Enough self-pity, I told myself. You can be sad and scared later. Now you have to save your friends. And you have to make this dumb German dog help you do it.
“Okay, Yutz.” I pushed myself off the ground and wiped my face. “You ready to save my friends, you stupid mutt?”
The dog sat down and licked himself, ignoring me completely.
“No way, vato,” I said, snapping his leash. “We’re going to find my friends.”
He snorted and slobbered at me, shook the snow from his fur, and lifted a paw while he sniffed the air.
“This way,” I told him and tugged him back in the direction that I wanted to go. This time, he obeyed.
Or maybe it was the way he wanted to go after all, because the moment we scrambled down the hill behind the hedge, he sniffed the air and dragged me out onto the road. There were tank treads and jeep tracks frozen in the road, although the snow had mostly buried them. The footprints were already gone.
“Okay, Yutz, find your masters. Go!”
He didn’t even look at me. He just stopped, right in the middle of the road, and sniffed up at the breeze. I glanced back, worried more Germans would be coming along, but the wind howled and swirls of snow cut off visibility. I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me or behind, which meant that Germans coming this way couldn’t either. But in this case, I had an advantage. I had a dog who wanted to go home.
Yutz pulled me along in the direction I had seen the column of prisoners going, and I hoped it was their smell he was following. I held on to that leash and did my best to keep up, although I kept stumbling. The first time I fell, Yutz yelped with the surprise of being yanked backward by the neck. The second time, he growled at me. By the fifth or sixth fall, he just stopped and waited until I got up again, and I swear I heard the wheezy dog-laughing sound. Once I was on my feet, he lunged forward again, and I stumbled after.
“Slow down, Yutz,” I said. “I’m not used to all this ice.”
I remembered what Goldsmith had said: “No snow in the desert.”
I’d lost hours coaxing the dog away from that foxhole, and now he was my only chance to find them again. He was my chance at redemption. I could still be a hero. No one had to know that I’d panicked during the battle. That would be my private shame. All anyone would need to know was that I had escaped capture to rescue my friends.
I focused hard on every step as I ran behind the dog, clinging to the leash, determined not to fall.
The howling wind sounded like a pack of dogs chasing us through the night.
I followed the Doberman for the rest of the night, his black-and-brown fur almost invisible in the dark.
On the ground, the road was empty. I started to wonder if we were even going the right way, but then I saw a man lying facedown on the ground by the side of the road. He had a dusting of snow over him, and as Yutz dragged me closer, I saw that he wore an American uniform. He’d died on the march and the Nazis had left his body unburied in a ditch. I pulled Yutz back and we went on. I couldn’t save him, whoever he was. I didn’t have time to bury the dead. I barely had time to help the living.
As we went down the road, I saw two more bodies. I approached each of them, heart pounding in my chest, and bent down to see their faces. I didn’t know them. They weren’t Goldsmith. We kept going.
As we rounded a bend in the road, the dog stopped. He lifted one of his front legs and perked his ears. They twitched on the top of his head.
“What is it?” I asked him. I didn’t know what his sudden alertness meant. Was someone coming? Should we hide?
Then I saw his nub of a tail wag, and he barked, pulling me forward. I followed. It was the first time I’d seen his tail wag. He must have smelled something he liked, and the sight of his tail wagging made me hopeful.
Until I remembered that what he liked was German soldiers! I’d forgotten that Yutz and I were not on the same side.
I dug my heels into the ice and pulled back hard on the leash, so hard that the dog slipped and lost his footing, sliding down onto the snow with a sudden yelp.
“Wer is da?” a voice yelled through the fog. “Zeigen Sie sich! Hände hoch!”
I didn’t speak German, but I sure knew what it sounded like. The dog tried to get up and run toward the man, but I heaved him in the other direction. He fought me every step of the way, and he started barking like mad. He was ninety pounds of pure muscle, and I couldn’t pull him across the ice.
