Simple Faith

by Anna Schmidt

  Anja smiled. “We cannot say, for to tell you would put you in more danger than you already know.”

  “I understand,” Elise said as she dished up three plates of the omelet and handed them to Colette to place on the table. Helene opened a cabinet and removed a loaf of bread and set it on the table as well. Elise brought out butter and jam and then sat down with a cup of coffee. “Eat,” she instructed.

  “But you …”

  “We will eat later once our visitors have come and gone.”

  Anja was struck by the woman’s expression of utter defeat. As if she had finally surrendered to whatever fate came her way. She covered the woman’s hand with hers. “Thank you for your kindness,” she said and then looked at Helene and Colette and added, “All of you.”

  Mikel wolfed down his meal in minutes while Daniel savored each bite, washing it down with a carefully rationed swallow of the hot chocolate. Anja smiled, remembering the night back in Munich that she and the children had first met Lisbeth—Beth then. It had been a cold, snowy night, not unlike this one. She and the children had been hiding in a park. Her husband had just been arrested, and she knew better than to return to their home. Lisbeth had taken them to her uncle’s home, where she had made them powdered eggs and given Daniel a piece of chocolate.

  It seemed ages ago. It had been only a little over a year.

  She sighed heavily as she drank the last of her coffee.

  “You must be exhausted,” Elise said. “Perhaps before you go, you could—”

  Helene had moved to the window and was holding up her hand, bidding for silence. “They’re early,” she hissed.

  Anja listened and heard the distant rumble of a truck’s engine.

  Instantly, Elise and Helene went into action. They cleared away all but two of the plates and mugs, setting the others in the wood box next to the stove and piling kindling on top to hide them. Colette was putting on a heavy coat that covered her to the floor, as well as gloves and a knit hat.

  “Colette will show you the way,” Elise said as she herded them toward the back door. “Hurry. They are closer than you think.”

  Sure enough, as they ran for the woods behind the little farmhouse, Anja caught a glimpse of dim headlights coming their way. And as Colette showed them a path they never would have noticed on their own and led them deeper into the forest, Anja heard the sound of raucous male laughter and shouted obscenities. Her heart broke for what Helene and Elise must endure for the next few hours—for the nights to come.

  “This way,” Colette whispered and led them to a small stream where a rowboat had been beached in the shrubbery at the water’s edge. “That way,” she motioned as Mikel pulled the boat into the water and Daniel climbed in. Anja cupped the girl’s face with her hands. “This will be over one day,” she told her. Tears ran down Colette’s cheeks, and Anja wiped them away with her thumbs.

  “Go now,” Colette whispered. “Please. Sometimes they come into the woods to search. They are convinced that Mama and Elise are hiding people.”

  Anja hurried to get into the boat, but she shuddered at the thought that on this night the soldiers would be right in their suspicions, and if they caught even a glimpse of the rowboat, who knew what they would do to the women. She wrapped both her arms around Daniel and hugged him to her while Mikel steered the boat downstream toward their next destination.

  The soldiers marched Peter down a long winding dirt road. When he didn’t move fast enough to suit them, they shoved him or hit him with the butt of their rifle. His guide with the pipe had apparently escaped their notice. Peter didn’t blame him for saving himself. Over the last several weeks, he had often wondered if he would be courageous enough to risk his life for total strangers the way the people he’d met since bailing out of that plane did. Not everyone was as brave as Anja.

  When they finally reached their destination—a run-down building in the shadow of the large church in a village next to a raging river—the snow had turned to a downpour. The soldiers shoved him inside, and he stumbled and fell against a table where three other airmen sat. They were soaking wet and covered in mud.

  “Welcome to the party,” one of them muttered. His accent gave him away as an Englishman.

  Behind Peter the door slammed, and he heard a key turn in the lock. The room was hot and musty smelling—the result of the combination of the other men’s wet woolen clothing and a stove in the corner that was putting out a lot of heat. As soon as the door closed, the three men hurried to the stove and began pulling papers out of their clothing, ripping them into pieces, and stuffing them into the flames. Peter saw that some of the papers were wet and clumped together—hardly viable fuel for a fire.

