The Last Green Valley

by Mark Sullivan

  The gunshot caused prisoners ahead of Emil to panic and break formation. Several began to run. Other guards yelled in Russian and shot into the air to stop them, but that only created more of a riot up and down the ranks. One of the uniformed German prisoners decided to use the commotion as a diversion to try to escape, sprinting directly away from the march into a fallow field, heading for woods about a hundred and fifty meters out.

  He’d made it more than halfway when Lebedev saw him, ran forward, dropped to one knee, aimed, and shot the runner in the back ten meters before he reached the trees. The sight of him pitching forward into a mist of his own blood was enough for the remaining prisoners to settle and scurry back into line. During the confusion, places were changed, including Emil’s. When they started again, he looked to his left and found Nikolas limping beside him, a miserable expression on his face.

  “You could have found somewhere else to stink, Martel,” Nikolas said.

  “How’s the knee?”

  Nikolas glared at him with utter loathing. “Getting better every day. Soon I’ll be good enough to stick a knife in your back when you’re not looking.”

  “Except I will be looking,” Emil said. “And when you try, I will take that knife away from you, and I will stick it up your ass and give the blade a twist or two. You’ll die shitting blood if you try, Nikolas.”

  That infuriated the bigger man, but he did not reply, just glared straight ahead now, gritting his teeth and limping on, stride for stride with Emil for hour after numbing hour until a halt was called in farming country. In eleven hours of walking, they’d covered nearly thirty kilometers and seen ten men die.

  Lebedev pointed Emil, Nikolas, and the other prisoners toward a small loose grove of trees in a field that had been recently hayed. Aleksey went with them and allowed them to dunk their heads as they waded across a stream. Though dunking in the cool water was a relief, Emil collapsed almost immediately against one of the trees, grateful for the shade and the green grass; he knew he had to rest if they were going to march like this for two straight weeks.

  Nikolas found another spot to lie down. Other men returned to the stream and drank from it, but Emil had seen cows farther out and decided it was too risky. Despite being massively thirsty, he waited two hours until a food-and-water truck came. Dinner was weak cabbage soup, a hunk of bread, and enough water to fill the can they’d been supplied with.

  Emil wolfed down the food and water. He got back in line for more water, drank it all, and lay down for good before the sun was gone. Using his clothes for a pillow and hugging his water can and shoes lest they be stolen, he allowed himself to think about Adeline, Walt, and Will for the first time since they’d started marching. He fell asleep with their faces before him, saw himself hugging them, singing the boys a silent lullaby, and wishing them all a good night’s rest.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  May 12, 1945

  Near Pulawy, Poland

  The last part of the march was the worst for Emil. They’d done nothing but hike in the heat for the past three days, more often than not across fields and broken ground in order to keep the roads clear for Soviet military traffic. Prisoners were collapsing and dying by the hour.

  Emil had woken up foggy, barely rested, and nauseated. He could already tell the heat was going to be relentless, and he wondered if he could keep going if they were in for a long march. His stomach was so upset, he couldn’t eat his ration of bread, and he spilled half the water in his can before he took a step. By noon, they’d hiked ten kilometers, and the temperature had soared, with air so thick, there seemed to be a mist on the hazy low horizon.

  One foot and then the next, Emil told himself. One foot and then the next.

  But by early afternoon, sheer thirst was cracking his resolve. He looked everywhere for water. Passing a pond, he wanted to go to it and dive in as his sister had at the lake the day she lost her legs. But he could see that Lebedev and Aleksey were in no mood to see their prisoners do what they could not.

  Emil’s tongue and throat felt as parched as the soil in the fields they crossed. His eyelids were sticky with sweat and his lips crusted with salt. Several times he felt so dizzy, he feared collapse. What if I fall and can’t get up again?

  In the throes of heat exhaustion, his tortured body began to infect his mind. He heard Lebedev and Aleksey shouting, which became Captain Haussmann shouting at him for the first time in months. Try as he might, he could not prevent the terrible memories of that night from returning in full force. Emil staggered eastward in a feverish trance, seeing parts of that night as if they were happening all over again.

