The Escape

This is excerpt 15 from The Comfort Bird translation, a book written in Frisian and Dutch by Hylke Speerstra.

In this excerpt the action switches to the Russian front where Meindert Boorsma is forced to join the SS in its fateful attempt to make Russia a part of the German Reich.

The same war, but then a few years earlier.  Meindert Boorsma finds himself with his combat buddies ten kilometers from Zagreb.  The Croatian winter is harsh, and the enemy is too, but one day there’s good news: “All is well.  Croatia has fallen.”  Still that same day another message follows: “And now on to the Volga! Stalingrad!”  The communication strikes him as hard and bitter cold.  He entertains the thought again of vanishing into thin air, but where would he go?  Flee from under the flag?  He sees himself running away as hard as he can and then smash forward to the ground with a load of lead in his back.  “Auf der Flucht erschossen.” [Shot in flight.]  His most trusted comrade Wolfgang Hanssen would like to escape too, but what did Wolfie whisper a few days ago?  “Meinhart, there’s no getting away anymore, we have to try to survive."

…

The winter goes on and on. …  One more night he digs himself in with his commando group; the last partisan can still cause a hell on earth.  … For the umpteenth time he digs a hole, not only in the snow, but deeper, in the frozen earth. … he settles down deep into the ground on a small stack of slender branches and some brush.

   “A bird catcher must think himself warm.”  While he’s on the way to a few winks, he hears his dad saying it.  His ears still buzz from yesterday’s hand grenades.  He thinks himself warm, imagines himself behind the hiding place deep in the Heidenskip Skar, hears the rustling of the reeds and the panting of the waves against the basalt.  And thus he sinks further and further into sleep.

   But then it happens; it’s like the whole earth is exploding and he’s lifted out of his grave.  He falls down again, along with a load of snow with something warm to cover him, tries to get his breath, doesn’t know if he’s dead or alive.

…

   A while later.  … He risks surfacing, and there things look terrible.  Blood, snow, and mud.  Three hand grenades delivered three dead enemies to the partisans.  And now ten of them are left.  Footsteps in the snow show his squad their heels.  The footprints indicate only three partisans.

… . “The skunks must’ve come from the hamlet on the other side of the woods.  Look, their footprints.  Find them and finish them off in their own stinking nest!”  Lübke selects three men to carry out the assignment: the radio operator, Eckhart Koch, Wolfie Hanssen, “and you, Meinhart.”

…      They get fifteen minutes to study the ordnance map, don a white camouflage overall, and follow the footprints of the Croats.  It’s as if the woods are still whizzing from the recent violence.  “We’re in luck,” Wolfie whispers.  “The sky is clouding over, visibility is getting worse.”

…   Meindert tries hard to control his rising fear. … Ahead, against the hills, must be the village of the partisans; the map says that it’s not much more than twenty houses.  Not a light anywhere.  “But they must be there!”  Echkart proposes not to follow the footprints any longer but to walk around the village in a wide circle.  “Into the village from the other side, where they don’t expect us.”

…   An hour and a half later they stand on the other side of the village behind a wooden cattle shed.  A humble farmhouse sits tight against it.  Had they seen a dim light a moment ago, or not?  Had they heard some male voices?  They decide to wait fifteen minutes, without moving a muscle.  When the fifteen minutes are up, they still wait motionless.  It’s getting even quieter around the place.  There’s a soft whisper: “They must be here.”

   “Why don’t they have one on guard, then?”

   “They think they killed all of us.”

   In the meantime it has been snowing so hard that their own footprints are no longer visible.

   “You or I,” gestures Wolfie.

   All fear ebbs away with Meindert; he appoints himself.  Is it because of the cow barn smell that is so familiar to him?

…

On the side of the old shed he finds a couple of loose boards in the wall.  Every time a cow snorts or coughs, he wiggles a board loose with the bayonet.  He succeeds in quietly sneaking his way inside the shed.  He’s landed in pitch darkness.  The cattle react nervously, but soon everything is back to normal.

…

With the revolver in his hand and a hand grenade within quick reach, he takes a chance on getting past the straw to a door and stands in the only living space of the little farm.

In the cramped room he notices a small table and a couple of chairs.  The inside blinds are closed, the stove is still warm enough to warm his hands on it.  An oil lamp on the wall.  Damn, it feels lukewarm, there sure as hell must be someone living here.  He risks taking the lit flashlight from his pocket.  Light.  And at the same moment he sees that a door in the wall is slowly opening.  With the finger on the trigger he’s ready to waste a Croatian.  He rams the door farther open and stands face to face with an old man who tries to get out from under a load of blankets.  A very old man with a silver-gray beard and a fearless glance.

   “Partisans, where partisans!” Meindert wants to know.

