The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  It was only then that he smelled something savory and almost indescribably delicious in the air. “What’s that cooking?”

  She smiled and whispered, “Fresh sausage and onions. I want the smell to fill the apartment, seep into the hall, and call everyone to our feast.”

  “Feast?”

  “Feast,” she said, smiling and standing. “Now, get up and come out. We’ll let the boys sleep as long as they need to.”

  She left the room. Emil threw back the blankets, sat up, and then stood without feeling dizzy. He walked out into their little living area, surprised at how warm the coal-fired stove had made it and how good the smells were coming from the tiny range where Adeline was turning over sausages and onions. And the table! It was covered with more food and ingredients than he’d seen in years.

  “Where did you get all this?” he asked in wonder.

  Adeline tapped the edge of the skillet and turned, grinning as she said, “It was a miracle, Emil. You won’t believe it.”

  And Adeline was right. At first, Emil did not believe her story of running into Esther after begging God for help and then the woman repaying her with enough money to buy food for a month, maybe longer. As far as he was concerned at that moment, God did not answer prayers like Adeline’s because there was no God that he could see or hear or touch. The only thing we can rely on is ourselves.

  Adeline had relied on herself, and there was a . . . coincidence. That’s what it was. Luck strikes everyone eventually. Adeline just got lucky, he decided, and smiled at the smells and the wad of money on the table that Adeline said had been a third again as fat yesterday evening.

  “Where did Esther get enough money to give away that much money?” he said.

  “I didn’t ask, and she didn’t say,” Adeline replied, going back to the stove even as a knock came on the door and Malia and their cousin Marie poked their heads in.

  “What is that smell?” Marie shrieked.

  “Heaven,” Adeline said. “First course coming up.”

  The Martels told no one else about the food and ate four times a day for the next two weeks while buying double their ration of coal on the black market. Will and Walt both recovered from the fever, and they, too, were gaining weight and growing stronger.

  Emil took daily walks in the arctic conditions, going by Sergeant Wahl’s cottage and finding it dark every time. He began to worry, because he did not know what was happening in the war, where the Allies were in Germany and the Soviets in Poland.

  “I need to hear where they are almost every day, and Sergeant Wahl was supposed to be back a week ago,” he fretted to Adeline on January 17.

  On his walk late that afternoon, the snow and the winds were building again, and the streets were clearing as people hustled toward shelter. Emil took a chance and slipped through the back gate to Wahl’s cottage and tried the kitchen door. Locked.

  He didn’t want to but packed a big snowball with his bare hands and used it to punch out a pane of glass above the doorknob. Inside, he didn’t dare put on a light, but knowing he was in the kitchen allowed him to grope his way to the room where Wahl kept the radio. He turned on the light briefly, saw it wasn’t there, and felt his heart sink.

  Then he checked Wahl’s closet and found it. After watching it done so many times, he had the radio set up quickly. He listened to the BBC German Service and soon learned that the Battle of the Ardennes Forest, or Battle of the Bulge, was over with the Allies victorious. The US First and Third Armies had joined up but were encountering fierce resistance trying to cross the Rhine. And the Soviets had retaken Warsaw.

  That last piece of information was all Emil had to hear. The Red Army was less than seventy-five kilometers away. Even in terrible conditions, a tank could cover seventy-five kilometers in a day, maybe less. He considered putting the shortwave in its protective case and walking off with it. The Nazis were losing, but having a radio transmitter was probably still reason enough to be shot if you were caught with it. He reluctantly decided to leave the radio where it was, along with a note to Sergeant Wahl, thanking him for his kindness. Outside, he sneaked around the cottage onto the road that led to his home. A match lit a cigarette on the other side of the road.

  Nikolas stepped out and said, “I live up the street, Martel, and I don’t think the VoMi would take kindly to a thief breaking into one of their cottages.”

  “I’m not a thief,” Emil said.

  “That’s what it looks like,” Nikolas said. “Hungry people have been wondering where the sudden money and food came from, and I decided to follow you, and now we know.”

