All God's Children (39 page)

Spirits were high as the leadership gathered for their final meeting that evening. Leon had arrived with the news that SS officer Hans Wagner had left that day on vacation. Wagner was the single officer that the group feared the most—he was intelligent and suspicious and made a habit of showing up unannounced in the most unexpected places. He was also a large man and incredibly fit. Killing him would take strength and perhaps more than the homemade knives they had at their disposal.

Josef had made an excuse to leave Beth early so that he could make the meeting at nine. They had an hour before lights out to finalize their plans. Anja had given him the pocket watches that she’d collected over the last several days. He would distribute these to the others so they could synchronize their actions. Timing was the key to success.

But on the following day a car arrived with several SS officers from a nearby labor camp. Josef was working in the garden—harvesting potatoes and the last of the other vegetables, storing small potatoes in a special pocket that he had sewn into the leg of his trousers for them to eat once they escaped.

At first Josef and the others feared that their plan had been discovered. Then they heard the new arrivals and their Sobibor comrades laughing. Later they heard singing coming from the open windows of the SS quarters. Still the addition of several new Nazis had to be taken into consideration. Word spread quickly among the rebels, and the plan to act that day was scrapped.

That night as he sat with Beth and heard the drunken and bawdy laughter and slamming of car doors as the visiting SS men left the camp, Josef faced for the first time the dangers of what they were about to do. So many unpredictable details. What if the officer scheduled to be lured to the warehouse by the promise of a new leather coat refused to come? What if the man with the appointment to try on new boots arrived early while his comrade was being killed? What if…

“Josef?”

He turned his attention to his wife—this woman that he had come to love more than life itself. If he could just get her out of here…

“Tell me the plan,” she said quietly.

“The plan?”

“I have seen you talking with the Russian and with Leon Feldhendler. Tell me what is going on.”

He could not lie to her. “I have asked that you trust me,” he reminded her.

“I do trust you. But I want you to also trust me—and I want to help.”

“The danger is…”

“Anja is helping you, isn’t she?”

Just then Sasha walked past them, his arm around a woman named Luka. The other women in the barracks had teased Luka—who was only eighteen—about her romance with the tall, handsome Russian. But Josef knew that Luka was acting as a decoy, giving Sasha and Leon and the other leaders opportunities for passing information right under the noses of the Ukrainian guards patrolling the alley between the fences that separated them from the garrison where the SS quarters were.

“Tomorrow,” Sasha murmured as he passed, and then he laughed and pulled Luka closer to his side.

Adrenaline pumped through Josef’s veins. He turned to Beth and grasped her hands. “Tomorrow when you dress for work, wear an extra sweater—a jacket if you can do so without drawing suspicion,” he told her. “And your heaviest shoes.”

“What’s happening?”

“Please don’t ask me anything more, Beth. Just…be ready.”

The following morning as Beth prepared for roll call and the day’s work, she noticed that Anja had also put on extra clothing. “Chilly today,” Anja said, loud enough for the others to hear. “Best take your sweaters and jackets just in case the evening roll call is a long one.”

The others nodded. They saw nothing odd in what Anja was advising. Too many times they had all stood for hours in a downpour or ninety-degree heat. It was always best to be prepared.

But the autumn day was warm and sunny and so routine that Beth began to think that perhaps something had gone wrong. The only difference was the sound of the Kapo’s shrill whistle that signaled the evening roll call fifteen minutes early. As usual the woman in the sorting room stopped what they were doing and moved quickly to the assembly area. Beth was aware only of the absence of SS officers and a murmur spreading through the gathering like a brush fire.

“Revolt…escape…”

Rabbi Weiss stepped out of the men’s barracks. He was wearing the prayer shawl that he wore every night when he gathered the others to say the prayer of mourning for those killed that day. He stood in the middle of the yard, swaying back and forth as he murmured to himself.

Suddenly the crack of a pistol shot rang out. The crowd turned as one and saw a prisoner fall as one of the SS officers who had just returned from a shopping expedition in the village holstered his sidearm.

Anja grabbed Beth’s arm and held on. At the same time, Sasha climbed onto a table. He told them most of the SS officers were dead and reminded them that they were all part of a larger struggle. “Forward,” he urged and added that those who survived must bear witness to these crimes against humanity. He delivered his speech in Russian, and all through his audience, others translated.

The Ukrainian guards in the towers waited for orders from the SS, their guns silent in spite of the nervous activity they were observing in the compound. They were too far from Sasha to hear his speech.

But all around her, Beth realized that others had taken up Sasha’s cry. “Forward,” they repeated as they moved toward the main gate. Then they were shouting it as one defiant voice.

Suddenly everyone was running—some toward the main gate and others to the sides. “Here, put this on,” Anja said as she thrust a heavy jacket into Beth’s hands.

She turned to look for Josef and saw him standing with Sasha and Leon and other men, aiming rifles they had somehow gotten at the watch towers. “Josef!” She started running toward him even as Anja pulled her away.

“Go,” he yelled. “Go now.”

Anja dragged Beth along with her as hundreds of prisoners stormed the barbed-wire fences. Some had garden tools and other weapons they used to try and hack through the wire. When that failed, they started going over the top. All around her Beth heard gunfire and explosions and shouting. All around her people fell. And still Anja urged her forward.