   The man shakes his old head and sits down.  Eyes too old to show fear.

…

  With the flashlight he trudges between the skinny cows to the loose boards in the shed’s wall.  Then he turns around one more time and shines the flashlight around the deep litter space.   What?  Is that a hatch carefully lifted up in the straw and then immediately lowered again?  He gives it no second thought, lunges toward it with two hand grenades ready to toss, lifts the hatch a few inches, flings the whole load of death woes inside, races to the opening in the wall, and gets stuck.  What happens after that he does not experience fully consciously, but he’s blown through the hole from a tremendous blast.

…

That afternoon they witness one of the consequences of their actions: on the square in the middle of the village with the wooden cow shed the very last of the partisans early that morning hanged the little old man with the silver gray beard by his heels on a pole for suspected treason.

After Stalingrad they’re done. … On to Leningrad.  “And when we have our claws on that city, Moscow will be a cinch.”

  After four months they know better.

…

Of this Meindert is certain: should the hour come that he has to surrender to the Russians, he will hold this letter (from his parents) above his head with both hands and call out “Hollanski, Hollanski.”  He will try to explain to them that he doesn’t belong in this war, he will show them the bone whistle that he’s worn night and day on a string underneath his thin woolen undershirt.

… It’s winter again.  They have as good as surrounded Leningrad – the old St. Petersburg – for a couple of months already and bombarded it with hundreds of thousands grenades.

…

How long is this madness still bearable? … Should he, against all logic, survive this hell, then the things he has seen will haunt him the rest of his life.

… The cannons continue to bark, and that has awakened a horrendously cruel beast.  And it’s coming: the Red Army.  Above the eastern horizon the rumble begins.  With might and main the positions of the Wehrmacht have to be fortified.

…

 On the longest day the men of Fortification 216 get a couple of hours off to stretch their legs.  Meindert no longer indulges in the illusion of escape.  He tramps through a village where at the most only a cat might still be alive. …  He steps inside a small, green house through an open door, sees himself in a high narrow mirror.  He’s shocked; is that him?

… he undresses himself completely to check whether it’s really him; he sees what’s left of him is as skinny as a beanpole.  He must already have lost his soul.  Yes, a plover whistle on a string still dangles around his skinny neck.  He raises both of his bony arms and shows the SS mark in his left arm pit, and he knows now that his old name doesn’t fit him anymore; he will live on as a man without a soul.  How much longer?

   “Mom, I promise Mom that I will come home again.”  He doesn’t even have his own voice anymore.  Completely defeated, he gets dressed and rejoins the other men.

… In the southeast the boom-boom steadily thunders louder, more massive, more threatening, till the sky and the ground tremble. …   They come to take revenge, accompanied by the winter cold of 1944-45.  A cold more deadly than the two thousand cannons and three thousand tanks of the Red Army.  Meindert sees a frozen hand sticking out of the snow as a grotesque symbol of the madness.   

   And he, only son of Johannes and Pytsje from the houseboat, is one of the hundred thousands who had let themselves get dragged along….   Three-hundred and seventy days he had camped out in desperate conditions before old St. Petersburg; more than a hundred thousand bombs and grenades they had disgorged over a city with three million poor souls.  At the end of the madness some seven-hundred thousand starving poor wretches will be left.  Hitler may regard them as subhuman creatures, but whoever can still fight keeps fighting fearlessly for wife and children.  Behind them they know of the comrades of the advancing Red Army.  Now far past the Urals they’re advancing in a front 1500 kilometers wide.  With four times as many men, cannons, tanks, airplanes, icebreakers, and armor ships than the Germans had in 1944 on the east and west fronts.

…  the Americans have already reached the Rhine… but they don’t know that.

Beginning of 1945.

 … there’s the call, it sounds like for the last time, “Zurück!”  “Retreat, on the double!”  … Leningrad is abandoned, the men of his squadron wander away from their command.  Chaos. 

…

  Meindert has little sense of time anymore, walks in the uniform of a regular Wehrmacht infantry soldier.  Except for the SS sign in his armpit, he doesn’t have a single mark or paper on him anymore.  Only the plover whistle still dangles on his bony chest.  Underneath his stolen long military coat a stolen chunk of sour bread and some cold coffee in a metal field bottle.

   A few days later on a late afternoon, Meindert follows railroad tracks running in a southwesterly direction at a safe distance.  He hides in the bushes when for the third time a Wehrmacht train is approaching.  When it’s become dark and a fourth one approaches, he grabs his chance when the train has almost come to a standstill.  It pulls ahead and then stops anew.  It turns out to be a passenger train instead of a freight train, and seemingly hardly armed.  He’s able to jump on the footboard, but he can’t open the entry door.  The train starts moving again, he sees a deep bank in front of him, can no longer jump off safely, but then the caravan stops again.  He takes the chance to crawl under the steel connectors between two train units to the other side of the wagon.

