The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  “Mama?” Walt blubbered. “Please say he’s coming back.”

  She licked her lips and swallowed before Will said, “He’s coming back, Mama. Right? He’s just going away for a while. Right?”

  The shaky squeak in her youngest son’s voice triggered something more powerful than her own fear or loss. A mother’s instinct to protect her young surged through Adeline, obliterating for the moment her desperate need to cope and grieve.

  “Yes,” she said, opening her arms to her boys. “Papa’s coming back. He will find us.”

  They rushed into her embrace, and she held them, not knowing whether to pray to God for strength or to damn God for robbing her of a husband and her sons of a father.

  “Adeline?” Marie said again. “There’s a truck coming. You need to get up.”

  She pulled back from Walt and Will, forcing a smile to her lips and a glint of optimism to her eyes as she said, “Well then, we’ll just have to have our own adventure until your father comes to find us. Okay?”

  The boys wiped at their eyes and their cheeks with their sleeves and nodded. She smiled again, stood, and brushed the dirt off her skirt before taking each boy by the hand, and with a nod of gratitude to her cousin, she tried to walk resolutely back to the little wagon and her mother and older sister.

  Malia and their mother stood by their wagon, watching Adeline and the boys approach with piteous expressions on their faces. Her sister moved first, came to Adeline, and hugged her. “We’re going to survive. He’s going to come back.”

  “Of course he will,” Adeline said.

  Lydia showed rare emotion when she took her daughter’s hand, kissed it, and said, “I never wanted this to be your burden, too, Adella. Never.”

  Adeline remembered her father being dragged into the night, vowing to return. She heard Emil’s last words echo in her mind: Go west, Adeline. Go as far west as you can, and I promise I’ll find you.

  “I know,” Adeline said, shaken inside again as she kissed her mother’s cheek. “But I’ve seen how strong you were for us, and now I’ll just have to be strong, too.”

  “Mama?” Will said, tugging at her skirt.

  She looked down at her younger child. His face was streaked with dust and drying tears, but the terror of losing his father had been replaced by a surprising earnestness and interest.

  “Are we going west without Papa?” he asked. “That’s what he said to do, didn’t he? Go as far west as we can, and he’ll find us?”

  Adeline gaped at him a moment, then looked over at the little wagons, already packed and ready to act on Emil’s mad idea to make it to the western Allied lines and to surrender as refugees. She knew he was serious, but she kept thinking of the last time they’d been caught between two armies, the snowstorm, the warring tanks, and the brutal way Emil had lashed at the horses until they’d bled to save them.

  Could she do that? Did she have that kind of courage and resolve? Had Emil been right? Was the only way to freedom through a hail of bullets and bombs?

  “Mama?” Walt said. “Are we going? Or not?”

  Her sweet, innocent boys were looking to her for guidance, and she knew the decision she was about to make might change everything about their young lives, for good or for bad. She felt anxious and alone, and then heard an explosion in the distance to the northwest that shook Walt, who held tight to her leg.

  “I want to go back inside,” he whined. “I don’t want to be near tanks again.”

  Seeing how traumatized her son was, Adeline made her decision and looked at her mother and sister. “We won’t go west if there’s combat anywhere near us. I can’t put the boys through it again. We’ll stay put until things calm down and . . . things are safer.”

  “Oh,” Will said, scrunching his brows. “But Papa said, ‘Go as far west as—’”

  “I know what he said, Will,” she replied sharply. “But do you want to see what it’s like to run on foot between the tank cannons and men from both sides shooting at us?”

  He took a step back at the sudden, harsh change in his mother. “No, Mama.”

  “Good. Then I expect you and Walt to help me as Papa would want you to help me. We start by unloading the little wagon and bringing it all back upstairs.”

  When they clomped up the stairs past Emil’s parents’ apartment, the door flew open, and Karoline was looking at them, puzzled. “I thought you’d all gone for good.”

  “Soldiers took Papa,” Will announced. “He’s going to Siberia.”

