Children of the Promise

by Dean Hughes

  “Yes. I must do this, too—the same as you. At the last, it was very bad here. I was hiding in a bomb shelter on the night my boarding house was blown apart. I lost everything—even the Book of Mormon I borrowed from the branch president.”

  “I can get you one.”

  “Oh, yes. That would be good.”

  “Do you sleep at the bakery—in that little room?”

  “That’s my home—the only place I could find. I’m lucky to have it. Some of the people in our branch don’t have as much. I’ll at least be warm this winter. And I’ll have bread to eat.”

  “Heinrich, go back to London. Be with our family. I promise you, I’ll do everything that can be done to find Peter.”

  “It’s my responsibility. I feel that I have to keep trying.”

  “I have my own responsibility. I should be with Anna. I should be a father to my little son. You go and take my place for now. I’ll look for Peter.”

  “I don’t know, Alex. I’ve made promises to Frieda, to myself. I don’t want to give up.”

  “I’ll find him, Papa. If he’s alive, I’ll find him. If he’s not, I’ll at least find that out.”

  Heinrich didn’t speak, but Alex saw in his eyes that he was adjusting to the idea, accepting that it might be right.

  “They need us both in London, and I can’t go. Please, go for us. Give my son a blessing. Name him after my little brother. That would do my heart more good right now than anything else I can think of.”

  Chapter 26

  Early one July morning Peter was hoeing weeds in the garden. He had gotten out of bed just after sunrise. It was better for him to get away from Frau Schaller and Katrina when they were getting dressed, but even more than that, Peter found it difficult to stay in bed very long. He usually fell asleep, dead tired in the evening, but at night his fears came, sometimes as dreams, sometimes as sounds and voices in his head. He would struggle to stay down, to control the panic, but eventually it was always easier to get outside into the mild morning air. He didn’t know how long he would have to live with this kind of agitation, but once he was up and working, he always felt much better.

  This morning, however, he looked up from his work and saw Frau Schaller walking toward him. It was still very early, before the British soldiers usually ate breakfast. When she reached Peter, she stood before him and folded her arms across her middle, over her old black apron. She seemed worried, upset. “Peter,” she said, “Captain Stubbs just warned me. There’s a problem.”

  “What?”

  “The zones have been changed—the borders. The British are withdrawing today. The Russians will be moving in.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. He said that the first borders were only temporary. Now, there’s been an adjustment. The Russians are taking more of this region west of Berlin. He told me that I should warn you. He thinks you should leave.”

  “Leave?”

  “He’s sure you were a German soldier, not a refugee. It didn’t matter to him, but he says the Russians will arrest you and ship you to their prisons back in their own country.”

  Peter knew all about that. He had no doubt that Stubbs was right. “When are the Russians coming?”

  “He doesn’t know. They start taking over today. He says you should go immediately and get across the new border.”

  “That’s not legal. I’ll be stopped.” But Peter’s mind was busy. That wasn’t the real problem.

  “You can get off the road, cross in the woods. Many are doing it. You’ll be crossing into the English zone again, and they don’t enforce the zones carefully, especially right now, before new guard stations can be set up.”

  “You have to go too. Didn’t he tell you that?”

  Frau Schaller looked past Peter. She had pretty dark eyes, like her daughter’s, and at times her face was as lively as Katrina’s, but she was more than solemn this morning; she looked discouraged. “Yes, he said that. But how can I leave? How can I walk away from my farm? It’s all I have.”

  “You know what the Russians will do.”

  She looked out across her land. She was still gripping her arms against her body. “I don’t know what Russians do. It’s all just talk, so far as I know. Why would they be any different from the others? My people, way back, were Russians. I can tell them that. I speak a little Russian.”

  “It’s not just you. It’s Katrina—what they’ll do to her.”

  Frau Schaller turned back and looked at him. “Do you know that? Are you sure? These Englishmen made eyes at her at first, but they’ve never bothered her.”

  “The Russians aren’t the same. They’re bitter. They hate all Germans. They think it’s their right to have the women. I saw it in the east, and I heard it from the refugees—over and over. In Berlin the stories were horrible. There was hardly a woman there, of any age, who wasn’t raped.”

  “Where would we go? Where could I take my children?”

  “I’ll help you. We’ll find a place. Perhaps I can get work.”

  “I won’t live in those displaced person camps. You know what will happen to us if we do. Those people are dying.”

  “Yes, but they’re exhausted. They came here sick and worn out. We’re not like that. But we’ll find some other place. I can work at something—on a farm or in a mine.”

  “For how long? You want to find your family.”

  “I won’t leave you until you’re all right.”

  Frau Schaller seemed locked in place, her breath caught inside her, but Peter could also see that she was trying to adjust to this new reality. “I’d have to leave everything behind—not just my land and my house, but every plate, every picture. How can I do that?”

  “Maybe you’ll be able to return in time. Maybe the armies will withdraw.”

  “No. If I leave, I’ll never have this place again. You know it’s true.”