   Right in front of him he sees the boots of a soldier who with his back toward him is taking a leak.  He hops on the footboard, darts through the open door, and is in the train.  In the dim light of the inside he sees wounded and apparently dead bodies lie on the floor; a nurse or helper hardly pays attention to him as he moves to another wagon.  Unnoticed, he lies down, between the living and the dead.  Huffing and puffing, the train is back in motion.

…

   An eternity later it’s a final stop.  The train appears to have made the Oder.  Meindert Boorsma gathers from the conversations that they have indeed reached the vicinity of Frankfurt on the Oder.

   “They blew up the bridge to keep the Russians back.”

   “We have to cross, but can’t now.”

…

Meindert begins to prepare for his escape, manages to gather some extra food and liquids, and offers to substitute for the ailing guard.  In the night, close to three, when the coast seems clear, he stands before the river with a backpack made from sturdy sailcloth and containing Red Cross clothes and some provisions.  He can see the destroyed railway bridge up ahead a ways.

…

The crossing is going to be more than a hundred meters.  …

   His war of attrition begins by a piece of bridge wreckage that sticks halfway out of the river.  He scrambles from beam to beam, from pillar to pillar. … at a given moment he can’t go on.  His last ounce of strength is depleted….  But the will not to give up has not quite left him, not for the whole long crossing; he makes it.

…

Much later he arrives at a farm which at the break of day he already had in view.  It looks like its residents left hearth and home in a hurry, all the doors are open, the cattle are gone. …

He stumbles onto a pair of work shoes that fit him pretty well.  Darn, in the front part of the place there are a couple of piles of clothes in one of the cabinets, without a doubt from the farmer himself: the underpants with patches for the knees, a neat blue outer pants, a heavy farmer’s jacket.  When he’s put it on and feels the comfort, he can’t help crying.  Wait, the cord with the plover whistle came off over his head.  Here, you!  The whistle has to go back to the houseboat.  If it is not his comfort bird, then it’s his protection bird.

   In the cellar he finds some food and drink he’s in need of, tries to eat it, takes off for the barn, makes himself a nest in the hay, and goes to sleep.

   After at least twelve hours he wakes soaked with sweat. …

…

Later, he’s ready to follow the path behind the old shed, when he’s startled by a loose-running horse.  The brown horse apparently had been hiding behind the shed. …

… Like a German farmer driven from his property, Meindert that afternoon rides on horseback toward the southwest.

…

     A good week and a half after he left the farm not far from the Oder, his flight is beginning to take its toll. …

He still manages and makes it across a half caved-in wooden bridge on horseback, though he doesn’t know what stream he’s crossing.

   “A small side-river of the Upper Elbe,” he finds out from a fellow fleeing companion.  “The allied already have Regensburg in hand.”  All right, that direction then.

   “The burning smell from a few days ago came from Dresden,” someone claims.  “The English bombed the whole city to smithereens.”  From a passer-by – one of the hundreds of loners on the run – he learns that the Americans indeed have established control of Regensburg.  “And the Russians have crossed the Oder.”

…

It can’t be long anymore, and Uncle Sam and Ivan will shake hands. 

   Four, five times he’s stopped by Wehrmacht soldiers, and each time he saves himself with a tale.  In perfect German: “They burned my farm down, I’m looking for wife and kids.”  But one evening at around eight there’s trouble.  An armed officer stops him and insolently demands his horse. … before he knows what hit him he goes down from a blow with the butt end of a gun, and not just any kind of blow.  As a reflex he must have raised both arms to protect his head, and that costs him a serious injury, maybe a broken shoulder.

   Done in, he’s sprawled on the ground. … His battle for survival is now challenged to the extreme.

   “The Americans are only five kilometer ahead.”

   “Yes, they’re in the Bohemian Forest, right across the Czech border here!”  There’s a catch in the voice.  “The Wehrmacht there has already surrendered.”

   He doesn’t really care anymore where he stays, the pain in his shoulder is unbearable.  His head is spinning from the roaring and the buzzing. …   He finds shelter in a small dilapidated and sagging gazebo behind the largest home of the hamlet.  There’s a worn, smelly armchair standing on three legs.  On account of his damaged left shoulder he tries to sleep sitting up.

A loud noise awakens him; droning and growling it’s coming his way.  Heavy tanks.

…

… he stumbles outside and tries to head in the same direction as the colossal caravan of rolling materiel of the Americans.

… To the left of him is the American 90th Infantry Division of the Third American Army under the command of George Patton….  There’s no end to the droning and rumbling, no end to the afternoon.  But then he can’t go on anymore.