We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (7 page)

This was the first time Jan had paused to think of an ultimate
escape. Up till then, it had only been a matter of dodging for the next
few hours, and he had still thought of north Norway as his destination. That was where he had set out for, and he had arrived; and
although he had lost his companions and all his equipment, he had
not admitted to himself that the whole expedition was a failure. He
still hoped to do part of his job there, at least, as soon as he had got
his strength back and shaken off the Germans. But the people who
lived there, as he now began to see, all thought at once of Sweden for
a man in such serious trouble. It was a difficult journey, but not a
very long one; about eighty miles, in a straight line; if you could
travel in straight lines.

The trouble was, the boy went on, he only had a rowing-boat
himself, and they could never row to the mainland. Just south of
them was the sound called Skagosund, which was two miles wide. On the other side of that was Ringvassoy, an island about twenty miles
square, and south of that again you had to cross Grotsund itself,
which was the main channel into Tromso from the north and was
four miles wide and full of patrol boats. The best he could do himself was to row Jan across to Ringvassoy before the morning. But he
knew a man there called Jensen who was all right, and he had a
motor-boat and was meaning to go into Tromso some day soon. His
wife was the midwife over there, and he had a permit and was always
moving about with his boat. He could easily put Jan ashore on the
mainland.

Jan listened gratefully as this plan unfolded. He was glad for the
moment to have everything thought out for him, and was ready to
fall in with any idea which would take him away from Toftefjord.

When it was all decided, and he was resting, the eldest son of the
Toftefjord family went out in his boat to see what had happened to
his home, and to find out for Jan if there was any sight of the rest of
his party. He was away for a couple of hours. When he came back, Jan
knew for certain that of all the twelve men, he was the only one who
was not either killed or captured. Toftefjord itself was quiet. There
were still parties of Germans searching the distant hills. The slopes of
the fjord were littered with scraps of planking. The boy had found
the remains of a petrol barrel, and seen an ammunition belt hanging
in a tree. But there was no one, alive or dead, on the beaches. The
German ship had left. It was steaming slowly up the north side of the
island, using a searchlight. Jan's friends, or their bodies, must have
been taken aboard it. Eskeland and Per Blindheim and all the others
were gone, and he could never expect to see them again. There was
nothing he could do except to go on alone.

He left the house on Hersoy very early in the morning, well before
it was light. Fru Pedersen and Fru Idrupsen watched him go and
brushed aside his thanks, which could certainly not have been adequate for what they had done. The boy took him down to his boat
and they got aboard and pushed her off into the sound. Jan felt fit again and ready for anything. They turned to the southward and
began to row, past the place where he had landed from his swim, past
the shop, and then out across the open water, heading for Ringvassoy,
with Toftefjord astern. Everything was peaceful.

IN MOMENTS of calm, Jan often thought about his family, as all soldiers of all armies think in war. So far as he knew, they were still in
Oslo: his father, and his young brother Nils, and his sister. His sister's
name was Julie, but none of them ever called her that because they
thought it was old-fashioned; they had always gone on calling her
Bitten, which was the nickname he had invented for her when he was
eight and she was a baby. When his mother died, he had been sixteen,
Nils ten, and Bitten only eight; and so he had suddenly had to be very
much more grown up than he really was; he had had to take care of
the children when his father was at work, and even shop and cook
and wash for them for a time till his aunt could come to the rescue.

They had always been a closely united family, both before and after
that disaster, until the morning just after the invasion when his orders
had come and he had left home on an hour's notice. But somehow a
special affection had grown up through the years between himself and
Bitten. Young Nils was a boy and an independent spirit who had
always been able to stand on his own feet; but Bitten had turned to
him more and more for advice, and he had become very fond of her,
and proud of her, and deeply interested in her growing-up.

