We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (6 page)

He went on, down to the shore a little way from the jetty. There
at least was a narrow strip of beach which was free of snow, and he
could walk along it, slowly and painfully, without leaving any tracks
at all. He turned to the left, away from the shop, back towards
Toftefjord. He felt intolerably lonely.

There were two little haysheds by the shore. He wanted to creep
into one and hide there and burrow in the hay and get warm and go
to sleep. They were obvious hiding places. But even as he began to
think of it, he knew they were too obvious. They were isolated. He pictured himself hidden there in the dark, hearing the Germans
coming along the beach, and their expectant shouts when they saw
the sheds, and himself trapped in there while they surrounded him.
The very uselessness of the haysheds impressed upon him that there
really was no hiding place for him in that dreadful island. If he stayed
on the island, wherever he hid he would be found.

As he scrambled along the beach he was coming nearer, though
he did not know it, to the sound which Eskeland and the others had
passed through on their way to the shop. It is called Vargesund, and
it is full of rocks, in contrast to the wide open waters to the north and
south. The largest of the rocks is about half an acre in extent. As soon
as Jan saw this little island, he knew what he had to do, and for the
first time he saw a gleam of hope. He hurried to the edge of the water,
and waded in, and began to swim again.

It was only fifty yards to the rock, and in spite of his clothes and
his pistol and his one sea-boot, he had no difficulty in swimming
across. But when he dragged himself out of the mixture of ice and
water, and climbed over to the far side of the rock, the effect of this
second swim began to tell on him. He had to begin to reckon with
the prospect of freezing to death.

There was a minute patch of peat on top of the islet, and someone had been cutting it. He got down below the peatbank and started
to do exercises, keeping an eye on the hills of the main land. His bare
foot was quite numb, although running had made an unpleasant
mess of the raw end of his toe. He took off his sea-boot and moved
his one sock from his left foot to his right. It seemed a good idea to
have a boot on one foot and a sock on the other. He stamped his feet,
crouching down below the bank, to start the circulation and try to
ward off frostbite.

It was only a very short time before the Germans came in sight,
and for the next two hours he watched them, at first with apprehension, and then with a growing sense of his own advantage. They came
slowly, in straggling line abreast, pausing to challenge every stone, with a medley of shouts and orders and counter-orders; and Jan,
watching them critically in the light of his own field training,
remembered one of the many things he had been told and had only
half believed: that the garrisons of that remote part of Norway were
low-grade troops whose morale was softened by isolation and long
inactivity. Gradually, as he watched their fumbling search, he began
to despise them, and to recognize beneath that formidable uniform
the signs of fallibility and even fear. They were probably clerks and
cooks and batmen, dragged out unwillingly at a moment's notice
from comfortable headquarters billets in the town. He could guess
very well what they would think of having to hunt a desperate armed
bandit among ice and rocks and snow.

It was dusk when the first party of them came along the beach,
but he could see them clearly because they were using torches which
they flashed into dark crevices. They passed his island without a
glance behind them out to sea. So far, it seemed not to have crossed
their minds that he might have swum away.

When it was dark, the confusion increased. They were scattered in
small groups all over the hills. Each group was signalling to others
with its torches. Men were shouting their own names, afraid that
their friends would mistake them for the bandit. Now and then a single shot echoed from hill to hill. That could only mean that nervous
men were firing at fancied movements in the dark. Slowly it dawned
on Jan, with a feeling of intense elation which gave him new strength
and courage, that for all their numbers, they were afraid of him.

That opportunity to study the German army at its worst was
worth months of military training, because after it he never again
had the slightest doubt that he could outwit them till the end.

At the same time, he was becoming more aware of the dangers of
his natural surroundings. A human enemy, however relentless and
malevolent he may be, has human weaknesses; but nobody can trifle
with the Arctic. In immediate terms, Jan knew that if he stayed where
he was in his wet clothes, he would be dead before the morning.

Of course, there was only one alternative: to swim again. He could
swim back to Ribbenesoy, among the Germans, or he might conceivably swim across the sound, to Hersoy, the next island to the eastward. One way or the other, he had to find a house where he could
go in and get dry and warm. He had only seen two houses on
Ribbenesoy, the shopkeeper's and the one in Toftefjord, and both of
them were out of the question. He knew from the chart that there
were others farther west, but by that time they were probably full of
Germans. Across the sound, on Hersoy, he had seen a single lonely
house, but he had no idea who lived there.

He looked at Vargesund, and wondered if it was possible. In fact,
it is 220 yards across, but it was difficult for him to guess its width
in the darkness. The far shore was only a shadow between the shining water and the shining hills. The surface of the sound was broken here and there by eddies: the tide had begun to set. In health
and strength he could easily swim the distance; but he could not
judge the effects of the tide and the cold and his own exhaustion.
He stood for a long time before he made up his mind. He did not
want to die either way, but to drown seemed better than to freeze.
He took a last look behind him at the flashing torches of the soldiers, and stumbled down the rocks and waded in and launched
himself into the sea again.

It is a mercy that the ultimate extremes of physical distress often
get blurred in memory. Jan hardly remembered anything of that
third and longest swim, excepting an agony of cramp, and excepting
the dreadful belief that he was just about to die; an experience most
people encounter once or twice in a lifetime, but one he had had to
face so many times on that single day. It was after he had given up any
conscious struggle, and admitted his defeat, and was ready to welcome his release from pain, that some chance eddy swept him ashore
on the farther side and rolled his limp body among the stones, and
left him lying there on his face, groaning and twisted with cramp,
and not able to move or to think of moving.