  Emil understood that once again he was in direct conflict with this man. Is he still in touch with Major Haussmann? Does he have the Nazis’ ear here in Wielun? Does it matter with the Germans on the run?

  “You know nothing,” Emil said at last, and started walking. “I’m no thief, Nikolas, just checking on my boss’s house as he asked me to.”

  “I doubt that!” Nikolas shouted after him.

  “I don’t care about your doubt,” Emil said, and turned the corner, out of sight.

  When he reached home, their apartment was more than warm, and Adeline had fresh bread already out of the oven and was ladling soup into bowls.

  Emil shut the door and said, “We have to pack and leave as soon as possible.”

  She looked up. “I know. They just told us.”

  “What? Who?”

  Adeline set the ladle back in the pot. “SS soldiers. We’re being moved closer to Germany the day after tomorrow.”

  German military trucks came to Camp Wielun at dawn on January 19, 1945. As before, they were able to take only what they could load in the little wagons. Luckily, with Marie’s wagon and one that had been gifted to them by another refugee family, the greater Martel clan now had four little wagons among them, and they were able to bring along most of the staples Adeline had bought for them in Lodz.

  Adeline sat with her cousin Marie and her twin boys on the bumpy ride.

  “They’re getting nice and chubby,” she said, holding Rutger, the bigger twin.

  “Thanks to your food and kindness,” Marie said, holding smaller Hans. “I think they’ll crawl any day now.”

  “Sometimes that’s all we really need to get up and go. Food and kindness.”

  Driving through Breslau—a vital stop on the road to Germany, and a strategic position with bridges over the Oder River—they saw Wehrmacht troops and the slaves of the Organization Todt, gaunt, weary men dressed in gray with the letter E sewn on their left breasts, acting on Hitler’s recent order to turn the city into an armed fortress. Two hours later, they rolled into Legnica, a city far more populated and beautiful than Wielun. And yet their quarters were in some ways worse. But they had money, and money always talks. While winter continued to throw ice and snow at them, Emil was able to buy enough black-market coal to keep the entire family warm.

  Emil also did everything he could to get news of the Soviets and the western Allies. He struck gold because refugees were often targeted by hustlers and black marketeers. Soon after they arrived in Legnica, while out walking, he met a teenager who offered to sell him contraband cigarettes.

  “Captured American,” the kid whispered. “Camel. Lucky Strike.”

  Emil told him he was more interested in a small shortwave receiver.

  “Not a transmitter,” Emil said. “Nothing illegal. Just a receiver.”

  “That could still get me shot,” the kid said. “It will definitely cost you.”

  A few days later, he handed Emil a bag in return for half the Reichsmarks the Martels had left. Inside the bag was a beat-up, khaki-green Radione R3 shortwave receiver stolen from a Wehrmacht supply depot.

  “Be careful,” the kid said. “My friend said there are fuses, but no spare crystals or radio tubes. What you see is what you get.”

  Emil waited until late that night to turn the radio on and tune it to the BBC German Service. He heard about the latest developments at
the Yalta Conference between American president Roosevelt, British prime minister Churchill, and Stalin. He learned that the Soviets had crossed the Oder River to the north and that they were now less than eighty kilometers from Berlin. The Americans and the British were still battling for western Germany and facing stiff resistance. He also heard a word he’d only heard once before, in the cemetery in Budapest: Auschwitz. The announcer described the scene when the Soviets liberated the concentration camp on January 27. Emil closed his eyes, completely overwhelmed at the scope of what the Nazis had done.

  He didn’t want to, but his thoughts inevitably returned to that night in Dubossary, when Captain Haussmann had put a gun to his head and told him he’d die if he didn’t kill the three Jews. He heard himself say, Okay, I’ll do it. He heard Haussmann reply, A wise choice.

  Emil fell asleep that night, feeling sick and fearful and wondering if he was doomed to be haunted the rest of his life by that choice.