Perhaps this big-brotherly affection had been the deepest emotion of Jan's life, when fortune landed him in Toftefjord when he was
twenty-six. At any rate, leaving Bitten had hurt more than anything when the time came. He had tried to make the break as quick and
painless as it could be when he knew he had to do it. He had waited
around that morning till he knew she would be coming home from
school, and he had met her in the street on his way to the station just
to tell her he was going. She was fifteen then, and he had never seen
her since. For the first few months, while he was in Norway and
Sweden, he had been able to write to her sometimes, using a false
name so that if the letters got into the wrong hands she would not get
into trouble for having a brother who was still opposing the Germans
after the capitulation. In his letters he had begged her to stay on at
high school, not to be in a hurry to get a job; but he had never known
if she had taken that advice. While he was in prison in Sweden he had
a few letters from her, sending him press cuttings about netball
games she had played in. It had made him smile to think that she
wanted him to be interested in netball when he was just beginning a
prison sentence; but it had also made him very homesick. Since he
had left Sweden and started his journey to England, he had never
heard of her at all. That was nearly three years ago. She would be
eighteen now: grown up, he supposed. He sorely wished that he knew
if she was happy.

Sitting in the boat that early morning, as the boy from Hersoy
rowed him across the sound, Jan had every reason to think of his
family. It had always been on his mind since he started to train as an
agent that he would have to be careful to protect them from reprisals
if anything went wrong. Now that capture and death were so close to
him, he had to remind himself of the one and only way he could protect them: to refuse to be captured, and to die, if he had to die, anonymously. He had nothing on him to identify him or his body as Jan
Baalsrud, and that was as it should be: if the worst came to the worst,
the Germans would throw him into a grave without a name. His
father and Nils and Bitten would never know what had happened to
him. He would have liked them to know he had done his best; but to
leave them in ignorance was the price of their safety.

Something the boy said brought this forcibly to his mind. The
boy meant to take him to Jensen's house and introduce him and
make sure that he was safe; but Jan had to ask him to put him ashore
out of sight of the house and leave him. He explained the first principle of any illegal plan: that nobody should know more than he
needs. It was a pity that the boy and his family knew Jan was going to
Jensen, but there was no need for Jensen to know where he came
from. You might trust a man like your brother, he said, but it was no
kindness to burden him with unnecessary secrets, because no man
alive could be certain he would not talk if he was caught and questioned. What your tongue said when your brain was paralysed by
drugs or torture was not a mere matter of courage; it was unpredictable, and beyond any self-control. Jan himself would be the only
one who knew everyone who helped him; but he had his pistol, and
he solemnly promised this boy, as he promised more people later,
that he would not let them catch him alive. So the two of them parted
on the shore of Ringvassoy, and the boy backed his boat off and
turned away into the darkness, leaving Jan alone.

Jan owned nothing in the world just then except the clothes he
was wearing, and a handkerchief and a knife and some bits of rubbish in his pockets, and his pistol. He had navy blue trousers and a
sweater and Herr Pedersen's underclothes, and a Norwegian naval
jacket, a warm double-breasted one with brass buttons and a seaman's badges, though he had never been a seaman, and was not even
very sure if he could row. The jacket had the Norwegian flag sewn on
its shoulders, with the word NORWAY in English above it. He had lost
his hat. He was amused at the odd footprints which his two rubber
boots left in the snow, one English and one Norwegian. There was
something symbolic there, if you cared about symbols.

There were a dozen houses in that part of Ringvassoy, but he easily picked out Jensen's. The lights were on, and there were voices
inside. He hoped that might mean that Jensen was making an early
start on his trip to Tromso. He went to the back door, and hesitated a moment, and knocked. A woman opened the door at once, and he
asked if Jensen was at home. No, she said, he had left for Tromso the
morning before, and would not be back for two or three days.

At this disappointing news Jan paused for a moment uncertainly,
because he did not want to show himself to people who could not
help him. He would have liked to make an excuse and go away; but
he saw surprise and alarm in her face as she noticed his uniform in
the light of the lamp from the doorway.

"I'm in a bit of trouble with the Germans," he said. "Have you got
people in the house?"