“Zeigen Sie sich!” the German in the fog shouted again. I still couldn’t see anyone. I hoped that meant he couldn’t see me either.
I had to think quickly. I could let the dog go and hide on my own, give up on using him to find the prisoners. He might just as soon turn around and lead the Germans right to me, though. He knew my smell now. I didn’t know if dogs could do that, but I figured they could. That’s why police used dogs to track escaped convicts and why hunters used dogs to catch animals. Was that a special kind of dog? Was Yutz one of those? I had no idea. I didn’t want to take the chance.
I yanked the leash again so he lost his footing, and at the same time I rushed around to his side. I decided that I couldn’t charge straight at him or he’d just bite me, so I dove at his big black flank and landed on top of him with a thump. He struggled and squirmed under me, snarling loudly and trying to turn his head and bite my arm. He was better at wriggling than I was at wrestling, and I was about to lose my grip on him.
“Jetzt! Zeigen Sie sich!” the voice yelled once more. He sounded frightened. The last thing I needed was to be discovered by a frightened German with a gun.
As I struggled to hold Yutz down, I looped the leather leash around his long brown snout, once, twice, three times, pulling tight, muzzling him. He stopped struggling. He looked up at me with his dark dog eyes and he flattened his ears. I figured he’d given up the fight, at least for now, and I jumped off him, holding the leash-muzzle tight, no slack at all. Then I dragged him to the side of the road. He followed, his whole rear end low to the ground and his feet skittering on the ice. He was going with me, but he wasn’t helping. When we got to a ditch, I pulled him down and crouched over him so that I could see and so that he was secure underneath me. That way, he couldn’t make a break for it.
“Ist jemand da?” I saw a form emerge from the fog. The German held a rifle out in front of him, and pivoted from side to side, surveying the road. He drew closer and closer to our hiding spot. The dog beneath me didn’t wriggle, and thanks to the muzzle, he couldn’t bark, but I heard him let out a low whimper, a longing to answer the only language he’d ever known.
I wasn’t cruel. I felt for the dog. It wasn’t his fault he’d been born in Germany at a time when dogs like him were trained and turned into Nazi soldiers. It wasn’t his fault his master had died or that I’d found him. But none of that mattered. I didn’t want to be here any more than he did, but I couldn’t let myself fall back into self-pity, and I wasn’t about to let the dog do it either.
“Shh, Yutz,” I whispered right into his ear, and he stopped whimpering. His eyes rolled up to look at me and he flattened his ears against his head. I guess he’d accepted our relationship: He was my prisoner.
As the soldier walked by our hiding spot in the ditch, I could finally see him clearly. He was young, younger even than I was, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. His cheeks were bright red with the cold and his hand shook on the rifle stock. His coat was far too large for him, his helmet too. It slumped down over his whole forehead and partway over his eyes. It was a wonder he could see anything at all.
“Wer is da?” the boy soldier said again. I could see his breath in the air in front of him, puffing out like steam from a train engine, his breathing was so fast. He was even more afraid than I was. His gun turned and pointed at every noise. We were so close I could see his finger twitching on the trigger. I feared that so much as a sigh from the dog would make the young man open fire. I feared that even my heart was beating too loudly.
After the
longest minute of my life, the soldier backed away in the direction he’d come.
“War nur ein Wildhund,” he said to someone. I didn’t want to stick around to find out what that meant. I eased up off of Yutz and gave his leash a tug. We crept along the ditch by the side of the road, slipping behind a ring of sandbags where the boy and another young soldier crouched with their rifles, pointing them at the road. I held Yutz on a very short leash, and whenever he left my heel, I gave it another tug. He looked up at me resentfully, but obeyed. We made it past the soldiers unseen and moved along as quickly as we could, although I was more careful to keep to the side now, and we moved a little more slowly. I did not want any more surprise meetings with nervous young Germans and their nervous trigger fingers.