  Since the others were so focused on feeding the fire, Peter cleared his throat. “Any idea where we are?”

  The men looked at each other. “You are American?” one of them asked.

  “Of course he is. Listen to that accent.”

  Accent? He didn’t have an accent. They had an accent. He was tired, sore, and more than a little annoyed with the conversation going on among the men around the stove as if he had somehow left the locked room. “I asked if you know where we are,” he grumbled.

  The Englishman closed the iron door on the potbelly stove. “No need to get testy, old chap. We’re all in the same boat here—so to speak. The fact is that we were brought here blindfolded and have no idea where we are. Perhaps you can enlighten us as to what you were able to observe when the soldiers brought you.”

  Peter shrugged. “After a while these villages all look alike. Big cathedral in the center of it all, some shops, cobblestone streets that look like they go back to biblical times.”

  “Think, man,” another of the trio demanded. “Are we still in France?” Peter thought the man might be Scottish.

  “Of course,” Peter snapped. “Where do you think we are?”

  The man slumped onto a bench and buried his haggard face in his hands. “I thought we were in Spain. I thought we had made it.”

  The third man—Irish by his speech—snorted. “We haven’t yet crossed the mountains, so how could we be in Spain?” He then turned to Peter. “We came to this river—not the one that gets us to Spain. Anyway, it was impassable, and our guide went to look for another way and …”

  “We didn’t make it,” the Englishman said calmly. “What about you?”

  Peter told them about the man with the pipe and the dog. “When I turned around, my guide had disappeared, and I was staring down the barrels of three German rifles.”

  “A man with a pipe, you say?” the Irishman asked. “Could be LeClerq.”

  The Englishman shrugged. “Lots of Europeans smoke pipes.”

  “Who is LeClerq?” Peter had had an uneasy feeling about the man from the moment he had stepped into the alley. There had been something about his nonchalance that rang false.

  “François LeClerq—not his real name—is the son of a high-ranking official in the Nazi Party. He has made his mark by infiltrating the escape lines that run from Belgium and Holland on through France and Spain and ultimately to Gibraltar. He is a master of disguise but apparently somewhat addicted to his tobacco, and the pipe in various forms is always with him.”

  “How do you know who he is, and how come he hasn’t been stopped?”

  “We were warned by other guides. As for how he gets away with his subterfuge, I couldn’t say, but clearly he is very clever. You may be more fortunate than you know.”

  “I’m in the middle of nowhere in a locked room with Nazi soldiers standing guard,” Peter reminded the man.

  “As are we. Still it could be ever so much worse, you see. I mean if they turn us over to the Gestapo, for example.”

  The mention of the Nazi secret police made Peter think of Anja. Where was she? He missed her terribly. Missed the way her smile came reluctantly like a flower opening in slow motion. She had been through so much horror in this war. Just in the past year alone she had lost nearly everyone she’
d ever loved, yet she had joined forces with others to help men like him. He wondered if she knew about this LeClerq fellow.

  “Are you carrying anything incriminating?” the Englishman asked. “Maps? Information on troop movements? Planned attacks?”

  Peter realized what the men had been putting into the fire when he arrived. “No, I—”

  A commotion sounded outside the door. Men shouting at each other in German. They heard the key turn, and an officer slammed the door back against the wall and went straight to the stove. He jerked open the iron door and started trying to pull scraps of charred paper from the flames. He managed to retrieve one of the wet packets, but it was charred and so wet that it fell apart as he juggled it from hand to hand, trying to manage the heat.

  “Dumpkof,” he bellowed at the guards, who Peter now realized were only teenagers dressed in uniforms that were too big for them. The realization actually gave him hope. After all, if Hitler and the Nazis were reduced to drafting boys and reissuing old uniforms, then perhaps the tide was indeed finally turning.