  Peter didn’t know, but he thought she might be right. He couldn’t imagine the Russians giving up what they took. They weren’t like the Americans, eager to get home. They were spreading their power across Europe. “Frau Schaller, I camped one night with some refugees—in East Prussia. There was a man in the camp, just a young man, but he was talking to himself, acting crazy. I asked what was wrong with him, and his friend told me that some Russian soldiers had grabbed his wife and raped her—a whole group of them. They had held him, made him hold his little baby, and made him watch. When the baby cried, one of the soldiers grabbed it from the man and killed it—crushed its head.”

  Frau Schaller raised her hands to her face, cupped them against her cheeks. She began to nod her head. “All right. Don’t say anymore. Fill some flour sacks with potatoes. We’ll go as soon as I can get the boys ready.”

  “Ask the officers for food. Cans of meat and fruit—anything they can spare.”

  “Captain Stubbs already told me. We can have all we want.”

  “All right, then. I’ll dig potatoes. But we can’t try to carry too much. We have to move fast. Does he know how far away the border will be from here?”

  “About twenty-five kilometers. Maybe thirty.”

  “We can walk that in one day if we keep up a good pace.”

  “Can the boys do it?”

  “They won’t want to, but they can. Better than you or me, probably.” He tried to smile at her.

  She took a long breath. He could see that she was trying to summon strength, but he could also see how devastated she was.

  “It’ll be all right, Frau Schaller.”

  “No, Peter. It will never be all right. I’ll do this for my children, but it will never be all right for me. I got through the war, always holding onto one hope—that I would have this place, the food here, that my children wouldn’t starve. Now we’re no better off than these poor refugees we see walking past here every day.”

  Peter didn’t argue. He knew that in many ways she was right. But he would do what he could for them. They had saved his life, and now he had to save theirs.
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  Peter and the Schallers set out in less than an hour. Peter worried that they were trying to carry too much, but he knew it would be easy enough to lighten their load if they had to. They could feed a few of their fellow travelers on the road. He kept his own little group moving much faster than the others, however. The refugees had traveled hundreds of kilometers, and they weren’t able to walk more than a few each day now. A certain part of the day was given to foraging for any kind of food they could find. Peter hardly knew what to do as he and the Schallers passed the people on the road. But Frau Schaller made the decision for him. When she saw people by the side of the road, looking starved, she gave them two or three potatoes. “Don’t give away our food,” Rolf told her. “We need it.”

  “They’re dying,” she would say, but Peter worried too. They had to get outside the Russian zone, and they needed to survive until he could find some way to feed themselves. He had worried they had brought too much, but now he could see their provisions shrinking fast.

  Katrina was strangely silent. Peter knew she was going through a process, trying to accept this change in her life. He remembered his own flight from Frankfurt, with his family, many years before, and he knew the ache she was feeling. In the middle of the afternoon, after a short break to eat a little, she finally came alongside Peter and said, “What’s going to happen to us?”

  “We’ll be all right,” Peter said. “We’ll figure something out. I’ll get a job.”

  “You don’t know how to do anything.”

  “Be quiet. You’re not funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny. There are no jobs. You know that.”

  “There’s work to be done. We have to rebuild our whole country.”

  “Who’s going to pay you to do that?”

  It was true, of course. There was no pay for such work, not yet, and factories weren’t operating. Those places that hadn’t been destroyed in the war had no capital, no clientele, no way to get started again. The occupying forces had frozen the currency, to avoid inflation, but the only thing that had done was render the Reichsmark worthless. The Allies had brought Germany to its knees, but no one had given much thought to saving the German people once the regime was crushed. America and England were beginning to disperse food, but supplies were far short of adequate, with little promise of improvement for a long time to come. Peter knew he would have to find some way to get more than the handouts they might receive. The truth was, he was as worried as Katrina was—probably more—but he knew he couldn’t tell her so.

  But if Peter had his worries, he also liked what was happening to him. He felt like a man. He had a family to look out for, and in spite of some self-doubt, he was also determined. He had a purpose that was better than anything he had achieved in his life, and he was not going to let the Schallers down. There was something redemptive in the idea that after taking life, struggling so long against his better self, he could finally make an attempt at preserving life, at doing what he knew was right.

  “I’ll take care of you, Katrina,” he said.

  “You will? Really?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Do you want to marry me?”

  Peter shook his head and laughed. “I want to take care of all of you. That’s what I meant to say.”

  “But if you want to marry me, my answer is yes. Just in case you’re wondering.”

  He glanced at her. She was smiling, and something in that touched him. She was strong, this little girl, no matter what else he might say about her. “You should look for a boy your own age,” he said. “Some little boy who hasn’t started to shave yet.”

  “Your cheeks look pretty smooth to me.”

  Peter ignored that. He glanced at Rolf and Thomas, who had started the day cranky and upset about leaving home but had settled into a steady tempo and moved along quite well all day. They were too tired to act up now, but they were also frightened. Peter could see that in their serious faces. That morning they had both kept saying, “But for how long? When can we come back? Where are we going?” Frau Schaller had only said, “We don’t know exactly. In time. Certainly, in time, we’ll plan to come back.” But they had obviously sensed that their lives would never be the same.