We encountered no one else as we went along, and after a while, I let Yutz have a longer leash. I unwound his muzzle so that only one loop held his mouth closed, and I even let that hang slightly loose so that he could pant more freely. He was my prisoner, but that didn’t mean I had to make him suffer. I hoped the German soldiers were giving the same consideration to their prisoners.
When we reached the edge of a town, I was dismayed to discover that they were not treating their prisoners even half as well I was treating mine.
The town looked like nothing I had ever seen before. The sun had started to rise, but with the heavy cloud cover and the continued snow, everything was cast in a soupy gray — lighter, but somehow not brighter. I hid in a row of trees on a hill at the edge of the town, from which I could see down into the central square — or rather, I could see the ruins of the central square.
There was a church, its steeple blasted clean off. The old stone buildings all around it were either totally collapsed or so riddled with bullet holes that they looked like they were made of lace, not stone. Rubble blocked the streets — and not just rubble. Amid the crumbled stones and wooden fragments, there were possessions, tossed from the houses by whatever explosive force had leveled this town. I saw a smashed piano flipped onto its back, a burned car crushed beneath the wall of a house, rags and broken plates, heaps of ruined chairs and tables, smashed picture frames, and the crushed body of child’s toy rocking horse.
And then I saw the people.
There were about fifteen of them clustered around a small fire by the side of the church. They were dressed in mismatched layers of clothes, bundled against the cold in whatever they could find. There were a few old women and a few old men and three or four small children. No young adults, no teenagers or men of fighting age. They stood close together but didn’t speak, looking down at the ground or into the fire, their faces thin and tired.
When I had passed through France on my way to the front line, the only civilians I had seen waved flags at our trucks. They cheered and danced in the streets as we went by. We had liberated them from the Nazis, and they treated us like heroes before we’d even gotten to the front lines.
These people were not liberated. Their town had been the scene of a fight, and was under Nazi control now. From the looks of it, no matter who won the battle raging across Belgium, this place had already lost. These bedraggled people were all that was left.
I heard a shout and one of the old men looked up. I followed his gaze to the rear corner of the church and saw a Nazi officer step into view, dressed in the familiar long coat and peaked cap. Even from my distance, I could make out the shine of the two lightning bolts on his collar, the SS.
The SS weren’t like normal German Army soldiers. They were a special organization, run by the Nazi leadership, not the German Army, and they were the only ones Hitler trusted. The SS were the ones who murdered civilians, burned entire villages. They were the ones who rounded up the Jews of Eastern Europe to slaughter them like cattle. From everything I’d heard, the German Army guys were basically all right, just normal soldiers that fought hard, but knew when they were beat. The SS, on the other hand, had this idea of “resistance to the death.” They were the ones who would rather see the whole world burn than surrender.
And they were the ones who had taken my friend.
The SS officer beckoned for the old man at the fire to come to him. I watched as the officer asked the old man some sort of question. When he was satisfied, the officer pointed to the side of the church I couldn’t see, and from around the corner came two more German soldiers, normal army men in army coats and helmets, not the feared SS. Behind them marched an American with his arm in a sling and behind him another, limping, and then another and another and another. They marched silently, single file, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and more. I lost count. They just kept coming, and the old man led them to the small fire, where they huddled together, far too many men for too small a fire. The civilians scattered, disappearing into the dark doorways of the ruined buildings.
I didn’t see them again.
I noticed that most of the Americans didn’t have shoes on. They marched across the freezing, snowy ground in their green army socks, some of which were already mere shreds so the men were barefoot in the snow. Toward the back of the line, hobbling along with his helmet still perched on his head, I saw Goldsmith, looking down at the ground, trying to avoid drawing any attention to himself. A man behind him limped and used Goldsmith’s shoulder for balance.
Relief came over me like a warm blanket. My friend was alive. He was walking, and although his feet must have been in pain, he did not appear gravely injured.
