NINETEEN
Julia, Czechoslovakia, 1942
Martin Drossen was a simple German soldier, but a good one. He didn’t believe in the National Socialist Party, but he did believe in the German people. And he had gone to fight not for the Führer, but because it was his duty to do so as a good citizen. Martin’s grandfather had died early in the Great War during a withering artillery barrage on the Western Front. His father’s fate came one day after the armistice was signed ending the war. After spending a short leave at home, he was killed while returning to his unit near Aachen by a stray bullet fired, ironically, by a drunken soldier celebrating peace. But he had left his seed in Martin’s mother then, and the legacy of honor and duty. Reared in Mainz by his widowed mother and widowed grandmother, he grew up to be a gentle person, but with little ambition. All he required from anyone who knew him was the same respect he gave them. Loving God was unimportant though, because he felt God had given him no right answers for his father and grandfather’s deaths, a fact he was reminded of every day watching his mother grow old laboring ten hours a day as a housekeeper for two wealthy Jewish families.
Maria Wolken came into his life by chance one day. Entering the farmer’s market to purchase a few fresh vegetables for home, he noticed her struggling to gather together an array of late spring melons that had tumbled into the street as she attempted to sample one. Rushing to help her retrieve the melons that had rolled beneath several parked trucks and carts, brought to Martin in a few short months a treasured friend and lover and devoted wife. Though Maria was deeply religious, she cared little, and worried less, that he wasn’t. He was a good and generous man, with what little he could provide, and had her own father been killed in the war, she might have left God, too, she knew. Neither one, though, was prepared for what Hitler and Germany would soon demand of them. Maria entered nursing, which would take her later to the Görden Psychiatric Hospital, and Martin enlisted in the Wehrmacht. His only hope was that the war would be quickly over and he could return to his beloved Maria. But he now found himself, three years later, patrolling the main road between Nürnberg and Prague, with his many dreams of peace still distant for all of Germany.
As he sat this day astride the idling motorcycle, adjusting his goggles, Martin thought of home and Maria and wondered if she was keeping warm in the freezing winter air that had blanketed all of Europe. No one sane would be moving about on a day such as this, he mused. And running a patrol on the treacherous and icy roads in ten degree weather was asking death to ride along with him and maybe make an early appearance. But he would go, as he always did, for no other reason but duty. He would tarry for a while in the small villages passed through on his patrol, talking with anyone who might listen to what he was about. Most kept to themselves, though, saying little to him or to any of the other patrols that passed their way. He was their enemy and they despised him; not enough, though, for there were some who despised the Jews more. Many Jews had already been betrayed in their own village where they had lived for generations, and turned over to the patrols, while others were shot on sight and their bodies dumped in the passing rivers. A perfect storm of madness had come to the land, opening up its vast dark clouds to rain monsters on all those below.
Julia and Eva had each asked the other a dozen times what they were doing tromping through woods on a day made only for dying. What little body heat they had early in the morning had long been taken down by the gripping cold. Little time remained, both knew, before they would become one with the frozen earth. They would surrender, not to the Germans, but to the precious gift of a warm sleep, when all feeling becomes suspended as frozen death comes to the mind and body.
It was Julia who saw the farm buildings first through an opening in the woods. Rising out of the snow two hundred yards distant, they looked like giant stone ogres of old sniffing the air for any human scent. Freezing, yet warm from excitement, Julia and Eva stayed in the woods out of sight for several minutes, watching for any movements about the buildings. Wisps of gray smoke broke from the chimney top on the house, wafting upwards from the snow-covered roof in a slow spiral to meet the early morning clouds. Eva had experienced the idyllic scene many times before on her farm in Bratislava, and never tired of the inward joy it brought to her long days of laboring there.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it,” she said, squeezing Julia’s hand.
“It is for sure. Beauty is the only thing constant in this dirty old world of ours that tells us God may be still hanging around. It can always be found somewhere.”
“Who told you that foolishness?”
“Erich, in one of his weaker moments I suspect, but it’s true.”