  The afternoon heat and humidity gradually got worse. Peter had told Frau Schaller not to carry water because it was too heavy. And so far, finding drinking water had not been a problem. But now, in the oppressive heat, the boys were complaining more often. Finally Peter let them stop and rest by a little stream. The boys stripped to their underwear and jumped into the cold water. That revived them, but afterward, they were reluctant to put their clothes back on. Frau Schaller had obviously been thinking ahead when she had told them to wear their long pants that morning. It was hot now, but winter would come, and then there might not be other clothes available.

  Still, the boys seemed a little refreshed when they began to walk again. The group had not been walking long, however, when Peter looked back and saw a vehicle coming. It was traveling fast and raising a plume of dust, like smoke, behind it.

  Peter wanted to believe that these were British Tommys, moving out, but he kept watching and saw that it was a Russian truck, a type he had seen many times on the eastern front. He scanned the countryside. If there had been a wooded area near enough, he would have had the family hurry off the road. But there were open fields on either side. “A Russian truck is coming,” Peter told the others. “Walk with your heads down. Don’t look up at the truck. Trudge a little. Try to look tired.” He saw the boys exaggerate their motion, and he barked at them, “Not like that. Try to look like the refugees we’ve passed today.”

  The boys glanced back at him, clearly alarmed by his severity, but they made more effort to drop their gaze, to slow their pace. Peter could hear the truck coming now, rattling and kicking up rocks, and he hoped that it would merely speed on by. He could also hear his own heart beat in his ears. He had not been close to this enemy for a long time, and all his old feelings returned.

  The truck kept coming, the roar of the engine louder all the time. “Step aside,” Peter said. “Keep your eyes down.”

  As the big truck wheeled on by, spreading dust, Peter thought the threat was over. He wondered where the Russians were going, however, and whether he should lead the Schallers off the road.

  Then the truck slowed abruptly and stopped. Peter tried to think what to do, but he had no choice but wait to see what the men wanted. He heard the door slam on the driver’s side of the truck, and in a moment a soldier walked back to Peter and the Schallers. He stepped up to Frau Schaller, looked her straight in the eyes. “Du Deutsch,” he said.

  She didn’t answer for a moment. She glanced at Peter. “Polish,” she finally told the soldier.

  “Nein.”

  The back of the truck was full of Russian soldiers. Most of them had crowded to the rear. They were peering over the tailgate, leering at Katrina. One of them said something in Russian. And then, in German, “Frau. Komm.” The other men laughed.

  The soldier on the ground, a sergeant, turned toward Peter. “Go back,” he said, and he held up his hands, the palms toward Peter. “Go back.”

  Peter nodded. He thought it might be best to turn around and start back to the east. Once the truck had moved on, he and the Schallers could cut across a field, find another road, or maybe stay in a wooded area until nightfall. He figured that they weren’t more than seven or eight kilometers from the new zone, and the Russians would certainly not be able to cover the whole boundary—at least not right away.

  But Frau Schaller said “Polish” again, and she pointed west. That was a mistake. The Polish refugees were bedraggled, emaciated. It was not hard to see that Peter and the Schaller family had not been on the road long.

  “Deutsch!” the sergeant screamed into her face. She had let her sack full of food rest on the ground. He grabbed that and looked inside. The sack was full of potatoes and carrots. He walked the few paces to the truck and handed the sa
ck up to one of the soldiers, and then he walked back to Frau Schaller. “You German,” he said. “You go back.” He pointed again to the east.

  Frau Schaller seemed to accept that. She nodded. The little scene seemed to be over. Peter turned back and said to the boys, “Come on. Let’s go.” Like the Russian, he pointed to the east.

  But Katrina said, “They can’t make us go back. We can go wherever we want to.”

  She had said this to Peter, not to the Russian, but the soldier had apparently understood. He bolted toward her and gave her a shove. She stumbled backward, and Peter grabbed her to keep her from falling. “Go! Now!” the sergeant said. But two of the soldiers were climbing over the tailgate of the truck. They dropped down to the ground, and then another followed them. The three swung their rifles off their shoulders and moved in close. One of them spoke in Russian and gestured, pointing up the road.

  “We’ll go. We’ll go,” Frau Schaller was saying.

  But a young Russian, a dark-haired boy with a hawkish nose, stepped to Katrina and took hold of her arm. “Komm,” he said. He looked at the sergeant and nodded, then spoke in Russian. The sergeant laughed; he nodded too.

  “Komm, Frau.” The man pulled on Katrina’s arm and took a step toward the side of the road, but Katrina twisted quickly, broke the man’s grip, and ran a few steps away.

  The soldier spoke in Russian, loud and harsh. Clearly, he was demanding that she come back to him. Katrina seemed

  to know that she had no hope to outrun the man. She stood several steps away from him, facing him, and she said, “No. You can’t do that to me.”

  Peter didn’t move quickly, but he took a step to his left, so that he was between the soldier and Katrina. Peter glanced to see Frau Schaller step to Katrina, wrap her arms around her shoulders. “We’ll go now,” she said. “Come on, boys. Let’s leave.”

  But the sergeant shouted, “Nein.” This was the same man who had told them to go before, but now he was apparently interested in having his fun, along with the other soldiers. Two more were climbing over the back of the truck now.