And soon the Russians would get here. They had to. Or perhaps, Cecile and Jeanne had conjectured, they were so far west that the British or the Americans would rescue them first.
The barracks were about two kilometers from the factory, and they walked along the edge of a small village to reach it. Cecile still wore her hiking boots and Jeanne still had the crocodile dress flats that Cecile had given her. And always, whether it was dawn or dusk, they saw townspeople. Sometimes the townspeople would avert their eyes when they saw the women trudging back and forth, and sometimes they would go about their business as if the prisoners were invisible. They would pass them on their bicycles. They would continue to prepare the loosening soil for their gardens. If they were children, they would walk to their school. The prisoners knew they didn't dare say a word to the Germans, and the Germans, it seemed, had neither interest nor curiosity in this group that had replaced the Russians at the factory.
The work wasn't hard. Some days they assembled pistons, using four long bolts to attach the fire plates to the piston's crown; other days they screwed the parts of the nozzle together for the fuel injection system for a particular Junkers fighter. Always there was a Dutch foreman, a prisoner, too, who inspected their work. He wasn't especially rigorous, and the women grew to understand that his lackadaisical attitude was his own personal form of resistance. Could a badly fitted piston or imperfect fuel nozzle bring down a German fighter plane on its own? They didn't know for sure, but they could hope.
Cecile knew she wasn't actually recovering her health with her new diet, her threadbare jacket with lice, or the reality that she was no longer sleeping in the worst of the cold like a wild animal. But she understood, as did all of the other women, that it was going to take a lot longer to die in this fashion. They might expire walking to and from the gates of the factory. But they were no longer actively being killed.
there was roughly one guard for every ten or twelve women escorting them between the barracks and the factory. Usually, Cecile scoffed at the idea that any prisoner was even capable of trying to escape. All of the girls were disappointed that so many of the guards from their original camp--the real sadists, it seemed, women like Sigi and men like Pusch--had accompanied them when the vans had picked them up and were brutalizing them here, too, whenever the opportunity arose. The guards were supplemented by older men who seemed to live in the town with the factory. Most of them weren't SS, and many of them seemed a little frail-looking themselves. Still, they carried their guns and they walked the prisoners back and forth between the barracks and the factory, and the only time they spoke to the women was to yell at them to keep up or move faster. They didn't seem to see any reason to be kind to the prisoners.
Consequently, Cecile was surprised one morning when a guard, as he walked beside the column of women, unwrapped a piece of butcher's paper to reveal a plump, cooked chicken breast and offered it to her. The guard was one of the older men from the town.
At first she was afraid to touch it, and so she said nothing. She didn't think this was a trick precisely, but she wondered whether accepting it might be suggesting that she felt the camp wasn't feeding her sufficiently and lead to an additional punishment. Moreover, she was completely unprepared for this--or any--act of mercy. Finally, when she hadn't taken it from him, he shrugged and handed it to Jeanne, who promptly tore the meat off in pieces, giving some to Cecile and some to the woman on her right, and keeping some for herself. The three women ate their chicken ravenously, almost swallowing their chunks of meat whole. The guard was, Cecile guessed, close to sixty years old, and his uniform didn't match the outfits the other men were wearing. She wouldn't have been surprised if it was the uniform he had worn in the First World War.
On the way back to the barracks that evening she realized that once more she was marching near that guard, and so she went to him to thank him. To explain why she hadn't seemed more grateful in the morning. He looked at her as if he didn't have the slightest idea what she was talking about and ordered her to shut up, stare straight ahead, and keep moving.
Two mornings later she found herself walking beside the older man a third time. Once more he reached into his uniform coat pocket and, as if he were a magician unveiling a bouquet of flowers he had somehow concealed up his sleeve, pulled out an object draped loosely in butcher's paper. He unwrapped it and this time revealed for Cecile a cooked pork chop. He motioned for her to take it.
"Why me?" she asked him, a reflex, still a little afraid to reach for it.
From the corner of her eye she saw Jeanne eyeing the meat and then glancing at her as if she were a complete lunatic--which, perhaps, she was. There was a part of her that knew she should just grab it and eat it. Suck every small scrap of flesh from the bone. Before she had moved her fingers toward it, however, she heard another guard, a younger man named Blumer, screaming furiously at--she supposed--her. She curled her arms against her body and ducked, preparing for the blow. But Blumer, who had probably been a real soldier until he had lost an eye and a part of his ear, wasn't furious with her; she was, at the moment, all but invisible to him. Instead he was yanking hard at the older man with the pork chop, pulling at his sleeve so suddenly that he dropped the meat and it fell to the muddy street, where Blumer used his boot to smash the bone and grind the pieces into the ground. Then he whisked the fellow away from the column, ordering the other nearby guards to keep a close watch on the swine, while the rest of the group plodded on to the factory.