  September 15, 1941

  Outside Dubossary, Transnistria

  “Okay,” Emil said. “I’ll do it.”

  “A wise choice,” Captain Haussmann said, waving the barrel of his weapon at the terrified young man still huddled with the two young girls at the edge of the ravine. “Do it, then. Prove you’re fit for the new Germany, farm boy.”

  Aware that Haussmann still had his weapon trained on him from just a few meters away, Emil felt himself harden and go to a mental place he’d been many times before. Growing up on a farm, he’d slaughtered animals, and that was how he tried to see the Jews as he turned to them that night. He tried to make them animals in his mind, not humans, and he was not human, either. Besides, if he didn’t do it, the three children would die anyway, and Emil and his family’s chances for survival along with them.

  The young Jewish man was pleading with him again, begging Emil not to shoot as he walked forward, clear-eyed as he raised the gun and tried to take aim. As his sights settled on the Jewish boy’s chest, Emil felt cold, ruthless, committed to murder.

  “Do it, or I’ll blow your head off!” Haussmann shouted behind him.

  In his mind, as he started to squeeze the trigger, Emil had already killed the Jewish boy and the young girls so he could see his wife and sons again.

  A shout rang out behind him.

  “Captain Haussmann, stand down and lower your weapon!”

  Feeling like he was still in a nightmare, Emil gaped over his shoulder. Silhouetted in the truck headlights’ glare, an SS officer with a hawklike nose was striding toward them. Haussmann took one look, lowered his weapon, and snapped into a salute.

  “Obersturmbannführer Nosske!” he cried.

  Nosske pointed at Emil. “Lower your weapon.”

  Haussmann said, “I thought you’d gone to Kiev, sir?”

  “Not yet,” snapped Nosske, who seemed to be Haussmann’s superior. “Were you threatening to kill this man unless he shot those Jews, Captain?”

  Haussmann nodded with vigor. “I thought he needed to demonstrate his allegiance to the Fatherland, to—”

  “He’ll do it in a different way,” Nosske said. “Reichsführer Himmler himself vomited when he saw fifteen men shot to death three months ago. His explicit order afterward was that no one shall be forced to participate unless they wish to.”

  “With all due respect, Lieutenant Colonel Nosske, this man is a coward; this man is—”

  “Not going to shoot Jews unless he wants to,” the SS assault leader said firmly. “Give him another job, Captain. Give him a shovel to bury them all and find someone else willing to shoot them, and do it quickly. We have two thousand more to dispose of before dawn.”

  Two thousand? Emil thought, now trembling uncontrollably and gaping dumbly at Nosske and Haussmann, who saw argument was futile and snatched the Luger from Emil’s hand. He walked over to Helmut, the young guy with the missing tooth, and gave him the pistol. “Go ahead. Show the farm boy what a true new German looks like.”

  Helmut nodded, passed Emil with a look of disdain before walking right up to the three Jews. He shot the girl on the left first, then the one on the right, and then the suffering older boy. He used his boot to push their corpses into the darkness.

  “Just like shooting hogs in a pen,” he said to Emil before grinning at Haussmann and Nosske. “Sign me u
p. I could do this all day long.”

  Emil stared at the place where the young Jews had been huddled, begging for mercy, just a few moments before. He felt dazed and sickened. I was going to shoot them. I was going to murder those children. How could I have . . . ? How . . . ?

  And then Emil processed the first thing Helmut had said and understood that he and the toothless guy had told themselves the same story: The Jews weren’t human. They were animals.

  “Martel!” Captain Haussmann shouted, snapping Emil out of his thoughts.

  He turned to the SS officer and his commander, seeing Nosske gesture to a shovel on the ground. “Use it, or he will shoot you.”