  Emil’s mother stared at her grandson, then saw it confirmed in Adeline’s puffy eyes and almost fainted before she grabbed the door frame and screamed the news to Johann and Rese. When they’d come, Emil’s father pushing his daughter in the wheelchair, Adeline told them what had happened just down the stairs when they’d been seconds from leaving.

  Karoline took the news like one more club to her battered body and soul, dumbfounded at first at the unfairness of it, then angry, then bitter. All within a few moments, what had happened to her son had gone from shocking to confirmation of the unending suffering that was her lot in life.

  “Why’d we come all this way?” Karoline asked Johann. “We could have stayed in Friedenstal, and Emil would have ended up the same way.” She looked at Adeline. “You would have ended up the same way, Adeline, even if we hadn’t come. This is what they do to our men and to us.”

  There was such compelling anger and defeat in Karoline’s eyes, Adeline almost succumbed to the rancor that thrived in her mother-in-law’s core.

  Then Karoline spat, “Face it, Adeline. This is what they will do to your boys, too.”

  That rocked Adeline, and fury boiled out of her. “That will never happen, you evil-thinking shrew! I will protect them and get them west when the time is right. And your son? He’s coming back to find us, because I know the kind of man he is.”

  Karoline’s face twisted with mock pity, but before she could reply, Lydia, who was on the stairs at the edge of the landing, said, “You know, Adeline, that’s what I said at the beginning and for too many years.”

  Adeline spun around and glared at her mother, shouting, “What? Should I think Emil’s dead and never going to return when he’s only been gone thirty minutes? I can’t think that way, Mother! I won’t give up hope! Not now. Not ever!”

  Lydia bowed her head, and when Adeline swiveled back to Karoline, the older woman had lost some of her spite. “You can’t give up hope. I did after Johann had been gone six years. I gave up hope. In my mind, Johann was dead. Fifteen months later, he knocked at my door.”

  “And look at me,” Johann said. “A wreck of a man.”

  “You’re not a wreck,” Adeline said. “And I promise you, Emil will not be wrecked, either.”

  Emil focused on putting one step in front of the other, trying not to let a predicament he’d spent a lifetime trying to avoid crush him before he could figure a way out and back to Adeline and the boys. As he and the two Polish militiamen walked farther and farther from his family through the streets of Legnica, he realized his mistake had been admitting his German heritage. He wasn’t a soldier, but it did not matter. To them, he was the last vestige of a conquering army in retreat. He should have spoken to them in Russian, but he didn’t, and now they could do anything they wanted to him and probably would. He was powerless in that respect, but not so powerless in another.

  As he walked, he remembered what his father had told him not long after his return from the frozen East and one of the few times he’d spoken about his years in a Siberian prison camp, slaving below ground. Emil had asked him how he’d managed to survive. Johann had said some of it was luck and some of it was learned. Despite all his hard work growing up on a farm, for example, Johann was lucky in that he’d been a little chubby from all the good food he’d been eating before the Stalinists came to take him away for hoarding. The extra flab around his belly had allowed him to survive the trip east when so many died.

  Emil thought about all the food
they’d had and how much weight and strength he’d regained since Adeline found Esther. In that way, he was somewhat ready to survive a long journey. He put that in his favor.

  His father had also said he tried never to speak German in the presence of any of the Soviet guards. It seemed to enrage them and often resulted in a beating. Emil decided to speak only Russian from that point forward. Maybe he could convince someone that these two had him all wrong.

  Johann said he had trusted very few people in the camps. Everyone at first should be considered a potential informer. Trust should be something hard won. So was the ability to avoid illness. Emil’s father had been fanatical about cleaning himself after leaving the mines and the latrines. He’d also forced himself to eat whatever he was given, no matter how grisly, and to drink the cleanest water he could find and lots of it.

  “The important thing was to stay standing as long as you could,” his father had said. “Every day you stayed alive, you had the opportunity to be set free or to escape. I escaped twice, but they brought me back and beat me senseless. Then I got sick.”