"When did they start hating us?" a woman named Eve asked her aimlessly.
"They've always hated us," said Leah, a seamstress from Budapest who had only arrived at their original camp the previous autumn. "Even when I was a little girl, my friends all called me the Dirty Jew. My friends! Hitler simply made it acceptable to kill us."
Behind them they heard the sound of a hard, vicious slap and re- flexively turned. There they saw the old man who had tried to give them the pork chop on his hands and knees in the mud by the side of the road. Standing over him, shaking his head in disgust, was the one-eyed guard named Blumer.
it was an almost idyllic existence compared to the other camp, and so most of the women knew it couldn't last--even Cecile. They had spent not quite six weeks here. Now the Soviets once again were approaching, and when the wind was right they could hear the periodic cannonade. As they walked to and from the factory, they saw the locals in the village either packing up wagons and carts to leave themselves or lining up in a park with a gazebo to drill with a group of Waffen SS. There the new recruits seemed to be learning to fire small arms and throw grenades, and sometimes Cecile guessed the explosions the women heard when they were inside the factory were merely a part of the training.
Still, they knew they were going to leave here soon, and they did. Usually they were awakened by a piercing, trainlike whistle at five thirty, but one morning the whistle went off closer to four thirty and they were roused from their beds and informed they were leaving that very moment for a different factory. They might stop for breakfast in a few hours, but only if they made sufficient progress.
And so once again they were walking, marching that morning in a direction that she thought was actually more northern than western. She was grateful she had her hiking boots and she presumed Jeanne was appreciative of the dress shoes she had given her. Yes, their shoes were falling apart--both pairs--but they were still better than those wooden clogs so many of the other prisoners were forced to wear. And while the sun hadn't risen and the air was brisk, it was infinitely more endurable than the march on which the group had been taken in late January and early February. No one knew for sure, but Cecile guessed at least a third of the group had died in those weeks, expiring in the cold by the sides of train tracks or roads, shot by the guards, or immolated one particularly awful night in great bonfires on wagons.
uri looked up into the woods, the first buds on the branches creating a small but perceptible green haze around the silver birch trees. The morning sun felt goo
d on his face, and the last of the mist had almost burned off. Today he was wearing the uniform of a Russian rifleman named Barsukov, minus his cap, because the fellow had been shot through the head. Uri hadn't killed him, but he guessed he might have if he had come across the soldier first. He needed a Russian uniform badly.
The problem, of course, was that he spoke far too little Russian to pass for more than a few minutes if he tried to join the Bolsheviks. Moreover, their army was not nearly the shambles that the Wehrmacht had become; they would expect him to be with the right company at the right time. Unfortunately, yesterday the Germans-- desperate old men and teen boys, and a few SS with mortars and antitank guns--had counterattacked and successfully retaken the nearby village. There was a factory there that made important airplane parts, and the Nazis wanted it back. When he had left an hour ago, there was still a pair of destroyed Russian tanks smoldering in a small park with an idyllic white gazebo, which, inexplicably, was completely undamaged.
Somewhere in these woods, however, he had heard a rumor that there was a group of armed Jewish resisters. Or there had been. They were living in a couple of caves and an underground bunker, and there were men and women among the group. Supposedly, the Russians had originally taken that village with their help. Somehow Ivan had contacted them ahead of time, and the Jews had blown up the bridge north of the town over which the Wehrmacht initially planned to send in reinforcements, and then cut the railroad tracks that linked the village with an officers' training school to the west. The town's mayor was a maniac, however, and there were just enough Nazi diehards in the area--and, unknown to the Russians, the remnants of a company of Waffen SS--to launch an assault on the Soviets before they could solidify their position.
In the chaos of the battle, he had melted from one side to the other.
Now, supposedly, the Jews had disappeared once more into the woods, into their hidden grottoes and fissures and dugouts. At least that's what he thought he had been told by another rifleman--a boy, really, from some icy village near Murmansk, who didn't seem to care that he spoke about seventeen words of Russian. Seemed to assume he was simply an Armenian or Azerbaijani from the Caucasus.
As he stood now at the edge of the woods, he considered his options. He could try to find those Jews, shed his uniform, and finally become Uri Singer from Schweinfurt once again. Or he could make one last attempt to reach Stettin and rejoin the Emmerichs. Just head straight north. That had certainly been his intention in the weeks since he had left the family, but it seemed there had always been a checkpoint, an artillery barrage, or a couple of extremist (and, at this stage, completely delusional) Nazis in the way. Like the mayor of this village and his entourage who had pressed him into service for their counterattack.
