by Anna Schmidt
Suddenly the crack of a pistol shot rang out. The crowd turned as one and saw a prisoner fall as one of the SS officers who had just returned from a shopping expedition in the village holstered his sidearm.
Anja grabbed Beth’s arm and held on. At the same time, Sasha climbed onto a table. He told them most of the SS officers were dead and reminded them that they were all part of a larger struggle. “Forward,” he urged and added that those who survived must bear witness to these crimes against humanity. He delivered his speech in Russian, and all through his audience, others translated.
The Ukrainian guards in the towers waited for orders from the SS, their guns silent in spite of the nervous activity they were observing in the compound. They were too far from Sasha to hear his speech.
But all around her, Beth realized that others had taken up Sasha’s cry. “Forward,” they repeated as they moved toward the main gate. Then they were shouting it as one defiant voice.
Suddenly everyone was running—some toward the main gate and others to the sides. “Here, put this on,” Anja said as she thrust a heavy jacket into Beth’s hands.
She turned to look for Josef and saw him standing with Sasha and Leon and other men, aiming rifles they had somehow gotten at the watch towers. “Josef!” She started running toward him even as Anja pulled her away.
“Go,” he yelled. “Go now.”
Anja dragged Beth along with her as hundreds of prisoners stormed the barbed-wire fences. Some had garden tools and other weapons they used to try and hack through the wire. When that failed, they started going over the top. All around her Beth heard gunfire and explosions and shouting. All around her people fell. And still Anja urged her forward.
“Josef!”
“He’ll meet us in the woods,” Anja shouted. “Now come.”
Anja started to crawl through a small opening others had created at the base of the fence as others decided scaling it was faster. Beth followed Anja. Just when Anja made it through, the fence collapsed, and Beth felt the sting of the barbs embed themselves in the jacket that Anja had insisted she wear. She was trapped, and the more she struggled, the more entangled in the fencing she became. She saw Anja turn back to help her. “Go!” Then she covered her head as others trampled over her.
The noise was deafening, and Beth was certain that she was about to die. She closed her eyes and forced her mind to ignore the tread of feet over her, the sting of the barbs making their way through the coat and into her skin, the shouting and the explosions and the shrieks of the dying.
It felt like forever, but then she felt someone tugging on her arm and opened her eyes to see Josef kneeling next to her. His eyes filled with tears of relief when she opened her eyes and looked up at him.
“Go,” she urged, her voice choked by the dirt she had swallowed with her face pressed into the ground.
“No. Can you get free of the jacket?”
She slipped one arm free even as she noticed that with Josef there helping her, the others avoided stepping on her.
“That’s it. Now the other arm?”
It was a struggle, but that arm also came free, and with Josef’s help she was able to shimmy her way free of the wire. Josef helped her to her feet. He was no longer carrying the rifle. She was aware of fewer explosions and more people making it all the way across the open field to the haven of the trees. It was also beginning to get dark, and the lights in the camp had not come on.
Clutching Josef’s hand, she ran as she had never run before, her eyes on the forest as behind them sporadic gunfire sounded and all around them the open field was strewn with the dead bodies of their fellow prisoners.
When they finally stumbled the last few feet into the cover of the pine forest, Beth collapsed into Josef’s arms. “Are you all right?” she demanded as she examined him for wounds.
He brushed her hair away from her dirty face. “Beth, we are free,” he said quietly.
“Not exactly,” Anja reminded them both as she emerged from a thicket of bushes. “Now come on. We have to get as far away as possible because they will come after us.”
“The river,” Josef said. “We can tend Beth’s cuts, and if they use dogs, they won’t be able to track us.”
But as their days on the run lengthened into a week and then two, Josef realized how badly he had underestimated the determination of their captors to hunt them down. They could travel only at night, and during the day it was essential that one of them stay alert at all times for the possibility of discovery by the network of soldiers, local police, and even local citizens who might spot them and turn them in. Their feet were blistered and bleeding, and the few potatoes and carrots that Josef had managed to smuggle out were gone.
The good news was that the focus of the hunt seemed to be toward the east. That made sense because the camp was very close to the Russian border. So Josef decided that the three of them should head north. If they could make it to the Baltic Sea, they might be able to get a boat or stow away on a fishing vessel and make it to Denmark.
Anja was in favor of this plan mainly because she had grown up on the Danish island of Bornholm, and as far as she knew still had relatives there in the fishing village of Gudhjem. Although occupied by the Germans, the island was used primarily as a lookout and listening station for tracking naval and submarine activity in the Baltic. But Josef was all too aware that such a journey meant traveling nearly two hundred miles—mostly on foot and while being hunted. He knew the Nazi mind. They did not like loose ends, and they would not give up the search until they had accounted for every last prisoner.
“Josef?” Beth took hold of his hand as the three of them sat together in a cornfield that had not yet been harvested. This late in the season it was more than likely that the farm it belonged to had been abandoned. The crop was field corn for the livestock, but it tasted like manna to them. “We need to come to consensus.”