  In the weeks that followed, up late at night, listening to the shortwave, Emil knew when the Soviets took Lodz and when they won Budapest and when the western Allies firebombed Dresden and when the Red Army laid siege to Breslau, only to pause along the western banks of the Oder River, resupplying and preparing to invade eastern Germany. On the night of February 24, he heard about the Allies launching nine thousand bombers over the Fatherland.

  Wahl was right, Emil thought, yawning and shutting off the radio. The Nazis are beaten even if they don’t know it.

  He stood and crossed the room, meaning to put the radio in a metal cabinet in the flat, only to trip over a bulge in the flooring. The radio flew from his hands and crashed and clattered across the floor.

  “No!” he said, grabbing the radio and trying to turn it on. “No, no, no.”

  It never ran again.

  Four days later, on the last day of February, Emil saw Wehrmacht soldiers rushing into lorries and leaving Legnica. He went out walking, saw more jammed trucks departing, and then spotted two Waffen-SS soldiers using razor blades to cut off the small blood-type tattoos they had high under their left arms.

  “Those bastards knew they were going to be caught and probably killed for being a member of the SS,” he told Adeline when he got back to their flat. “We’ve got to go in the morning. We’ve got to get to the Allied lines.”

  “How?” Adeline demanded. “The Germans have left.”

  “We’ll walk if we have to,” he said.

  Adeline hesitated only a moment before yet again packing their meager belongings. Her mother and sister did the same. Marie was feeling sick and needed help, but she was not waiting for the Soviets to send her and her sons back to Ukraine, either. When Emil knocked on his parents’ door and entered their quarters later that evening, however, he found his mother, father, and sister sitting by the coal stove.

  “C’mon, get packed,” he said. “We’ve got to leave early.”

  Karoline said, “We’re not going.”

  “What? You have to go. You know what they’ll do to you when—”

  “Do we?” Rese asked. “We’ll just speak to them in Russian. They won’t know who we are. And besides, I can’t walk to Germany, and you can’t carry me.”

  “The wheelchair.”

  Johann shook his head. “It won’t last the trip. This is it, son. We’re staying and hoping for the best.”

  The temperature nose-dived that night. March came in like a lion, with snow that intensified after dawn. While he waited out the storm, Emil kept arguing with his parents and sister, telling them that their best hope was to get to the Allied lines. They wouldn’t hear of it. Karoline said she had heard rumors that the Soviets might let them return to their lands.

  “Don’t believe it,” Emil said. “Not a word. They’ll say anything. Do anything.”

  He stood at the window, watching the snowy streets. Every time he saw a convoy of Wehrmacht trucks heading through town, headed toward Germany, he ran down to ask for a ride for his family and their four carts. And every time they turned him down, even when he asked for his family alone.

  The same pure bloods that Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler had lauded for leaving Ukraine to repopulate Greater Germany were now unwanted, discarded, forgotten, and left to their own wits. Emil was at once discouraged, isolated, and yet unbowed; he had relied on himself in difficult situations before, hadn’t he?

  Never bet against me. I’ve gotten out of tougher situations than this.

  The snow finally stopped on the morning of March 4, 1945, but howling east winds had caused drifting and stranded them another five days. Luckily for the Martels, the Soviets had been hampered by the same foul weather and were still encamped along the Oder River the evening of March 9, when Emil saw other ethnic Germans like themselves loading their wagons. The Martels had a final meal of mashed potatoes and sauerkraut and went to bed with plans to leave first thing in the morning.

  When Emil got up at dawn on March 10, he could see other refugees already pushing their carts to Berlin. An hour later and knowing this might be the last time he would ever see his parents and sister, Emil fought off tears, hugging them and telling them each good-bye.

  “We’ll see each other again,” Rese promised from her wheelchair. “I know it, just like Corporal Gheorghe said he knew he was going to live through Stalingrad.”

  He rolled his eyes but couldn’t help smiling. “I’m counting on it.”