  The Irishman turned away, hiding a triumphant grin.

  “Get them out of here and put that fire out now,” the officer demanded as he strode from the room.

  The soldiers did as they were told, and possibly still smarting from the dressing down that their commanding officer had given them, they took it upon themselves to be extra tough on their prisoners. They marched the four men through the entire village—up one street and down the next—barking orders at them every step of the way. When a local woman rushed up to the Englishman and gave him a bar of chocolate, the soldiers chased her away by threatening her with their rifles.

  Finally, they steered them to a building that looked as if it should have been condemned at least a century before and led them up a narrow outside stairway and into a tiny room with no window and a couple of stained and filthy mattresses on the floor. They shoved them inside and shut the door. They were in utter darkness with barely enough room to stand, much less sit or lie down. The room stank of mold, mildew, and the sweat and waste of former occupants.

  Peter could not recall a time when he had been so tired. He braced himself against the wall and closed his eyes, determined to sleep. But as he stood there, forcing himself to tune out the voices of the other men and the muffled sounds from the street outside, he realized that he was no longer sleepy. His mind had never seemed clearer. He felt as if he were connected to a greater universe, and the one thought that was foremost in his mind was that this was what Anja had meant by the Inner Light.

  He had so admired the way she could go completely still and stay that way for what seemed to him like hours but was really only minutes. Always she came out of that silence calmer and more confident than before. She had read to him from the writings of Quaker leaders through the ages, and time and again he had found their thoughts in line with his own beliefs. Now in one of the darkest hours of his life, facing certain transport to a prisoner-of-war camp, he had discovered what Anja had apparently always known—that God’s Spirit is not an external thing but dwells within and is the very source of a person’s inner strength. Peter had only to connect with Him. Thanks to Anja, Peter had found that inner place and the sense of peace and calm that came with it.

  He thought about how gung ho he had been when he first volunteered. And then once the United States got into the war, he had been so very sure of who the enemy was. But in the weeks since he’d had to parachute from the plane, Peter had seen another side of war—the side that affects innocents, disrupting and changing their lives forevermore. Surely there was another way to handle tyrants like Hitler and his gang. Or barring that, there must be another way for Peter. He had once thought that the military might become his career. It was a secure and even noble profession, but was it for him?

  He chuckled softly as he imagined Anja’s surprise at this change of heart. How they had debated the issue of war and peace through the nights that he had hidden out above the café—she always arguing for peace as the only answer while he insisted that there were times—like now—when war was not only necessary but vital for the future of mankind.

  “I have an idea,” Peter said, assuming the others were as awake as he was. “My best guess is that we are to be held here until someone from a higher authority can come to pick us up. What if we use whatever time we have to befriend our young captors?”

  “The Yank is going hysterical on us,” the Scotsman muttered. The others were silent for so long that Peter thought either they had managed to sleep or they agreed with the Scotsman.

  “No, listen. If we personalize this—learn their names and their backgrounds, ask about their families, their girlfriends, their dreams for after the war …”

  “It could work,” the Englishman mused. “We all speak passable German, and if we communicated with them in their own language …”

  “It won’t be easy to break them,” the Irishman grumbled. “We’ll have to seize every opportunity.”

  Even in the darkness, Peter could feel the idea beginning to take shape. “Perhaps we should begin by introducing ourselves to each other—first names can’t hurt.” Each man had claimed one wall of the tiny space, and so they stood in a kind of circle. “I am Peter.”

  “Ian,” the Scotsman muttered.

  “Colin,” chimed in the Irishman.

  “And I am Roger.” There was a rustling of paper, the sound of something being unwrapped. “Shall we seal our bargain with a bit of chocolate, gentlemen?”

  CHAPTER 12

  Mikel did not like the sound of Daniel’s cough. If he couldn’t keep quiet, they might be discovered. Voices—and coughing—carried long distances on water. But more importantly, he was genuinely concerned about the boy. If something happened to Daniel, he wasn’t sure that Anja could survive. He wasn’t sure that he could survive. He had come to think of Anja’s son as his own. The damp air on the river certainly wasn’t helping, and the cold was almost unbearable.