Next to her Anja nodded. The two women laid down their corn cobs and closed their eyes as they prepared for the Quaker ritual of sitting in silence and waiting for divine guidance. Josef was irritated that either of them thought that God was going to show them a way out of this. Did they not understand that he spent every waking minute planning for their safety?
“I need to think,” he said and would have stalked off to some other part of the field were it not midafternoon with a sky that threatened to bring rain before nightfall.
“You can think here,” Beth said without opening her eyes.
“Well, we’d all better pray that the Light dawns soon because we need to find shelter for the night,” he grumbled.
Just before he closed his eyes and took a deep steadying breath as Beth had taught him to do when preparing for worship, he was sure that he saw Anja smile.
Quakers. It was one thing to be married to one and quite another to be outnumbered.
After a few minutes, Beth spoke. “I am thinking that we need to find the best way to bring all three of us to safety,” she began and paused. “Perhaps this island—even if it is occupied—is at least a place we can begin.”
Silence.
Anja spoke. “If we travel as far as possible through each night…”
“Do you not understand that we are in territory we don’t know and we have no map?” Josef had had enough of the silent meditation.
The two women remained stone still, their eyes closed, their breathing even.
Josef squeezed his hands into fists, his frustration like a weight inside him. What other options did they have? He intended to wait out their silence and so focused his attention on alternate possibilities. So far they had made fairly good time. While the search parties focused mostly on the eastern end of the Bug River, he had been able to rescue an abandoned rowboat, and by using a branch from a pine tree as a pole and following close to the river banks, they were now west and north of Warsaw.
He knew that they were past Warsaw because he’d seen a sign for a village that he knew was north of that major city. He also
knew that rivers flowed to larger bodies of water—a bay or gulf and then on to an open sea. If they followed the river…“All right, we’ll go to Gudhjem.”
“We have consensus then,” Beth said softly.
Josef did not think he would ever understand these Quaker ways, even if the three of them were fortunate enough to survive. But the way both women looked at him with such conviction of the rightness of this decision, he could not help feeling that there was something to this whole waiting-in-silence thing.
CHAPTER 22
At night as the three of them made their way through fields and forests, crossing streams and dodging tree roots, Beth developed the habit of following Josef’s steps in complete silence. They could not risk talking—even in a whisper. The farms and villages in this part of Poland were close together, and who knew when a local might be nearby? Instead she placed her thoughts on Josef, imagining the future they would share—the home they would make for the children they would raise.
She never put a name to the location of that home, but she saw it in her mind as clearly as she saw the moon above her on starry nights. A house with a garden. She thought about how Josef had found refuge tending the garden at Sobibor. She’d been surprised to hear him talking about how the various plants were developing as they sat together each summer night on that rough bench outside the women’s barracks. He had found such hope in tending those plants.
And it would be a house with a fenced yard where the children could play safely, especially when they were young. Children that she pictured like Anja’s Daniel and Rachel. Such beautiful children. Such thoughts would make her wonder where Daniel was now and how Anja could possibly stand not knowing. Her friend had never really spoken about the capture of her family, the deaths of her husband and daughter, and the burden of not knowing where her son was or even if he was alive. How did she manage to keep going day after day?
Josef held up his hand and stopped walking. He motioned for Beth and Anja to crouch down, and after dozens of similar incidents, they obeyed without question. Beth heard male voices and laughter. They had been following a dirt road for several miles. In the east the sky was starting to lighten. They had come to the end of another night of travel and would soon need to find somewhere to hide for the day. She crouched a few feet away from Anja and felt the chill of the night held deep in the rocks that formed a wall at their backs seep into her bones. The voices came closer.
She saw two men in silhouette as they rounded a curve in the road. One of them was smoking a pipe, and the scent of the tobacco almost made her weep for the memory it carried of her uncle. Where were he and Aunt Ilse and Liesl now? Were they safe? Were they still alive? Who could say?
Suddenly Anja gave an involuntary gasp, and Beth looked over to see a dog sniffing at her friend’s shoulder. The men were nearly even with them. Beth signaled Anja to stay still and turned to see if Josef had noticed the dog.
But Josef was gone.
The two men were speaking in Polish, but by their tone Beth surmised that they had noticed the missing dog. One of them let out a sharp whistle. The dog turned its head toward the sound but remained with Anja. The man whistled again, and both men stopped walking and talking as they scanned the roadside.
Where was Josef?
The dog pawed at the dirt and then dropped a stick at Anja’s feet. When she did not pick it up, the dog barked and pranced around her, nudging the stick closer. Anja huddled closer to the stone wall. One of the men grumbled something in Polish and turned toward them.
He gave a command to the dog, which the dog ignored. Up the road, rustling came from the brush. The dog turned to the sound, and so did both men. One of the men laughed and said something.
Beth knew almost no Polish, but she knew the word for rabbit—the SS officers had kept a rabbit hutch near the garden, and their cook was a Polish Jew. More than once she had heard the cook complain that the prisoners ate stale bread while the Nazis feasted on rabbit stew.