  With that, Emil began moving the last of their things into the three wagons on the sidewalk out in front of the tenement. The sun was strong, melting the snow, springlike, almost balmy after the cold blasts they’d survived in the prior months. He planned to follow the other refugees, heading south first, then picking up a main road heading west. With luck, they could make fifteen kilometers a day, which would put them at the German border in roughly eight days. From there, we’ll figure out how to get to the western Allies and—

  Emil felt a sharp poke at his back that almost knocked him into the little wagon. He got his balance, turned around to see what had hit him, and found two Polish militiamen standing there. One of them was aiming a rifle at him.

  “German?” the rifleman said in German.

  Emil nodded. “Volksdeutscher.”

  “Hands behind your head,” he said. “You are coming with us. You have cleanup work to do. Here and then in the Soviet Union.”

  Stunned, Emil said, “No, no, my family, we were just leaving.”

  Adeline had come out of the building with the boys, her mother, sister, and Marie, who held the twins.

  “You’re not going anywhere but with us,” the soldier said as the other one came around behind Emil. “March.”

  “Emil!” Adeline shouted in a panic.

  “Let me at least say good-bye to my family,” he said.

  “No,” the soldier said. “March!”

  Emil felt another jab between his shoulder blades and started walking, feeling like he was outside of himself the way he’d been that fateful night in Dubossary, apart from his body, walking on the road to doom.

  “Papa! Papa!” Walt and Will yelled.

  Emil looked over his shoulder, saw them bursting into tears. Adeline ran up alongside the militiamen, her palms up in surrender.

  “Please, he’s done nothing wrong,” she said in Russian. “He’s not a soldier. We’re farmers from Ukraine. Can’t you hear our accent?”

  “We don’t care about your accent, and we don’t care where you’re from or what you do,” the first militiaman said. “We have orders to find all Germans, including all Volksdeutsche men, and detain them until we can turn them over to the Soviets.”

  “No,” Adeline said, terrified. “No, no, no, where are you taking him?”

  “He’ll help clean up Poland for a while,” the soldier behind Emil said. “And then, far east. Probably Siberia.”

  “No!” Adeline shrieked, and grabbed the front soldier by the sleeve. “You can’t do this! Please, my father never came back from Siberia!”

>   He threw her down in the snow and snarled, “We don’t care, bitch.”

  Jolted by the fall, lying there in the snow, Adeline fought her way to her knees and screamed hysterically after him, “Emil! Emil! What do I do now?”

  Emil looked over his shoulder at the love of his life and his dear sons coming to help her and bellowed, “Go west, Adeline! Go as far west as you can, and I promise I’ll find you!”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Adeline felt her sons’ hands on her, hugging her and trying to console her. She heard their voices asking questions but did not understand them and could not look at them. She just knelt there in the street, paralyzed and staring after the dwindling form of Emil, her husband, her life, being stolen from her when they were only minutes from making their final escape west to freedom. The sheer unfairness of the loss was magnified by the last sight she had of her husband—trudging forward into his fate with head unbowed and will unbroken.

  I will remember that, Adeline thought, dazed. I will hold that image in my heart until . . .

  In her mind, Emil’s last words—I promise I’ll find you—echoed against her father’s last words—I promise you all I will come back!

  But my father never came back, she thought bitterly, and felt more broken than she’d been in her entire life. He never came back. He . . .

  “Adeline,” Marie said. “Please, you’ve got to get up. You’re upsetting the boys.”

  Though still in a daze, Adeline heard that clearly and looked up to find her cousin kneeling at her side. Marie was gazing at her with a concern and understanding born of the harshness of her own lost love. Then she felt a little hand patting on her other shoulder and looked around to see Walt there, crying.

  “Is Papa coming back, Mama?” he choked.

  Adeline hesitated, suddenly understanding that her faith in God, in life, in herself, lay in total jeopardy. She could feel the fear of never seeing Emil again like a night bird clawing at her heart, tearing at the root of the one thing that had always kept her going: her fervent belief that someday, somehow, their life would get better if she kept faith in God and her dream of that mythical green valley in the West.