“He hasn’t been to hell yet,” Eva laughed, leaving the woods and starting across the highway towards a narrow, snow-covered road leading to the farmhouse. As she did she looked back to Julia following her.
“I will talk,” she said. “I am a peasant, and whoever lives in the house will be a peasant too. Besides, you are too citified and Jewish looking.”
Julia smiled and said nothing. She had always wondered as a child what a Jew should look like, and no one, not even her father knew, though he joked about it many times with Hiram. She finally decided one day that it was their good Rabbi who looked the way a Jew should be. But he was a man, which meant to her that only men could look like Jews, not women, leaving her quite disgusted. This seemed true to her even now because Eva was a Jew, yet she looked no different than all the Slavs who worked the fields and vineyards around Bratislava.
As they neared the farmhouse, Julia noticed a thin wire fence circling the building as well as the barn standing immediately next to it. The gate opened into a small courtyard separate from the rest of the grounds leading to the barn. Like the outbuildings, the farmhouse was made of heavy fieldstone, one level, and elevated several feet above the ground to accommodate the heavy snows that came in the long winters. A wide stone staircase led to the front door. Before they reached the stairs, the heavy wooden door swung open. A thin older man, spare in flesh, with ruffled grey hair and a dark complexion, greeted them with suspicion and an old German Mauser rifle used by some Hungarians in the Great War. Julia and Eva moved no closer, unsure of what they should do.
“What do you women want? I have been watching you two for some time.”
“We are cold and lost, I think, and want only to warm ourselves for a little while and we will be on our way,” Eva answered.
“Who are you? Only fools and bad people would be out in this weather.”
“I am Eva Pitsky and my friend here is Julia Simik. We are from Pilsen,” Eva said. “We were trying to get to Klatovy, when the bus slid off the road some ways back.”
“Does your friend here talk?” the man said, looking strangely at Julia.
“Yes I do, and may we please come in? My feet are frozen solid,” Julia said softly, smiling at the man.
Saying nothing, the man stepped back into the house. Holding the rifle steadily with both hands, he nodded to Julia and Eva to enter the room. Julia rushed to the open stone fireplace holding a thick bed of hot embers slowing burning a large, newly laid log. Removing her boots, she quickly sat down on the hearth, placing her feet within inches of the glowing embers, and sighed with delight.
Eva waited by the open door for a second before entering. Nothing about the man was reassuring, especially his eyes, which asked questions when they looked at you. Less trusting than Julia, she stepped into the large room, watching every move the man made. He seemed to be alone in the house.
There were only two small rooms opening to the right of the big central room where Julia was and an open kitchen to the left with a small table and two chairs. A dirty soup bowl and spoon rested on the table alongside an empty butter dish and a slice of crusty hard bread. The toilet, she knew, was somewhere out back. He was a poor peasant by any measure, though her father’s house had little more. Like many peasants in this area, each day’s task in this man’s life was to make it through another da
y, that’s all.
The man walked to the kitchen and sat down by the table with the rifle resting on his lap. He watched Eva for a few seconds, then Julia as she continued to warm her feet by the fire.
“You are not cold like your friend?” he asked, staring now at Eva.
“No, I am a peasant like you. We are used to being miserable,” Eva said, forcing a smile and returning the man’s stare.
Seconds passed in silence before the man rose from his chair and laid the rifle down on the table.
“I have little for you to eat—soup and bread, that is all. You may warm yourselves a little while longer, then you must leave.”
“We had hoped to spend a day or two until the days warm. We will pay you for the trouble,” Eva said, moving to the stove and stirring what little was left of the lentil soup.
“You have not told me who you are. There are many like you on the roads today causing trouble, especially the Jews and gypsies,” the man said, still staring at Eva.
“Do we look like gypsies and Jews? Look at my face and skin,” Eva said boldly, moving closer to the man and brushing the hair away from her face.
But it was not Eva the man looked at now. His eyes were fixed on Julia, who was kneeling now by the fire, warming her hands.
“You do not talk much. Where is your home?” he asked, nodding to her.