  That confession had surprised Emil when he’d first heard it. He’d never seen his father as the kind of man who would try to escape. But now that he was a prisoner himself, he thought he understood Johann at a deeper, gut level, better than he ever had before, and he vowed to follow those four survival tactics and others he had heard that day long ago.

  I can only rely on myself, he thought. But in a sense, my father has prepared me.

  Emil was certainly better prepared than the fifteen men in the back of the truck they threw him into an hour later. Nervous, thin, suspicious, they would not meet his eyes, as if they instinctually knew to trust no one now. He sat on a bench near the rear gate and saw other men being led to other trucks under armed guard.

  The truck coughed to life after an hour of waiting. As they pulled away, putting more and more distance between him and his family, Emil swore he saw Nikolas and two other men he recognized from the trek and Camp Wielun climb into another waiting truck.

  They began to drive east. With every kilometer that passed, Emil felt more and more betrayed by life. He’d spent almost a year since they’d left Friedenstal doing everything in his power to get his family west, and now he was heading in the exact opposite direction. To the north and east, he heard sporadic cannon fire and knew the Red Army was not far. Two hours later, approaching Breslau with the noon sun glinting off the Oder River, he could see the Soviets had the city surrounded. Mortar shells were exploding inside the fortress the Nazis had built.

  They turned due north for several kilometers and then looped back toward the river. Not long afterward, Emil saw the first Soviet tank and then another and then seven, all of them rolling west, unimpeded. He watched them and the Soviet troop carriers that followed the tanks, knowing that he’d failed miserably. He’d wanted to get to the western Allies, and he’d come up short, got captured, and was soon to be delivered to Stalin’s men. And Adeline, Walt, and Will were back there, right in the path of the tanks passing him, thrown to the wind and the wolves.

  He remembered how the militiamen had pushed Adeline to the ground and tried to use his anger at that to weld in himself the belief that he would survive whatever he was going to have to face. But try as he might, Emil could not do it. He kept thinking about Adeline and the boys and felt in his heart the first acid trickle of despair.

  That despair grew over the numbing six weeks that followed as Emil and hundreds and then thousands of ethnic Germans were put to work by the Polish militias, who treated them as slave labor. They were not trucked anymore but made to walk in long double lines under the supervision of armed guards, moving from one war-torn little town to the next, spending twelve to fourteen hours a day removing the debris of collapsed buildings and clearing roads so more Soviet troops could be brought to the battle lines.

  Emil tried not to speak unless spoken to by one of the Polish guards and then only in Russian. But he listened in both languages and heard the news that the Allies were forcing Hitler back on every front. The Soviets were preparing to attack Berlin from the east while the Americans and British were fighting their way there from the west, though they appeared to be stalled by pockets of fierce resistance from the remaining Wehrmacht forces.

  As March turned to April 1945, the brutal cold that had gripped all of Europe gave way to climbing temperatures that made the heavier clothes Emil wore intolerable. He took to carrying most of his clothes with him wherever he went and placed them where he could see them as he toiled. He thought of his father constantly, following Johann’s lead, keeping his head down, laboring without comment or complaint, drinking only the water given to him by the guards, eating all the food given to him as well, and sleeping whenever and wherever he could.

  The prisoners spent their nights in abandoned barns or in the woods, often side by side in the dirt, with the guards under orders to shoot any man trying to escape. Emil had been looking for a way and a chance to flee, but they’d been under tight control, no more than one hundred men in a group with eight armed militiamen watching.

  Rumors spread that they were headed much farther east once the war ended, but they seemed to move between war-ruined town and war-ruined town in a lazy S pattern, sometimes north, sometimes south, and even a few times west. Emil began to hope he would be imprisoned somewhere close to Germany so if he did escape, he would not have to go far to find his family. But where would they be?

  He’d told Adeline to go west, as far west as she could go, but now he feared he’d sent them into harm’s way. He imagined them following his orders faithfully, walking west despite being shot at and dodging bombs, and tried to tell himself that they would somehow make it to the Allied lines. Or had he been a complete fool and sent them all to their deaths?

