a hard stone floor. Ralph tries to bring the sledge with our last parcels, but the farmer pushes him away with the shovel, down into the cellar. The trapdoor bangs shut above our heads, and we are in total darkness. We can hear the farmer shoveling snow onto the trapdoor, and for a second, I think he’s burying us and this will be our coffin. Then Bill’s fumbling for a match in his kit bag.
“My bloody hands are too cold,” he whispers, trying to strike it over and over.
“Maybe the box is damp,” suggests Max. “Try the floor.”
We hear the swish of the match on the stone floor, and there’s a flare of light as it catches. Bill stands and lifts the match above his head, and we see we’re in a small cellar, with empty shelves where food was once stored. There’s just enough room for us to lie down, and we have our blankets wrapped around us, but we have no provisions, and our sledge is outside.
“I’ve got a few candle stubs,” says Max, and we hear him opening his kit bag and rifling through it. A match is struck again, and once a candle’s lit, our shadows leap up the walls. Max lines up three more candle stubs, but we can all see they won’t last till morning.
We sit down on the hard floor, and open our kit bags to see what food might remain. Bill has a wizened turnip. I have a tin of pilchards and Ralph has prunes. Max says he doesn’t have anything.
There’s a hasty discussion.
“Once he’s gone, we could go back out and look for the sledge,” suggests Bill.
Ralph isn’t sure. “But we might get caught coming out.”
“Better stay here,” agrees Max.
“I’m famished,” argues Bill.
I say quietly, “We die from cold out there,” and the others all stop and consider me for a second before their voices tumble over one another.
Ralph says, “You’ve saved our lives. We can manage on this food for one night.”
Max is curious. “What did you ever say to him, to persuade him?”
“Just one word, like ‘open sesame,’” says Bill.
Ralph nods. “And he helped us though you could tell he was terrified.”
I say it again in Polish and Ralph repeats, “Var-shah-vay,” tasting the shape of the word to fathom its meaning, but he can’t guess.
“Warschau,” I say to Ralph in German, and he shakes his head in admiration, then translates for the others.
“Warsaw. Of course. Genius. Warsaw. The one word in the world to persuade him to save our lives.”
“But why?” asks Bill. “Why would that work?”
“When the Nazis broke the Siege of Warsaw, every single one of the civilian citizens was rounded up and sent to a prison camp,” Ralph reminds him. “Every man, woman and child. Who knows what they’ve suffered? No self-respecting Pole could deny sanctuary to people who fought the Third Reich and helped his countrymen in Warsaw. That one word reminded him who were his enemies and who were his allies. And he’d think if we escaped, maybe others did too.”
Max nods in respect, while Bill allows himself to gaze on me in wonder. “How ever did you think of that?”
I shrug, and say aloud, “Just thought,” and I feel a small glow of pride as we divide up the raw turnip and chew it. The first candle stub gutters, and we decide that when it goes out, we’ll huddle together and try to sleep.
The darkness is more complete than I’ve ever seen. The cold from the floor penetrates our clothes, and the stone is unforgiving against our bony frames. But we fit ourselves close together. I’m in Bill’s arms for once, because here nobody can see. I have his arm to rest my head on. Ralph sleeps with his back to Bill, and Max is on my other side. Despite our hunger and discomfort, we are so exhausted that one by one we fall asleep.
We don’t know how many hours later it is when we’re woken by scraping above our heads as the farmer clears the trapdoor. Max helps push it open from inside, and although it’s still night outside, it’s a blessed relief to see the light from the stars. In the east is a thin graying, indicating we’ve lived to see another dawn. The farmer pulls us out roughly, wanting us away from the house as soon as possible. As he starts to shovel snow back onto the cellar door, he indicates a rough drift to one side, and underneath is our sledge, with the remains of the final parcels. We heave the sledge out and start to help him with the shoveling, but he’s looking around anxiously and very eager for us to leave. He thrusts the branch of a fir tree at Ralph and indicates how we must cover our tracks, then yanks from his pocket a paper bag, which he gives to me, looking deep into my eyes. “Dla Warszawy.” It sounds like “Varsahvay.” For Warsaw.
I grip his hand for a second. “Dziękuję ci, thank you,” and the others all echo my thanks, but he’s pushing us away, terrified of being found with us. We pull the sledge over the fresh snow, back toward the farm buildings, which were too full to take us, passing the snow-covered bodies of men who were not so lucky. Ralph crunches backward, obliterating our tracks, and tosses the fir branch under a tree.
Ahead of us, the tall guard is banging on the door of a shed, calling, “Raus, raus.” We slip round behind to look as if we’re just emerging from another building, yawning and stretching into the dawn light. He barely glances at us.
“What did he give you?” asks Ralph, and I open the top of the paper bag. We peer inside. Oats. Like we’d feed the horses.
“Porridge for breakfast!” beams Bill, as if it’s all he could ever imagine wanting in the world. I know we’re all thinking of Scotty, wishing he was here to share it. As we’re making the watery porridge, the tall guard comes around looking for Ralph.
“Arzt, doctor.” He beckons urgently. “Komm mit mir.”
Ralph struggles to his feet. “Cousins, can you come too?” And we follow the tall guard down to the farmhouse, where we spent the night.
The white-haired farmer recognizes us and freezes, ready to deny everything, but I signal to him to say nothing. The tall guard stumps upstairs to a bedroom, and we follow to where the bald guard is lying on a bed in his long underwear, gasp
ing for breath, his face ashen and sweat pouring down it.
He’s clutching his chest. Even I could make Ralph’s diagnosis: “Heart attack.”
For fifteen minutes, Ralph and the tall guard and I take turns pressing on the bald guard’s chest, trying to bring him back to life, but eventually the tall guard makes a decision. “Nein. It’s no good. He’s gone. Stop now.”
I lift my head and stop the pounding. The room is absolutely still and silent. Ralph leans in to close his eyes and mouth, and I cross myself, while at the same instant the tall guard does the same. He nods to me and pulls the sheet over his comrade’s face.
Ralph and I turn to leave, but the tall guard taps us on the shoulders and puts out a hand to shake. “Dankeshön.” We both solemnly shake his hand, and he seems to be trying to think of a way to thank us. He points to himself. “Hans,” he says.
Ralph replies, “Ralph, and this is Cousins.”
He shakes our hands again, and we escape back down the stairs into the freezing air.
A little farther on, late in the morning, we enter a village where some children come out and walk alongside us, nudging one another. They are laughing and want to ride on our sleigh. Of course we let them climb aboard, two at a time. We are so weak that it takes three of us to pull the extra load, but it’s worth it to hear their squeals and giggles. All around us men are smiling at them, squaring their shoulders, lifting their heads, visibly cheered by the laughter, and gaining new determination to stay alive, to return to their own children. Tonight there are fewer men to house in our section, and we all squeeze together into the designated barn.
In another village, a dark-haired Polish girl smiles at Max, and a passing Hitler Youth boy happens to see. He swings out his rifle barrel and knocks her down. She flies sideways into the snow and curls into a ball, waiting for more blows. Max moves to help her, but the Hitler Youth trains his gun on us.
“He’ll shoot, for sure,” says Bill.
The Prisoner's Wife Page 28