Again the rustling—this time farther into the field. The dog abandoned Anja and the stick and bounded back the way the men had come. Both men started after the dog—one of them clearly swearing and the other nearly bent double with laughter.
Suddenly Josef was there, his breathing coming in short spurts as if he’d run a race. He tapped Beth’s shoulder and motioned for her and Anja to climb over the low wall while the men were distracted and hide on the other side. They did as he instructed, but now they could not see the men or the dog, and to make matters worse there was a ditch filled with water on that side of the wall.
After what seemed like forever, the dog ran back to where Anja had been and once again sniffed the ground, but this time when its master gave a whistle the dog gave up the search and followed the men down the road. Still, they stayed where they were for some time just to make sure they were safe.
“Come on,” Josef said finally as the sky in the east grew lighter. The three of them ran across the field toward the safety of a cluster of trees. Beyond the trees was a farmhouse, smoke rising from the chimney and activity in the yard as the farmer’s wife scattered feed for the chickens and the farmer and a boy about Daniel’s age and size climbed aboard a hay wagon.
Anja began to sob. “I can’t,” she whispered, her words coming in broken syllables. “Can’t do this one day more.”
Beth’s heart broke for her friend, who had lost everything. She and Josef still had each other, but Anja…
“We’ll wait for the man and his son to head out to the fields then go to the wife. Perhaps she’ll give us some food,” Josef said. Beth knew that he was not ignoring Anja. This was simply his way. When faced with any sign of adversity or distress, Josef looked for ways to make the situation better.
“Let me go,” Anja said, sniffing back her tears and swiping the back of one dirty hand over her eyes. “That way if something goes wrong…”
“We’ll both go,” Beth said. “Josef can keep watch and give a whistle if there’s danger.”
Early in their journey, they had worked out a system of signals to use should they get separated. It had been Beth’s idea, and how Anja and Josef had laughed when she told them she had taken the idea from the Hollywood Westerns that she and her brothers used to attend every Saturday afternoon back in Wisconsin. But it had worked for them more than once, and no one was laughing now.
“All right,” Josef agreed.
They waited, shivering in the cold morning air, as the farmer and his son left the farmyard and headed down the road. They stayed a while longer to make sure that no one else was around other than the housewife.
“Go now,” Josef said.
Together Beth and Anja walked quickly toward the farmhouse. It was a plain house, but pristine in its orderliness. It was—Beth realized— not unlike the house she had imagined one day sharing with Josef.
They went to the back door. They could hear the woman inside humming to herself as she washed dishes. Beth knocked on the back door, and too late she wondered if the woman spoke or at least understood German. Perhaps they should have sent Josef. He could have presented himself as a soldier separated from his unit. How were she and Anja to explain themselves?
But the minute the woman opened the back door, her eyes went soft with pity, and she signaled to them that they should wait on the back stoop. Moments later she returned, her arms full of warm clothing— coats for each of them, hats, mittens, scarves. While they gratefully put the garments on, the woman once again disappeared. This time she returned with mugs of hot tea and a knapsack bulging with apples, potatoes, bread, and even a bottle of apple cider.
Both Anja and Beth thanked her repeatedly. She held up her hand once more and ran back inside the house. This time she brought with her two blankets and the most precious gift of all—a compass and a roughly drawn map. The woman pointed repeatedly to an area that she had labeled die See—the sea.
“Baltic?” Beth asked, pointing to the spot, and the woman nodded.
“Funfzi
g…“ She broke off as from the road behind them they heard the sputter of the farmer’s ancient tractor, and suddenly the woman’s entire demeanor changed. “Gehen Sie,” she urged, her voice filled with panic as she glanced toward the road. “Schnell!”
Beth hooked the straps of the knapsack over one shoulder while Anja took the blankets and compass, and they ran for the woods, where Josef waited.
Josef watched helplessly as Beth and Anja raced across the open yard and climbed the hill to reach the safety of the forest. Behind them the farmer had halted the tractor and was now standing on it as he pointed a pistol at the two women. He fired. The shot missed, but both women did as they had been taught and dropped where they were, covering their heads with their arms.
“Come on,” Josef shouted, exposing himself to draw the attention of the farmer his way. “Get up. Run.”
Thankfully they obeyed and had almost reached the line of trees when the farmer took aim and fired one last time. The crack of the shot echoed in Josef’s head as Anja ran past him. He reached for Beth’s outstretched hand to pull her to safety and saw her eyes widen in surprise as the bullet found its mark and blood spurted from her calf.
Josef lifted Beth in his arms, throwing the knapsack to Anja as they scurried deeper into the woods, the rantings of the angry farmer following them.
When they could go no farther for having come through the stand of trees to another open area on the outskirts of a village, Josef set Beth down so that he could examine her wound. As far as he could tell, the bullet had lodged in the bone, and without the proper instruments, the best he could do was stop the bleeding and bandage the wound.
Anja used the makeshift knife they had brought with them from Sobibor to cut one of the wool scarves the farmer’s wife had given them into strips. It was the best option they had for a sterile bandage—their own clothing by now covered in dirt from their days on the run.