  That last question gnawed at Emil whenever he lay down under the watchful eyes of the militiamen and escaped into sleep. He had nightmares in which Adeline, Walt, and Will were out in the middle of a muddy battlefield, hurt and screaming to him for help. But in those dark dreams, he always seemed to be behind a fence, gripping the barbed wire so hard, blood seeped down his hands as he screamed to them that he’d found them; he’d come west, and he’d found them.

  Four weeks after Emil was taken, Soviet guards took over from the Polish militiamen, but his assignment was the same in every town they entered: clear debris, stack bricks, stay alive.

  The first day under Soviet control, he heard a squat, flat-faced guard named Lebedev boast, “Stalin will have Berlin. It is certain. The Red flag will fly above the Reichstag by Workers’ Day!”

  “Maybe before Workers’ Day,” said his usual partner, Aleksey—a skinny kid, no more than twenty—who seemed to always follow the older Lebedev’s lead.

  The Soviets finally attacked Berlin on April 16, 1945. Two full army groups fought toward Hitler’s capital from the south and the east. A third Russian army overran the Germans from the north.

  Within four days, the city was encircled. The pitched and hand-to-hand battle with the last of Hitler’s fervent loyalists unfolded in the same brutal heat Emil was experiencing. More than eighty thousand Red Army soldiers would die in the next ten days, wresting Berlin from Nazi control. Hitler committed suicide on April 30. His generals formally surrendered two days later, and the rough boundaries of East and West Germany were effectively set where the various Allied armies stopped moving forward.

  The day the war ended, Emil was in a small town south of Kielce, Poland, stripped to the waist, moving busted concrete and brick in infernal heat, when he heard the same two guards talking.

  “I told you the Red flag would fly on the Reichstag by Workers’ Day,” Lebedev said, grinning and lighting a cigarette. “I wish I was there to see it.”

  “I wish I was there for the party,” his comrade, Aleksey, said. “I heard they’re trucking in vodka, and any German woman is yours for the taking. No one will stop you.”

  “Instead, we watch these G
erman swine pick up bricks and march east with them tomorrow, nowhere near Berlin. I saw the orders myself.”

  “How far?”

  “Almost two hundred and fifty kilometers,” Lebedev said bitterly. “Probably two weeks on foot to the train.”

  Two weeks? Emil thought morosely when he took his first hated step straight east early the morning of May 3, 1945. And the Soviets are free to rape every woman they see. Including my Adeline. The thought made him so sick and angry, he wanted to kill one of the men guarding him with his bare hands, but he knew he’d surely be dead the next minute. And where would that leave his family?

  They were in marching formation, two abreast, and every few kilometers that day, they were joined by more groups of prisoners, many in German army uniforms, until Emil lost count at twenty-three hundred. One of them, unmistakably, was Nikolas. Emil could see him fifteen men ahead of him and to the left, limping only slightly.

  The heat that day soared along with the humidity. The four times they were given water, Emil guzzled two-thirds of his ration and soaked his brim cap with the remainder so he could keep his head cooled. By three o’clock in the afternoon, it was brutally hot, in the upper thirties Celsius, not a cloud in the sky, and the weakest men among them began to stagger and drop. The man next to Nikolas was one of the first. Nikolas ignored his fallen partner and kept walking. The next man in line stepped over him as did the next eight.

  Emil stopped, grabbed the man under the armpits, and tried to help him to his feet.

  “Leave him be!” Lebedev shouted. “Keep marching. Close your ranks!”

  Emil reluctantly let the man sag into the dirt, stepped around him, and hustled forward to close the gap in the line. He heard Lebedev shout at the fallen prisoner that he had one more chance to get to his feet. Then he heard the Russian shout for Aleksey to finish him off and throw him in the ditch. Glancing back, Emil saw the young soldier walk up and without hesitation put a bullet in the fallen man’s head.