Seconds or minutes later, in the mists of half-consciousness, there
were voices. There were footsteps on the beach, and the clink of
stones turning. He wondered with a mild curiosity whether the
words he could hear were German or Norwegian, and from somewhere outside himself he looked down with pity on the man who lay
beaten on the shore and the people who approached him; because if
they were German, the man was too weak to get away. But slowly his
dim enfeebled brain began to accept a fact which was unforeseen and
strange on that day of death and violence. They were children's
voices. There were children, coming along the beach and chattering
in Norwegian. And suddenly they stopped, and he knew they had
seen him.

He lifted his head, and there they were, two little girls, holding
hands, wide-eyed with horror, too frightened to run away. He
smiled and said: "Hullo. You needn't be afraid." He managed to turn
round and sit up. "I've had an accident," he said. "I do wish you
could help me." They did not answer, but he saw them relax a little,
and he realised that when they had seen him, they had thought that
he was dead.

Jan loved children; he had looked after his own young brother
and sister after his mother died. Perhaps nothing in the world could
have given him strength of mind just then, except compassion: the
urgent need to soothe the children's fear and make up for the shock
which he had given them. He talked to them calmly. His own self-pity
and despair had gone. He showed them how wet he was, and made a
joke of it, and they came nearer as their fright gave way to interest
and wonder. He asked them their names. They were Dona and
Olaug. After a while he asked if their home was near, and whether
they would take him there, and at the idea of bringing him home and
showing their parents what they had discovered they brightened up
and helped him to his feet. The house was not far away.

Two women were there, and the rest of their children. They
exclaimed in horrified amazement at the frozen, limping, wild dishevelled man whom the little girls led in. But the moment he
spoke to them in Norwegian their horror changed to motherly concern and they hurried him into the kitchen, and took him to the fire
and brought him towels and put the kettle on.

Of all the series of acts of shining charity which attended Jan in
the months which were to come, the help which these two women
gave him on the first night of his journey was most noble, because
they knew what had happened just across the sound, and they knew
that at any moment, certainly by the morning, the Germans would
be pounding on their door. They knew that their own lives and the
lives of all their children would hang on a chance word when they
came to face their questioning. Yet they opened their door at once
to the stranger in such desperate distress, and cared for him and
saved his life and sent him on his way, with no thought or hope of
any reward except the knowledge that, whatever price they paid,
they had done their Christian duty. Their names are Fru Pedersen
and Fru Idrupsen.

The first thing Jan did was to warn them all that the Germans
were after him, and that when they were questioned they must say
that he came in carrying a pistol and demanded their help by force.
He brought out his pistol to emphasise what he said. As soon as he
had made quite sure that they understood this, and that even the
children had a clear idea of what they should do and say, he sent two
of them out as sentries, and told them to warn him at once if they
saw a boat coming into the sound.

Fru Idrupsen, it turned out, was the woman from Toftefjord. She
had run to the hills with her children when the shooting started, and
she had seen most of what happened from the top of the island. She
had rowed across the sound to take refuge with her neighbours. Fru
Pedersen had a grownup son and daughter and two young children.
Her son was out fishing, but she expected him back at any minute.
Her husband, like Fru Idrupsen's, was away for the Lofoten fishing
season and would not be home till it ended.

All the time Jan was talking, the two women were busy with the
practical help which he needed so badly. They gave him food and a
hot drink, and helped him to take off his sodden clothes. They found
him new dry underclothes and socks and a sea-boot Herr Pedersen
had left behind, and they hung up his uniform to dry, and rubbed his
feet and legs till the feeling began to come back to them, and bandaged the stump of his wounded toe.

Twice while they worked to revive him, the sentries came running
in to say that a boat was coming. Each time Jan pulled on his steaming jacket and trousers and the sea-boots, one his own and one Herr
Pedersen's, and gathered together everything which belonged to him
and ran out of the house and up into the hills. But each time the boat
passed by.

Between these alarms, he rested and relaxed. That humble
Norwegian kitchen, with the children gathered round him speaking his
native tongue, was more homely than any place he had seen in the three
years he had been abroad. The warmth, and the sense of homecoming,
and the contrast of family life after the fearful tension of the day, made
him drowsy. It was difficult to remember that outside in the darkness
there still were ruthless men who would shoot him on sight, and wreck
that home if they found him there, and carry the children off to captivity and the mothers to unmentionable torment. Such violence had the
quality of a dream. And when he dragged his mind back to grapple with
reality, Jan found himself faced with a doubt which often came back to
him later: ought he to let such people help him? Was his own life worth
it? Was he right as a soldier, to let women and children put their lives in
such terrible danger? To save them from the consequence of their own
goodness, ought he not go out, and fight his own battle alone? But for
the moment, these questions went unanswered, because he was not fit
to make any such decision. Fru Pedersen and Fru Idrupsen had taken
him in hand, and they treated him as an extra child.

When he had been there half an hour or so, the eldest son of the
Pedersen family came home. He had heard the explosion in Toftefjord, but did not know what had happened. They told him the
story, and as soon as he had heard it he took it as a matter of course
that a wounded survivor should be sitting in his mother's kitchen
while the Germans scoured the islands round about. As his father
was not at home, it was up to him to get Jan away to safety. He began
to debate the question of how to do it.

The first thing was to rest. For one thing, there was no knowing
when Jan might get another chance, and for another it would be
madness to go out in a boat while the Germans were still there. And
after that, the boy said, when he had rested, he ought to get away
from the islands altogether, to the mainland. Any island, however big
it was, might be a trap, not only because you might find your retreat
cut off, but also because everyone on an island knew everyone else's
business. If he stayed another day in Hersoy, everyone would know
he was there. But on the mainland, if they did come after you, you
could always go on a stage farther; and gossip did not spread there
quite so fast. Altogether, he would be safer there. Besides, that was the
way to Sweden.