All God's Children (42 page)

B
eth faded in and out of consciousness. One minute it was pitch black, although she knew that her eyes were open, and the next she saw a sliver of a moon. One minute she felt herself being carried along on a bumpy ride, her body cushioned by padding to all sides as whatever conveyance she was in stumbled over cobblestone streets.

“Josef?” she whispered, but her lips were cracked and dry, and her throat burned for lack of moisture.

At one point she thought she heard Anja say that they were nearly there, and she wondered where
there
might be. She had no feeling in her leg, and she wondered if perhaps she would be crippled for life.

Life
.

They were still alive—all three of them. Anja seemed to have recovered her indomitable spirit, and Josef—dear brave Josef. She could hear the now-familiar sound of his steady breathing and knew that he was the one pushing her forward. They were on the move—to freedom at last.

The terrain changed. They had left the cobblestones behind and were making the trek across a field of mud. It was raining hard, and suddenly they stopped.

“It’s stuck,” Josef said.

From close by, Beth heard what sounded like the cars of a train being hooked one to the other. “That door is open,” Anja called. “Come on. We can make it. It’s going north, and we can—”

Her voice was lost in a crack of thunder as Josef lifted Beth into his arms and started across the muddy field. She forced herself to focus on their destination, determined to do whatever she could to help make certain they reached the train in time.

She could see Anja scrambling aboard an open cattle car. She and Josef were still twenty yards away as he plodded through the mud.

“Put me down,” she demanded. “Josef, put me down and let me lean on you so we can make it before it leaves.”

To her surprise he did as she asked, and using him as her crutch, she hobbled the last few yards to the train. Overcome by the stress and fears of the last several weeks, she started to laugh.

“Don’t,” Josef said as he reached to lift her again.

She pushed his hand away as she continued to hop toward their destination. “I’m all right,” she said but could not stop laughing. “It’s just that…”

“She’s delirious,” she heard Josef tell Anja as he hoisted her onto the bare floor of the cattle car just as the train began to move.

“I am not,” she protested, lying flat on her stomach, as was Anja, their arms outstretched to Josef, who was now running alongside the train.

As the train gathered speed, he made his move and managed to flop down next to them in the car.

“You want to tell me what was so funny back there?” he asked irritably as he brushed himself off and bent to examine her dressing.

“I just suddenly thought about a picnic our Quaker community has every summer back in Wisconsin,” Beth said as she combed his hair back from his eyes with her fingers. “We always ran a three-legged race, and the way you and I were hobbling across that field…”

Anja giggled.

Josef frowned.

“Well, she’s got a point,” Anja said. “Under other circumstances the two of you would have made quite a humorous sight.”

Josef still did not laugh—did not even smile.

Beth took hold of his face, forcing him to look at her instead of her wound. “Josef, I am going to be all right—we are all going to be all right,” she said.

“How can you be so certain?”

“I don’t know, but what would be the point of bringing us this far if there were no purpose?”

Josef settled himself next to her while Anja made a pillow for herself of the knapsack—almost empty now.

Beth laced her fingers with Josef’s and rested her cheek on his shoulder. The pain in her leg that the medicine had masked was beginning to break through again. But they were on a train—not walking for miles and miles through all kinds of weather. They were dry if not exactly warm. They had food—for now. “I believe that we will be all right, Josef—all three of us. God has other work for us to do.”

“I wish I had your faith,” Josef murmured.

“You can—close your eyes, open your heart, and look inward, Josef. The answers are there inside you—they always have been.”

Josef didn’t have to be told that Beth’s pain had returned. He was well aware that the effects of the medicine he’d given her could not last forever. In truth he had thought that once he’d been able to remove the bullet, the kindly chemist would have made certain that they left with everything they would need for her recovery.

But such plans had been dashed the minute he saw the soldiers questioning their rescuer. There would be no surgery, no sterile instruments he could use to take out the bullet. And there would be no more medicine. The fever and infection most likely would return. He was desperate to get Beth to a place where she could receive proper care. Time was the enemy. They had miles to go yet, and it was already the first of November. The temperatures would continue to drop, and their tattered clothing would not keep them warm once they faced nights below freezing.

To further complicate matters, they had to remain on constant alert, and now that task was up to him and Anja. While the train was in motion, they were all right, but when it stopped, they had to hide in the corner of the cattle car, and because there was no cargo or livestock to hide behind, they had to hope that no one would decide to check the empty cars. Worse, Josef feared that the empty car they occupied might be uncoupled and left behind before they reached their destination.

