She turned to her daughter, still mute, and signalled for her to bring something for these men to eat. Out came a breakfast of bread, potatoes and imitation coffee, which, after several days of foraging, counted as a banquet.
As they ate, she sketched out the current lie of the land. She confirmed that the villages of this area had indeed been heavily Germanised. If Walter and Fred saw people working in the fields, the chances were high that they were German civilians. They carried weapons, even when out farming, and they had the authority to shoot ‘unidentifiable loiterers’ on sight. The area was full of partisans, she said, and so the Germans were especially vigilant.
The remaining Poles in the region were now confined to houses further away from the roads and from the river, and therefore, thought Walter, away from their route to the border. Not that many would be too eager to help a pair of fugitives. Not only had the Nazi occupier made the granting of help to the wrong kind of strangers a capital crime for those directly found guilty of it, a perpetrator’s entire family often paid the same price. The woman added that many Poles had already been killed for making the mistake of giving food or shelter to men who had posed as escapees, speaking Polish or Russian, but who were, in fact, German agents provocateurs .
It turned out that the woman had had two sons: one was dead and the other was himself a prisoner in a concentration camp. Perhaps that was why she took what she clearly understood was an enormous risk, allowing Fred and Walter to stay in her house until the early hours of the next morning.
They made themselves useful, chopping wood, taking a break for lunch of a bowl of potato soup followed by … potatoes. Once the work was done, they slept until the middle of the night, when Walter woke suddenly. He jumped up, startled. It was the woman, with a jug of coffee and a warning that if they were to cross open country and make it to the mountains unseen, they needed to leave right away. She wanted them to take some money, ‘Just for luck.’ It meant breaking another Volkov rule, but Walter found it impossible to say no.
Her advice proved sound. They travelled unchecked for three hours, reaching the mountains, capped with snow even in April, by dawn. They were still within reassuring distance of the So?a, trekking along the western banks of the river through a valley thick with trees. Only occasionally did they see a house and, when they did, the residents usually closed their doors and shuttered their windows if either Fred or Walter drew near. If, in a moment of rare necessity, the fugitives attempted conversation, the locals tended not to answer. Was it a refusal to help two Jews in their midst or, more simply, had the woman in Pisarzowice been right: the local population were terrified of an occupation that had made basic human kindness a fatal risk? Either way, it made the pair appreciate all the more those Poles who would glimpse them on their trek, then accidentally drop half a loaf of bread near their path.
On Sunday 16 April they emerged from the forest, but that brought a new fear. They had come out in the mountains overlooking Por? bka. Both Fred and Walter had been warned, separately, of the dangers of this place: a nearby dam made it enough of a military target that barrage balloons hovered like dumb sentries in the sky above, and it was teeming with German soldiers. Indeed, this was the spot where Eisenbach, Balaban and the others had run into those German foresters and where their own attempt at escape, a success until then, had come unstuck. And now Fred and Walter were eyeing the same barrage balloons, just as fat, grey and sullen as they had been warned to expect.
They would stick to the mountainside, its steep slopes carpeted in dense green forest, thereby avoiding the dam and the town. But it was tough going. They were getting tired; their legs were beginning to swell. There was snow on the ground, and in the dark they had to move gingerly. Every sound of a broken branch or dislodged stone brought dread. If it were one of them who crunched a twig underfoot, then they feared they had given themselves away; if the noise came from elsewhere, then it meant a stranger, or enemy, was close by.
After a few hours’ rest in the daylight, evening approached and they readied themselves to set off once more. Except now, for the first time, they were to confront a threat which could not be swerved or outwitted. They were about to face a Nazi bullet.
19
Crossing the Border
W ALTER WAS LYING down, eyes closed, when he heard it. The crack of a rifle and the whizz of a bullet over his head. Instinct made both him and Fred leap to their feet, though whether that was wise, neither of them could know.
Now they could see it. A patrol of about a dozen German soldiers was on the next hill, about seventy yards away. They had dogs on leashes and they had guns, which they were aiming at the two of them. Perhaps these Wehrmacht men had seen the telegram, cabled by the SS major a week earlier, alerting every outpost of the Reich to the disappearance of two wanted prisoners of Auschwitz. Perhaps they had a description which Fred and Walter matched. Either way, they had seen enough to open fire.
The old Red Army captain had been adamant. You could never outrun a bullet. So never leave yourself in that position, never let your only hope be a request of your legs that the laws of physics would always refuse. But as Walter scrambled up the hillside, stumbling through the snow, hoping to make it to the top and then disappear down the slope on the other side, he had no use for Volkov’s golden rules, almost all of which he had broken. Uniformed Germans had opened fire on them and with great accuracy. All they could do was run.
Fred was faster, spotting a boulder big enough to hide behind. He hurled himself into place and Walter was desperate to catch up and do the same. But he tripped, falling flat on his face. There was no way to get up now; he would be too slow, too easy a target. The air was crackling with gunfire, bullets clipping the rocks all around. To move, even a muscle, was to be shot dead. There was nothing he could do. He was paralysed with fear.
Seconds later he heard the order to cease fire. ‘We’ve got him! ’ the commander told his men. They began to climb down the hillside, doubtless to identify their two kills. Walter leapt up and completed the journey he had tried to make before, flinging himself behind that rock.
Now Fred gave his own order, urging Walter to push on ahead. They made it to the brow of the hill and down the other side, but the Germans had not given up and their dogs were closing in.
The fugitives kept on running, setting their sights on a small wood halfway up the next hill. They could disappear in there, if only they could make it that far.
Except the only way to reach that next hill was to cross a wide stream at the bottom of the valley. The dogs were getting nearer. There was no choice. They simply had to plunge in.
The water was ice cold and moving fast. The opposite bank was so near, but the current was tugging at their clothes, pulling them under. Walter lost his footing and sank into the water, not once but twice. Immersed in the glacial liquid from head to toe, he felt the cold bite into his bones.
Somehow they made it to the other side, but that brought little respite. The ground was covered in snow so deep their legs sank into it. Soaked from the stream, they were in snow up to their waists. But they kept on, determined to make it to the trees. They looked over their shoulders to see that the soldiers were still giving chase, scrambling down the hillside towards the water.
Walter and Fred were in the wood now, running in a zigzag pattern, hoping to confuse their pursuers, running and running until one of them noticed the sound that they could not hear: there was no more barking, no more baying of dogs. Drained and drenched, they fell into a ditch. They lay as still as they could, shivering from the cold, listening for the sound of human tread. After a while they realised that in the scramble to escape their pursuers they had lost both their meagre provisions and their overcoats .