At the back of the line of Americans, there were a few more German Army soldiers, and three more SS men, surveying the huddled crowd of prisoners. One of them led the big brown-and-black German shepherd I had seen the previous night. The dog looked alert, his eyes fixed on the American soldiers trying to warm their hands and feet around the fire. Beside me, through his muzzle, Yutz whined.
“Friend of yours?” I asked. I could feel him straining on the leash, every muscle in his body wanting to run to the dog and its master.
“Funf minuten!” the SS officer yelled at the Americans.
Suddenly, a small blond boy ran out from the shadows of a mostly destroyed house and rushed up to the Americans. He had curly golden hair that shined in the dim morning light like a halo or a crown. It was the only vivid color in the otherwise gray-and-brown landscape.
He approached the injured man beside Goldsmith and tugged his tattered pants. The man turned down to the boy and I saw the soldier’s face. It was Mike, the guy whose bleeding shrapnel wound I’d treated, my first act as a battlefield medic. He leaned on Goldsmith for support, but he had some color back in his face. I was glad to see him alive, glad to see he was on his feet. It looked like I wasn’t such a bad medic after all.
The boy shoved something into Mike’s hand and ran off again. The SS men watched him go, but said nothing.
Mike whispered something to Goldsmith and tore off a piece of what the boy had given him.
Bread. It was bread. He offered some to Goldsmith.
I couldn’t tell what my friend said, but his gestures were clear enough. He turned it down, pushed the piece back to Mike. I guess he figured the injured man needed it more. I suppose he was right. But Mike insisted, even after Goldsmith refused again, so he ate a little bit and then passed his chunk of bread down the line for a few others to get a taste.
My stomach growled.
Goldsmith was a better man than I. I think I would have eaten that whole chunk without even chewing. For a second, I considered surrendering, just to get something to eat.
The Germans laughed at something and then they started shouting, pulling the prisoners away from the fire and making them stand in line with their backs to the church wall.
Icy fear gripped me. It looked like they were being lined up in front of a firing squad.
I had to do something. I had to think of a plan, fast. All the German soldiers were armed with machine guns, and there was that ferocious dog down there. Plus the one up here that I still couldn’t trust. If I let him go, he’d turn on me, and I’d have a wh
ole squad of Nazis plus two trained-killer dogs to deal with.
While my mind raced with ideas, each one worse than the last, the SS officer started speaking. He didn’t order his men to fire. It wasn’t that kind of line the Americans were in. The officer spoke to them in English.
“American invaders!” he shouted, his accent crisp and sharp. “I am Obersturmführer Schultz and you are prisoners of the German Reich. You will be treated justly if you obey our commands. If you disobey, if you attempt sabotage or if you attempt escape, you will be shot.”
Obersturmführer was a rank like first lieutenant in the US Army. Schultz was the commander of this group, and it looked like he made the regular German Army guys nervous.
“We will continue our march in three groups!” he shouted. “Officers, you will stand here.”
He pointed, and there was a murmuring and a shuffling of feet among the Americans. I saw some lieutenants, two captains, and even a major step to the spot where they had been commanded to stand.
“Enlisted men!” Obersturmführer Schultz shouted at the rest of them. “You will be in two groups. All American soldiers who are Jews, step forward!”
No one moved.
“Do not be alarmed,” the SS officer said. “It is for your own protection.”
Still, no one moved. My heart thumped in my chest. Why was he singling out just the Jewish soldiers?
Goldsmith stood still. He let Mike lean on him and he did not step forward.
“If you continue to disobey,” Obersturmführer Schultz said calmly, “you will be shot.”
“You can’t do that!” the American major yelled. “These men are prisoners of war and under the laws of war, you cannot simply begin —”
One of the other SS men hit the major in the back with the end of his rifle, knocking him into the snow.
“I repeat,” Schultz snapped. “Jewish soldiers, step forward.”
The SS dog handler made a noise and the big German shepherd barked.
Prisoners of War Page 4