Even on the battlefield as he’d crawled from one wounded soldier to the next, Josef had not been as terrified as he was now. The stakes were so much higher—he had a wife and a cause that he believed in. The White Rose might have perished with the arrests of his friends, and it had been evident that the people would not rise up and take back their government. But the acts of courage and defiance that he had witnessed at Sobibor had inspired him. He could do more. He had to do more.

But first he had to get Beth and Anja to safety.

“Tell me more about your relatives in Bornholm,” he said to Anja as Beth dozed and the train rumbled its way toward the coast.

“My grandfather is a fisherman—herring mostly. He and my grandmother have lived on the island their whole lives. As a girl I used to spend summers with them. I loved being there.”

“The island is occupied?”

Anja nodded. “The last letter that Benjamin and I had from them before…” Her voice drifted off as it so often did whenever she thought about her late husband. But then she rallied and continued. “It sounded as if the Germans leave the locals pretty much alone—no roundups and no Gestapo—at least not then.”

“That would have been how long ago?”

Anja calculated, counting out the months. “Over a year now,” she said softly as if she could not believe so much time had passed. “They wanted us to go there and stay until the war ended. My grandfather said that he would train Benjamin in the fishing business. How Benjamin laughed at that idea. ‘How can I go out to sea when I can’t even swim?’ he used to say.” She was silent for a long moment and then said, “How I wish we had gone.”

“We’ll go now,” Josef told her and felt the inadequacy of his words even as he spoke them.

Anja—never one to wallow in her fears—brightened. “When that woman took Daniel, I gave her my grandparents’ address. Perhaps she was able to get Daniel to them—or at least she wrote to let them know he was all right. Do you think so, Josef?”

He would not offer false hope—there had been too much of that. “We’ll have to wait and see, but the good news is that, unless the train gets sidetracked, I heard two of the railroad workers say at our last stop that we should reach Danzig later today.”

Beth was well aware that the infection had returned. Her leg was swollen and tender, and whenever Josef removed the bandages to examine the wound, she could see the pus. The slightest touch was so painful that she had to bite hard on her lower lip to keep from crying out. The bedding that the chemist had lined the cart with and that Josef had wrapped around her when he was carrying her across the muddy field toward the train was useful now as the most sterile bandaging available.

She and Anja had torn the fabric into strips, which they had carefully rolled into balls and placed inside the knapsack. Whenever Josef changed her dressing, he discarded the old soiled bandage in favor of one of the clean ones. But Beth was well aware that they were almost at the end of their supply.

She could no longer stand or walk even by leaning on Josef and Anja without the pain feeling like a fire in her leg. So whenever she needed to move—away from the doorway of the cattle car to the shadows while they were stopped—she crawled, or Josef carried her. She was beginning to think that she might actually lose the leg altogether. But even if that happened, it seemed a small price to pay for freedom when so many others had paid with their lives.

Most of the time she slept—or pretended to sleep—so that Josef and Anja could concentrate on keeping watch. She discovered that if she used the time for silent worship, she was able to forget about the pain and discomfort. She gave herself over to the rhythm of the train rocking side to side as it sped through villages and past farm fields and thought only about the future she and Josef would build together once they reached their destination.

“Bornholm is not free,” Josef reminded her one night as they sat together while Anja slept and Beth—weaker than she’d ever been with fever and hunger and pain—talked about the life they would have there.

Once while they were in Sobibor, she had begged him to promise her that he would always tell her the truth. Even in her state of near delirium, she knew that it would have been so much easier for him to assure her that all her dreams for them would come true. “Josef, will I ever see Bornholm?”

He was quiet for so long that, if it were not for the sudden tensing of his body, she would have thought he’d perhaps dozed off. “Josef? The truth?”

“If you are asking me if you are dying, Beth, then my answer is this—I will do everything in my power to make sure you not only live to see the island but fully recover once you are there.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “Now get some rest.”

Beth curled closer to him, and when he wrapped his arms around her, she knew that no matter where life took them, this was home.

Josef had worried for much of the train ride that he was making a mistake. The train was headed for Danzig, Poland’s largest seaport and as such a place of supreme importance to the Nazis. The port was the gateway to the Baltic Sea with access to Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden—and Russia. With the defeat at Stalingrad and the subsequent turning of the tide of war against Germany, he suspected that Danzig had taken on even more significance, and he was not surprised to see a strong presence of men in uniform as the train approached the station.

Anja had prepared everything for their departure from the train— packing up whatever they had left of the supplies they’d brought from the chemist and leaving no trace that they had been there. Beth was weak but determined to do her part. The plan was for them to jump as the train slowed down for the final approach to the station.