"Why, of course," she said. "I have my patients. But they're
upstairs. You'd better come inside."

That explained the lights and the voices so early in the morning.
He had not made allowances for what a midwife's life involves. He
went in, and began to tell her a little of what had happened, and what
he wanted, and of the danger of helping him.

Fru Jensen was not in the least deterred by danger. She had heard
the explosion in Toftefjord, and already rumours had sprung up in
Ringvassoy. The only question she asked was who had sent Jan to her
house, and when he refused to tell her and explained the reason why,
she saw the point at once. She said he was welcome to stay. She was
very sorry her husband was away, and she herself could not leave the
house at present, even for a moment. But there was plenty of room,
and they were used to people coming and going. He could stay till the
evening, or wait till Jensen came home if he liked. He would be glad
to take him to the mainland. But she could not be sure how long he
would be away, and perhaps it would be risky to try to ring him up
in Tromoso and tell him to hurry back.

"But you must be hungry," she said. "Just excuse me a moment,
and then I'll make your breakfast." And she hurried upstairs to attend
to a woman in labour.

Jan felt sure he would be as safe in her hands as anyone's. He
could even imagine her dealing firmly and capably with Germans who wanted to search her house. If you were trying to think of a hiding-place, there could hardly be anywhere better than a labour ward,
because even the Germans might hesitate to search there. And yet it
would be so impossibly shameful to use it. It might fail; it might not
deter the Germans. Jan had all a young bachelor's awe and ignorance
of childbirth; but he had a clear enough vision of German soldiers
storming through that house, and himself forced to fight them there,
and failing perhaps, and having to blow out his brains. If it came to
that, he was ready to face it himself; one always knew it might happen, one could think of it calmly. But to involve a woman in something like that at the very moment of the birth of her baby, or
perhaps to see a new-born infant shot or trampled underfoot-that
was too appallingly incongruous; it could not bear to be thought
about at all.

Besides this, there was another practical, strategic consideration.
He was still much too close to Toftefjord. If the Germans really
wanted to get him, it would not take them long to turn Ribbenesoy
inside out: they had probably finished that already. And the obvious
place for them to look, when they were sure he had left the island,
was where he was now, on the shore of Ringvassoy which faced it.
Their search would gradually widen, like a ripple on a pond, until
they admitted they had lost him; and until then, at all costs, he must
travel faster than the ripple.

When Fru Jensen came back and began to lay the table, he told
her he had decided to move on. She did not express any feeling about
it, except to repeat that he was welcome to stay if he wanted to; if not,
she would give him some food to take with him. She began to tell
him about useful and dangerous people all over her island. There
were several ways he could go: either by sea, if he happened to find a
boat, or along either shore of the island, or up a valley which divides
it in the middle. But if he went up the valley, she warned him, he
would have to be careful. People in those remote and isolated places
were inclined to take their politics from the clergyman or the justice of the peace, or the chairman of the local council, or some other such
leader in their own community; they had too little knowledge of the
outside world to form opinions of their own. In the valley there happened to be one man who was a Nazi, or so she had heard; and she
was afraid a lot of people might have come under his influence. If a
stranger was seen there, he was certain to hear of it; and although she
could not be sure, she thought he might tell the police. Of course,
most of Ringvassoy, she said, was quite all right. He could go into
almost any house and be sure of a welcome. And she told him the
names of a lot of people who she knew would be happy to help him.

It was still early when Jan left the midwife, fortified by a good
breakfast and by her friendliness and fearless common sense. He
wanted to get away from the houses before too many people were
about; but it was daylight, and it was more than likely someone
would see him from a window. It was a good opportunity to be misleading. He started along the shore towards the west. In that direction, he might have gone up the valley or followed the coastline
round the west side of the island. But when he was out of sight of the
last of the houses, he changed his direction and struck off into the
hills, and made a detour behind the houses to reach the shore again
farther east. He had made his plans now a little way ahead. The next
lap was to walk thirty miles to the south end of the island.