“Josef!”

“He’ll meet us in the woods,” Anja shouted. “Now come.”

Anja started to crawl through a small opening others had created at the base of the fence as others decided scaling it was faster. Beth followed Anja. Just when Anja made it through, the fence collapsed, and Beth felt the sting of the barbs embed themselves in the jacket that Anja had insisted she wear. She was trapped, and the more she struggled, the more entangled in the fencing she became. She saw Anja turn back to help her. “Go!” Then she covered her head as others trampled over her.

The noise was deafening, and Beth was certain that she was about to die. She closed her eyes and forced her mind to ignore the tread of feet over her, the sting of the barbs making their way through the coat and into her skin, the shouting and the explosions and the shrieks of the dying.

It felt like forever, but then she felt someone tugging on her arm and opened her eyes to see Josef kneeling next to her. His eyes filled with tears of relief when she opened her eyes and looked up at him.

“Go,” she urged, her voice choked by the dirt she had swallowed with her face pressed into the ground.

“No. Can you get free of the jacket?”

She slipped one arm free even as she noticed that with Josef there helping her, the others avoided stepping on her.

“That’s it. Now the other arm?”

It was a struggle, but that arm also came free, and with Josef’s help she was able to shimmy her way free of the wire. Josef helped her to her feet. He was no longer carrying the rifle. She was aware of fewer explosions and more people making it all the way across the open field to the haven of the trees. It was also beginning to get dark, and the lights in the camp had not come on.

Clutching Josef’s hand, she ran as she had never run before, her eyes on the forest as behind them sporadic gunfire sounded and all around them the open field was strewn with the dead bodies of their fellow prisoners.

When they finally stumbled the last few feet into the cover of the pine forest, Beth collapsed into Josef’s arms. “Are you all right?” she demanded as she examined him for wounds.

He brushed her hair away from her dirty face. “Beth, we are free,” he said quietly.

“Not exactly,” Anja reminded them both as she emerged from a thicket of bushes. “Now come on. We have to get as far away as possible because they will come after us.”

“The river,” Josef said. “We can tend Beth’s cuts, and if they use dogs, they won’t be able to track us.”

But as their days on the run lengthened into a week and then two, Josef realized how badly he had underestimated the determination of their captors to hunt them down. They could travel only at night, and during the day it was essential that one of them stay alert at all times for the possibility of discovery by the network of soldiers, local police, and even local citizens who might spot them and turn them in. Their feet were blistered and bleeding, and the few potatoes and carrots that Josef had managed to smuggle out were gone.

The good news was that the focus of the hunt seemed to be toward the east. That made sense because the camp was very close to the Russian border. So Josef decided that the three of them should head north. If they could make it to the Baltic Sea, they might be able to get a boat or stow away on a fishing vessel and make it to Denmark.

Anja was in favor of this plan mainly because she had grown up on the Danish island of Bornholm, and as far as she knew still had relatives there in the fishing village of Gudhjem. Although occupied by the Germans, the island was used primarily as a lookout and listening station for tracking naval and submarine activity in the Baltic. But Josef was all too aware that such a journey meant traveling nearly two hundred miles—mostly on foot and while being hunted. He knew the Nazi mind. They did not like loose ends, and they would not give up the search until they had accounted for every last prisoner.

“Josef?” Beth took hold of his hand as the three of them sat together in a cornfield that had not yet been harvested. This late in the season it was more than likely that the farm it belonged to had been abandoned. The crop was field corn for the livestock, but it tasted like manna to them. “We need to come to consensus.”

Next to her Anja nodded. The two women laid down their corn cobs and closed their eyes as they prepared for the Quaker ritual of sitting in silence and waiting for divine guidance. Josef was irritated that either of them thought that God was going to show them a way out of this. Did they not understand that he spent every waking minute planning for their safety?

“I need to think,” he said and would have stalked off to some other part of the field were it not midafternoon with a sky that threatened to bring rain before nightfall.

“You can think here,” Beth said without opening her eyes.

“Well, we’d all better pray that the Light dawns soon because we need to find shelter for the night,” he grumbled.

Just before he closed his eyes and took a deep steadying breath as Beth had taught him to do when preparing for worship, he was sure that he saw Anja smile.

Quakers
. It was one thing to be married to one and quite another to be outnumbered.

After a few minutes, Beth spoke. “I am thinking that we need to find the best way to bring all three of us to safety,” she began and paused. “Perhaps this island—even if it is occupied—is at least a place we can begin.”

Silence.

Anja spoke. “If we travel as far as possible through each night…”

“Do you not understand that we are in territory we don’t know and we have no map?” Josef had had enough of the silent meditation.

The two women remained stone still, their eyes closed, their breathing even.

Josef squeezed his hands into fists, his frustration like a weight inside him. What other options did they have? He intended to wait out their silence and so focused his attention on alternate possibilities. So far they had made fairly good time. While the search parties focused mostly on the eastern end of the Bug River, he had been able to rescue an abandoned rowboat, and by using a branch from a pine tree as a pole and following close to the river banks, they were now west and north of Warsaw.