“Pilsen. My father works in the iron works there.”
The man studied her face for a moment and knew she was lying, then turned away and looked to where Eva was standing.
“You have money?”
“Some. Very little, in fact, a few Reich marks. You may have them if we can stay here for a few days,” Eva said.
“I have my son’s old bicycle. You must buy it also if I let you stay,” the man said, looking back to Julia, who was sitting pulling her boots on.
Eva started to respond but stopped, and moved quickly to the door, opened it and listened. The distant puttering of motorcycles could be heard coming from the south. Julia had heard the sounds, too, and moved to the open door followed by the man.
“That will be a military patrol. They pass by here every day many times.”
“Do they stop here?” Julia asked, trying to still the rising anxiety in her voice.
“Sometimes, maybe twice, to ask if I’ve seen any refugees or Jews on the road. If they stop, I will tell them nothing, and they will leave. But you must buy the bicycle,” the man said without hesitation.
Julia exchanged glances with Eva, then nodded to the man.
The chugging of the motorcycles grew louder as they came into view, increasing to a frightening roar as it resonated through the crisp air. Julia counted six, each with a helmeted rider wearing heavy goggles and a submachine gun strapped across the back. As they neared the narrow road leading to the farmhouse, the last two slowed, then stopped at the entrance while the others continued on. Parking their machines by the roadside, they stood for a moment talking and smoking a cigarette before starting to the house through the heavy snow. Neither one seemed to notice, or pay any attention, to the double rows of tracks left by Julia and Eva leading to the house. When they drew near, Julia could hear their words, the closer of the two happily relating that he would go home soon to see his wife in Mainz, where he hoped she would become pregnant. Having a child would make him a better soldier, he believed.
“You must stay here and hide in the rooms while I go and talk with them. They won’t come in. They never do,” the man said, opening the door and going to the two soldiers.
“The bastard will betray us—he knows we are Jews,” Eva said, moving quickly to the edge of the window, where she could see the man talking with the two soldiers.
“Probably, but it’s the reward he will get from the Germans that has him out there talking,” Julia said, glancing to the kitchen where the man had left his rifle. A fool’s gift, she mumbled.
Within seconds of meeting the two soldiers, the man pointed to the house. Without waiting, both soldiers started for the staircase holding the submachine guns by their side. Julia and Eva were armed and waiting, kneeling quietly in the left front corner by the kitchen holding the small handguns they had carried holstered in a special inner waistband. Hidden by the front door when opened, they could be seen only at the last minute after the soldiers stepped from the doorway into the big room.
“We have the edge,” Eva whispered to Julia as the door swung open.
Martin Drossen came in first and never saw who killed him. Julia shot him dead center between the eyes the second he turned his head towards the kitchen. The second soldier fared no better, falling within a second from two rapid shots fired by Eva. Before Julia could move, Eva jumped up and walked straight to the man who had meekly followed the soldiers into the house and shot him in the head twice.
“You betrayed us, you son of a bitch,” she yelled at his crumpled body beneath her feet, then spat on him.
Julia hadn’t moved from where she knelt, firing the first shot of her war with the Germans. She looked closely at the bloody face of Martin Drossen, who had fallen only a few feet from her, eyes open, frozen in death, staring at her. His moment on the stage had come to this. Erich was right. It is only when you can see the face of those who have died, those whom you have killed and never knew, that war has any meaning at all. Without the face, there is nothing to remember, only a statistic. Julia leaned over Martin and gently closed his eyes, then looked at Eva.
“We have killed three men this morning Eva. I wish God would tell us which side He is on now, then we would know what to do,” she said in a remorseful tone.
“My sweet, gentle friend. Do you think God is hanging around to see which side is going to win this war?”
“This man seemed to be a kind German, that’s all,” Julia continued, pointing to Martin.
“He was. That’s why he is dead. He wasn’t ready to kill us, or anyone else. Only animals fight wars.”
“Are we animals now?”
“Yes, fully grown ones. Like you said, we’ve just killed three people,” Eva said, walking to the door and looking toward the road where the two motorcycles were parked.