  Anja held her son close, her arms around him like a blanket. She hummed to him as he slept fitfully, his racking cough waking him. “He has a fever,” she told Mikel once Daniel had drifted off again. “He needs medicine.”

  “The next town,” Mikel promised. “I’ll find shelter and go for a doctor.”

  “No. I know what he needs. You must go to the chemist. I will tell you what to ask for. Bringing someone to examine him is too risky.”

  Mikel nodded. She was right. More often than not, she thought things through more clearly than he did or any of the guides she worked with on the line. She had a gift for instantly seeing all sides of a situation, weighing the risks and dangers, while he acted always on pure instinct. He’d done that when he’d decided to take Daniel from the convent. Had that been the best decision? Now that the boy was ill, Mikel was not so sure. “Next town,” he promised and hoped it would not be too late to save Daniel.

  Anja held her shivering son close to her, trying to warm him with her body. She was so tired of being worried, so exhausted by the constant fear, and so very lonely. She was unaware that she was crying until she felt the tears hit her bare hands and looked up, expecting it to be raining. She missed her grandparents and wondered if she would ever see them again. She missed Josef and especially Lisbeth. And she missed Peter more than she was willing to admit. His smile, his eyes that twinkled with mischief whenever he teased her, and yes, his kiss.

  When Benjamin was killed, she had thought she could never love again. And repeatedly as her feelings for Peter blossomed, she told herself that it was the crushing isolation of her life without Benjamin that drew her to the American. But it was more—much more—and she knew it. The love she felt for him was a fantasy and would in the end become just one more casualty of this ghastly war.

  “Mama?” Daniel’s voice was a whisper, as if just forming the word cost him too much effort.

  “Almost there,” she said and glanced up at Mikel for confirmation. When he nodded, she added, “Soon. Ve
ry soon now.”

  After several minutes that passed like hours, Mikel guided the little boat to a patch of open beach, jumped into water that covered his feet, and pulled them ashore. He held out his hand to her.

  “Take Daniel,” she said. “I can manage.”

  “I’ll carry Daniel after you get out. Stop giving me orders.” He sounded irritable, and his eyes were bloodshot with dark circles ringing them. The man was exhausted, and instead of arguing with him, she stepped ashore and waited for him to lift Daniel in his arms and lead the way up the bank to a path that ran along the river. Once again it was raining, but she could see a steeple in the distance and knew that Mikel was using that as his guide as he trudged ahead of her.

  She focused all of her thoughts on putting one foot in front of the other and praying that they would find shelter and perhaps some food and most of all medicine for Daniel. Then she could care for Mikel and Daniel. She thought of making them soup and wrapping them in layers of blankets to stop their shivering. She thought of a fire and remembered again the night she and the children had been taken in by Lisbeth. She could practically smell their damp wool coats drying next to the kitchen stove and the eggs that Lisbeth cooked for them.

  Mikel stopped on the path ahead of her, and she was so lost in prayer and memory that she nearly ran into him. He motioned for her to be quiet. Beyond the trees that lined the path, she saw a military convoy of trucks coming their way—German, of course. She pressed closer to a large tree, waiting for them to pass, hoping that they would not slow or stop, that they had not seen Mikel carrying Daniel. She closed her eyes and forced her breath to come in calm, even beats.

  One truck. Two. Three. Moving fast. Away from the town.

  She and Mikel waited in silence for the roar of the engines to fade. Then they crossed the road and headed across an open field. It was either that or the open road, and while neither was safe, the open field was a shortcut. As the morning fog cleared, she saw a sight that meant they were that much closer to freedom. She saw the mountains—their peaks rising up through the cloud cover in the distance. It was February, so the melting snows had swollen the river they would need to cross to get to safety. They needed a place not only to give Daniel the time he needed to recover but also a place where they could wait for the optimum time to cross the mountains.