  Emil nodded, lowered his head, and hurried to get the shovel. More rifle and pistol shots were beginning to ring out farther north up the ravine, and with them the cries of the doomed rose once more. It all made Emil feel like he’d gone to hell for reasons he did not understand, and he had to struggle to focus on Haussmann, who pointed south along the ravine.

  “Go there and start shoveling that pile of lime onto last night’s work,” the SS captain said, his tone sewn through with disgust.

  Emil wanted to ask how long he’d have to shovel before he could go home but thought better of it. He nodded and turned away, only to receive a kick square in the right butt cheek that made him stagger forward and almost fall.

  Emil’s instinct was to spin around and break Haussmann’s skull with the shovel blade, but he knew if he did, he’d be a dead man. Instead, he straightened up, kept his head low, and limped toward the pile of lime in the shadows just beyond the headlights’ glare. The night breeze shifted, came out of the southeast and the ravine itself. With the breeze came the reek of bodies that had rotted all day in the sun.

  He retched and retched again. More rifle shots went off. More people were screaming. When Emil was able to stand, he could see north through the headlights the long line of Jews waiting to die. Most of them seemed resigned to their fate now, going to slaughter like animals. Only they were not animals.

  Emil stopped breathing through his nose, went to the lime pile, and started shoveling, crying, unable to stop thinking about his decision to shoot the three Jews, and how quickly he’d gone from seeing them as people, children, to seeing them as animals, and how fast he’d thought of himself as a tool, an implement, not a person at all. Even if he’d done it for his family. He retched and sobbed as he threw the first shovelfuls of lime over the edge of the ravine and into the darkness and decay below. He felt in his heart as if he’d killed those three children himself. He’d been willing to do it, hadn’t he? He’d absolutely decided to put a bullet in each of them, hadn’t he?

  Emil knew in his heart and his mind that he had decided and that he was a murderer. I crossed the line. They were already dead. I was already living with it.

  But he’d been forced into it, hadn’t he? He’d begged God not to make him part of it, but there he’d been placed, and there he’d decided to kill three children, finding a way to justify it beyond the gun at his head. They were doomed to be killed no matter who pulled the trigger. They were animals. I was only a tool.

  No, they weren’t. They were as human as your own flesh and blood. And no, you weren’t some unthinking, unfeeling tool of destruction. You, Emil, were a cold-blooded murderer no different from Helmut.

  He went on this way, torturing himself as he shoveled for hours and the shooting went on and on and on. Every shot made him flinch, made him relive the three children being executed. He thought of Adeline and wondered what she would have done in his place. He bowed his head, feeling like a lesser man when he understood exactly what her reaction would have been. Her thoughts would have been with the dying and the dead. Not herself.

  Adeline would be praying for their souls, he thought, and felt confused, enraged, and small, a speck in time. She’d be praying for their souls, and I can’t see the sense of that anymore. Dead or alive, no one’s listening.

  And with that, in the dark of the night as two thousand Jews lost their lives, Emil Martel’s faith in a benevolent God, his belief in himself and in the common good of man, left him. The following day, on his way back to Friedenstal and his family, he would shake his fist at the sky and curse a cruel God for his sorry lot in life.

  Emil tripped and sprawled facedown in the weeds of an overgrown field the prisoners were crossing, ripping him from his trance.

  “Get up!” someone barked as he stepped over Emil. “Lebedev’s coming!”

  Forcing himself to his knees and then to his feet, Emil felt like he might go down again. But he gritted his teeth, got angry, and started marching once more.

  He remembered that moment outside Dubossary almost four years ago when he’d lost his faith and realized his beliefs had not changed a bit since. There was no God. Despite what Adeline said, there was no help from on high. No one else could help him put one foot in front of the other. He had no one to rely on but himself.

  And this march? With every step, he saw it more and more as punishment for being a murderer in everything but the pull of a trigger.

  By sheer force of will, Emil kept putting one foot in front of the other for nearly three days after he collapsed in the heat. And for nearly three days, he obsessed about and suffered for what he’d become in Dubossary—a monster no different than Helmut or Haussmann.