“Right now we need to try and stay alive ourselves. These bodies and the motorcycles have to be hidden before they are missed by other patrols.”
Julia rolled the soldier Eva had shot onto his stomach, trying hard not to look at the man’s lifeless face. With some effort, she pulled a small leather wallet from his pants pocket, took the few Reich marks it held, and replaced the wallet. The peasant man she would leave alone. In Eva’s eyes he had betrayed them, but to Julia he was just an ignorant man trying to survive for one more day.
Martin Drossen carried a beautiful brown embroidered leather case for a wallet that held five Reich marks and one photograph of a young woman in a nurse’s uniform. Written across the bottom of the picture were the words, “Together in love always, Maria.” Julia looked at the photograph for several seconds, then for reasons hidden from her by the drama of the moment, she placed the photograph in the inside pocket of her jacket. Later, whenever she would look at it, doing so kept before her Martin Drossen’s gentle face, reminding her always of the day she became an animal trying to survive like everyone else in a world full of hate. Perhaps, she would think, when the killing was all done, she could go and find the young nurse and tell her of Martin.
Eva burst through the front door and walked to where Julia was sitting by Martin’s body, streams of sweat dripping from her face.
“We can’t use the man’s spring pond to hide the bodies in—frozen over solid. But I found a better place. Let’s take the old man first,” she said, signaling Julia to lift his legs.
“Where are we taking him?”
“Just follow me and try and step in my tracks,” Eva said, backing through the door and down the staircase.
Julia saw ahead the fresh tracks made by Eva leading to the old man’s outhouse, and shuddered at what they were about to do.
“
You won’t like it, but it’s all we have. Somehow it seems we are always around shit when it’s there,” Eva said.
When they got to the outhouse, Julia saw that Eva had kicked the toilet loose from the wood floor it was resting on, exposing the pit full of human feces and lime below.
Eva stopped at the door and looked at Julia’s questioning expression for a moment.
“We can’t hide them under the snow—they’ll find them when it melts,” she said.
“I know. We should do it quickly and be done.”
The old man was the first of the three to rest his soul in the outhouse, with Martin Drossen last. Each was pushed with some difficulty through the hole face down so their arms wouldn’t catch on the floor. When it came Martin’s turn, Julia tried to avert seeing his face, but couldn’t, and cried a little inside. When they were through, though, thinking back on where Martin and the others were made her glad she had kept the picture of Maria—it shouldn’t be rotting in such a filthy mess.
As quickly as they had disposed of the three bodies, Eva moved the toilet back over the hole, leaving it unattached because of the heavy damage she had done kicking it loose from the metal ties securing it to the floor.
She then followed Julia back to the house, leaving their tracks as they were in the snow. They looked no different than if the old man had gone to the outhouse several times. Before going into the house, both picked up large handfuls of snow to cover the gathering pools of blood left by the three men. Julia continued to bring in more snow while Eva scrubbed the floor with a short wooden floor mop she found in the kitchen. When the mop turned red with blood, Julia cleaned it the best she could in piles of snow away from the house. After fifteen minutes, only three small spots remained where the blood had stained the floor. Both then carried more snow to the fireplace, dousing the flames and then the embers. Julia quickly kicked some of the dead embers across the floor onto the remaining stains, mashing and scuffing the floor with them. The stains could still be seen, but only if you came in looking for them. When she was through, she went to the larger of the two bedrooms where Eva was trying to reduce the only bed quilt the man owned into a tighter roll.
“The damn thing is too dirty and smelly to take,” she said, tossing the quilt back onto the bed, though it could help keep them warm in the nights ahead.
“Leave it. We need to get as far as we can from this horrible place before other patrols come looking for the two soldiers.”
On their way out, Julia looked back at the kitchen and spotted a pint bottle of vodka sitting back in the far corner of the countertop.
“We can take that—it might be warmer than the quilt and certainly won’t have any lice,” she said, nodding to Eva.