It surprised him how frequently he had thought of the Emmerichs this spring. Originally, of course, they had been nothing more to him than his ticket to the west. Or, to be precise, Callum had been his ticket to the west. But then something had changed, and he was left wondering: Was he so hungry for kinship and camaraderie that he had grown to like them? Was he that lonely and desperate to replace his own forever lost family? Apparently. Now, here was an irony: The people he felt closest to were the remnants of some clan of Nazi beet farmers from Prussia. A boy, his older sister, their mother. A paratrooper from Scotland who was captured almost the moment he hit the ground. He didn't honestly believe he had any sort of future with this family, but he also found himself thinking about them often. About where they were, whether they were safe. He would recall the impressive way that Anna and her mother and young Theo had managed those massive horses. The way they had endured no small litany of indignities and privations. He would hear in his head Mutti's determination to protect her children--a determination, he knew, that resembled his own mother's. Even that hulking paratrooper seemed more interesting to him now that he had some distance from the fellow, and he recalled instead their long conversations as they walked and the unexpected moments when they would laugh. Certainly Anna saw something in him. Cared for him. Besides, for all of the fellow's size, he was barely more than a boy. How old was he? Twenty? He shouldn't be so hard on the young man.
Likewise, had he become so unhinged that he thought Anna might be a worthy substitute for his courageous sister, Rebekah? Perhaps. He would see in his mind once again Anna's lovely yellow hair and the elegant curve of her cheekbones. Her face when it was flushed from another day in the cold. The way the smallest things could make her eyes sparkle. He knew the guilt that he felt for jumping from the train that his sister might have been on was never going to leave him.
Interesting that he felt remorse for that, but not for the innumerable Germans and Russians he had killed over the last two years. He had lost no sleep over their deaths--and had, in fact, felt only satisfaction each time he had assassinated some Brownshirt or SS thug. They deserved it. The whole German people, it seemed, deserved it. But then he would find the personal and the anecdotal in the cauldron. People like the Emmerichs. A child like Theo. A young woman like Anna. The other night he had gunned down two older German soldiers standing guard outside a jail in the village. But what if one of them had been Mutti's husband, Rolf?
He really had no idea who he was anymore. He had been so many people lately that he simply hadn't a clue. Which, he guessed, was a part of the reason why he was here at the edge of the woods, looking up into a hill in which there were still small piles of snow in the shade beneath some of the trees. Perhaps here was his destiny. Not Stettin, not the Emmerichs.
Still, how in the world was he going to find these partisan Jews if the Nazis back in that village hadn't even known they were out here somewhere? Perhaps that young Russian rifleman--rifle boy, if he was going to be precise--had been mistaken, and someone else had blown up the bridge and torn up those railroad tracks. They were right on the border that had separated Germany and Poland five and a half years ago, and in the area there might be Polish as well as Jewish resistance. There were also all of those Russian units eager to be among the first to reach Berlin. Perhaps the boy hadn't realized that his own artillery had taken out the bridge or the railroad.
He had his German uniform in his knapsack and wasn't sure now if he should dispose of it here. If he did find the Jews--or, perhaps, the Poles--it wouldn't look good if he was traveling around with a Wehrmacht corporal's outfit in his backpack. On the other hand, with the front this fluid it might not be advisable to be Rifleman Barsukov either. At least not for very long. If some fanatic Nazi didn't shoot him, the Russians would as soon as he opened his mouth. How could he possibly explain his bizarre picaresque these past two years to Stalin's NKVD without incriminating himself? He'd killed a lot of Nazis, but he'd killed a good number of Russians, too.
Besides, did he really want to wind up a Soviet citizen? His plan certainly wasn't to survive this nightmare only to wind up in a labor camp or a farm collective somewhere. Somehow, he had to get west. Which brought him right back to the Emmerichs and to Callum Finella. He would remind himself that the paratrooper might ease his entry into the British or the American lines. And then his internal compass once again would long for the north. For Stettin, where the Emmerichs might still be. If they had any sense, of course, they would have left by now and continued their own journey west. He hadn't heard if the Russians had reached that city yet, but if they hadn't already he guessed they would within days--unless they simply decided to bypass the town in their rush to Berlin.
Still, would he have lost anything if he ventured north to Stettin and discovered that the Emmerichs were gone?
Well, yes. Time.
In the distance he heard airplanes, and initially he presumed they were Russian. But they were coming from the west and so he changed his mind. Probably RAF or American. It wasn't likely they were German. These days the Luftwaffe still had planes, but their airfields were cratered, fuel was almost nonexistent, and it was nearly impossible to find any pilots left who had the slightest idea what they were doing. And
so he lit a cigarette and leaned against a tree, waiting, wondering what the RAF 's or the Americans' target would be. He thought it was possible it was that factory in the village he had just left. Of course, it was slave labor working inside there. Girls, he had heard, just like his sister. At this stage in the war, were those nozzles or pistons or whatever they made there so important that it was worth torching the Jewish prisoners assembling them? Of course not. He hoped those girls had left. Been moved somewhere else. He hoped the target was that officers' training school further up the tracks.
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