  I became a monster, and this is the torture I must go through if I am ever to see Adeline, Walt, and Will again, he told himself over and over again. I just have to take the pain, accept the torture, and plod on.

  Every day, men dropped from exhaustion. Every day, men were shot for their weakness. The deaths alone kept Emil going when all he wanted was to lie down in the shade and sleep.

  Near the end of the third day, lightning bolts had begun to crack nearby and thunder to shake the ground beneath Emil’s weary feet. He did not care. Lebedev had just said they were a mile from the station where their train east awaited.

  The last mile, Emil thought, and smiled wearily. There were times when I wanted to quit and let them put a bullet through my head, but I’m here. I made it.

  Then the winds came with rain, blustery and drenching. Emil and scores of other prisoners took off their shirts and let the rain pelt the filth off them while they leaned back and opened their mouths wide to drink from the sky. Somewhere deep inside, Emil wanted to roar out in victory for having made it this far when so many men had fallen along the way—almost two hundred by his count.

  But he knew that celebration would only attract attention, and his father’s number one rule of survival in a Soviet prison camp had been to attract as little attention as possible. Emil stayed silent as they entered Lublin, which was like so many of the other small cities and towns they’d trudged through—in ruins or pocked with bullets or bomb-cratered. And just as they had in the other towns, people came out to jeer and curse at the prisoners in Polish and Russian, calling them “German swine” and asking them how it felt to be beaten and herded east.

  “Enjoy Siberia, stinking Kraut!” one little boy yelled, and threw a rock at Emil, hitting him in the shoulder.

  The kid let out a cry of joy that turned into a sneering laugh. Emil trudged on, less enthusiastic about the rain. That boy could not have been much older than Walt, and he hated me. I never did a thing to that child, yet he hated me so much, he was happy to hit me with a rock.

  He was beginning to think that hate ruled the world. Hate was certainly in almost every terrible experience he’d endured in his life. He’d succumbed to it in Dubossary, hadn’t he?

  The cycle of mental suffering began all over again for Emil as they rounded a corner and were led into a rail yard where a long freight train awaited them, boxcar doors gaping wide. The rainstorm had passed and with it the short-lived pride of having survived the march. The shadows and darkness inside those boxcars spoke to Emil in a language he did not understand but felt like a slow sawing in his brain and belly.

  Where would he be coming out o
f those shadows and that darkness? Worse, who would he be? Was he destined to die in the East? Or return like his father, a gentle man, but a broken one deep inside?

  Lebedev and Aleksey called a halt. Emil stood there, closed his eyes for several moments, blocking out the train that would take him farther away, and summoned up the clearest image of Adeline and the boys he could muster. The one that came up was of them all the evening after she’d returned from Lodz with enough food to feed the entire family. Adeline had beamed that night. As weak as Emil had been after the fever broke for good, he’d felt stronger every time she smiled at him that night over dinner.

  Well, isn’t that what love does? he thought. Makes you stronger?

  Lebedev began shouting out orders.

  “Get your rations and get on the train.”

  “Where do you think it’s taking us?” Nikolas asked Aleksey and Lebedev.

  Emil hadn’t seen them enter the train yard.

  Aleksey smiled. “I understand you’ll be given winter clothes when you arrive.”

  Lebedev snickered and added, “Don’t let anyone steal your gloves, or your fingers will fall off in fifteen minutes’ time.”

  Emil felt sick, closed his eyes again. Siberia.

  “Get your rations and get on the train!” Lebedev shouted again. “I never want to see any of you filthy, worthless bastards ever again.”

  Having been through the train rides to Budapest and then to Lodz, Emil knew that getting a good place to stand was crucial to surviving what had to be a one- or two-week trip to Siberia, depending on the train’s power and the track conditions. As the sun began to set, he got his rations and climbed into an almost empty car near the rear of the train. He took a position on the short side of the doorway and steeled himself for the long journey ahead.