Walking down to the road, they decided to deliberately make two new rows of tracks in the snow alongside those the soldiers had left coming to the house.
“The returning footprints might fool them for awhile. What we do now is just a guess,” Julia said, as they both stood by the parked motorcycles, looking at the frozen landscape all about them.
“God surely is not going to let us freeze to death standing here next to these fucking German motorcycles,” Eva yelled, frustrated with the indecisiveness about which direction they should go.
“We have to go south,” Julia finally said, “and push the motorcycles on the road until we find a heavy stand of trees and brush that will hide them from passing eyes.”
“But our radio and weapons are back the other way, toward Prague,” Eva said, pointing north where the snow-covered road seemingly disappeared from the earth as it blended into the vast whiteness surrounding it.
“I know, but our best chance is to reach the great forests further south of here. The Germans will not come into the forests without a reason. There should be more farms along the way, too,” Julia said, kicking up the parking arm on one motorcycle and walking it onto the road.
Twenty minutes passed before they came upon an unusually heavy grouping of trees and brush ahead on the right. Moving as fast as they could on the icy road, Julia saw a small opening through the roadside brush leading into the woods, and moved into them with her motorcycle. Eva quickly followed in Julia’s tracks with the second motorcycle. Then she tore the distributor loose from each machine, walked further into the woods, and threw them into an isolated cluster of brush and leaves.
“Too bad they didn’t teach us how to ride these crazy things back in England,” Julia said.
“Unladylike. We would surely be ‘straddling’ such a big machine with our legs, you know,” Eva laughed in a mocking English accent, flavored with her Slavic tongue.
Julia laughed, too, but more from relief, in gaining distance from the three men they had killed. The Gestapo were too good not to find the dead soldiers and the motorcycles, and even them, unless they were too far away to care about. By her calculations they were ten to twelve miles from Klatovy, a small town to the southeast of little importance to the Germans, except for the railroad nearby. From there it might be another eight miles to the deep forest along the German border. They would be safe there, and maybe so in Klatovy, if they could find one God-fearing person still willing to help them. She had always loved this part of Bohemia, mostly because of its raw beauty. Somehow it always stayed fixed before you, unchanging in the summer heat and winter snows. Looking up at the broad skies, Julia’s spirits gladdened when she realized that what she most wanted was happening. Patches of deep blue had begun peeking through small holes in the heavy blanket of gray clouds that had kept all warmth from the earth. With each passing minute the patches of blue grew bolder until the long fingered rays of the afternoon sun broke through the shattering grayness, bringing their healing grace to earth’s life again. The warming air, though, was taking its toll on the snow and ice, making the roads much more treacherous to walk on, and slowing Julia and Eva to a snail-like pace. Yet, they both knew, the slushy roads would slow the Germans, too, as they moved supplies. Other than the patrols, the roads should stay empty until late in the day, or perhaps even tomorrow, giving them a slight advantage in avoiding more confrontations.
After two hours they reached a narrow road turning southeast to Klatovy. The village, Julia knew, was no different from many of the other small towns scattered around Pilsen except that the railroad was there, which meant the Germans would be, too. Ahead a hundred yards, a rail line could be seen crossing the road, which she believed ran between Klatovy and Pilsen. Upon reaching the crossing, she paused for a moment, looking west towards Pilsen. Their contacts with Czech and British intelligence were there, unless the Gestapo had found them. There were no contacts in Klatovy. Even so, the small village would bring them nearer to the great forest where they could hide safely for weeks if necessary, until the warming spring winds arrived and the Germans tired in their hunt for them. Either way would be like testing the waters of hell once the hidden motorcycles were discovered. Looking down a long span in the rails leading towards Klatovy, Julia quickly saw that passing trains had cleared most of the snow from the tracks and shoulders. Moving quickly onto the gravel shoulder, she began walking at a much brisker pace with Eva close behind. They would be in Klatovy in less than two hours, she yelled back at Eva, as they moved deeper into the snow-covered hills rising around them like giant puffs of white clouds that had come down to rest on the earth for a while.
***