She gave me a smile.
“Oh, don’t worry, he was all through. Your horses should come first, anyway.”
Either something had gotten lost in the translation or the officer in Reinsberg had expedited things the best way he knew how.
The requisition read that the Wustrow garrison was to assist us in recovering “our stolen horses.” The girl ordered the reluctant lieutenant to confiscate the horses immediately. He nodded, and I wondered if he had accidentally put on her uniform. I thanked her profusely and again expressed my apologies.
“I’ll catch up later. Anyway, he needed a breather,” she winked.
The officer quickly rounded up a couple soldiers and Jean, Michel, and I led our military escort to the barn where the draft horses were being kept. The farmer’s protests fell on deaf ears. The officer had only one thing on his mind and it wasn’t his duties. I couldn’t blame him.
Jean and Michel led a pair of well-kept Percherons to the country estate. We calmed the animals with a couple buckets of oats and a bale of hay. Since they were too fat to saddle, we needed to
“organize” harnesses and a wagon. That wouldn’t be an easy task.
The Soviets had confiscated nearly every vehicle in Wustrow. We had gotten the horses and our permits quicker than expected, so we were confident that we would jump this new hurdle and be on our way home in a couple days.
“Ou nous pouvons revivre, aimer, aimer” (Where we can live again and love), Michel laughed as he led the horses into the stalls.
I was holding Stella the last time I heard that refrain. I walked into the courtyard with tears welling in my eyes. I had lost almost all faith of ever holding her again.
One of us was always in the barn keeping guard over our new prized possessions. There were no secrets in such a small town, and once the farmer learned of the horses’ new home he made daily visits. He would brush their coats, hug their necks, and kiss them on the nose, all the while blubbering like a four-year-old. He tried to make us feel sorry for him. Without those draft horses he couldn’t work his fields, but we had no pity. One time he even offered me a smoked ham for their return. I shook my head, no.
“Go break your back tilling your fields just as we broke our backs digging ditches for your glorious Führer.”
It would be a long and arduous trip to the French border. At least four main Germany rivers—the Hafel, the Elbe, the Weser, and the Rhine—must be crossed. No one knew if there were any bridges still standing. The rubble-filled towns might not present opportunities for “organizing” provisions en route. So, in between scouring the countryside for anything with wheels, we canned a sheep and fruit preserves. We lived off a stray goat that I shot while leaning out the cottage’s back window. That was the last time I fired at anything in Germany, because the Soviets posted notices forbidding the carrying of weapons. Nevertheless, Jean and Michel went off with the shotguns for a morning rabbit hunt. When I pointed out that their activities might prove dangerous, Jean replied, “Those signs don’t apply to us. We’re on the Allied side.”
All morning I heard them sniping away in the woods. Around noon, a truck filled with soldiers rumbled up the road. Hearing the shotguns, the truck stopped. The soldiers seemed unsure of what to do. Coming out of the house, I could hear them talking. The truck turned down a trail and disappeared into the woods. When my two friends didn’t return that evening I was certain that they’d had a run-in with the soldiers.
At daybreak I followed Michel’s and Jean’s tracks to the bank of a stream, where their footprints mingled with a multitude of heavy bootprints. I walked over to the garrison, hoping that they could tell me something. The guard standing near the front door didn’t question me when I walked inside the house. Wearing “pajamas”
was almost as good as having an authorized pass. To my surprise, the Soviet lieutenant’s stunning lovebird was sitting behind a desk in the front room. She had a white piece of cardboard pinned to her blouse with her name, Sonia and Dolmetscher, German for “interpreter,” written across it. Her gorgeous smile turned to a frown when I told her why I had come.
Without hesitating she said, “I have a driver making a round trip to the provost in Reinsberg. You can catch a ride. They might have some information.”
“Can’t you call?” I was in no hurry to leave. Gazing at Sonia was too enjoyable.
She shook her head. “The telephone lines are still down.”
Sonia went to an open window, barked in Russian, then handed me some paperwork for the driver. She touched my arm. “I’m sure your friends are fine.”
The driver was a gray-haired reservist in his fifties who had worked the oil fields in the Caucasus. His deeply creased face complemented the battle-scarred Nazi amphibious car he was steering.
He drove slowly because he feared the cracked windshield might shatter in our faces. Avoiding the numerous holes left by tank and mortar shells seemed to be wearing him thin. I handed him one of my Austrian cigarettes.
“Danke Schön.”
He parked the clunker to the side of the road so he could light his smoke. “I, too, was a prisoner in Germany,” he said in halting German, “but in the First World War.”
Exhaling smoke, he released the clutch. The gears groaned and the car jerked forward. He waved his cigarette at the surrounding meadows. “This is nice country when you’re on the right side.”
At the Red Army headquarters in Reinsberg, a plump major, his chest covered with hardware, deigned me a few moments of his precious time. Through his interpreter, who looked like a farm servant and stuttered incomprehensible German, I deciphered that the major hadn’t received a report of two Frenchmen hunting in the woods. I wanted to ask more questions, but the major turned his back to me. My time was up.
I hoped that Jean and Michel were in some Russian prison, but it was more than likely their swollen bodies were floating down the river. Either way, I was now alone, and my urgency to leave dissipated. I wanted my parents to know that I was alive, that I had survived, but the road home had excessive perils—too many unknowns to go it alone. If I was patient, the right traveling companions would eventually come along. So I took the whining farmer up on his offer and gave him back his horses for the smoked ham hanging in his chimney.
CHAPTER 23
I had become friendly with a plain-spoken former truck driver whose property I crossed every time I went into town. Arthur Novak was a stocky man in his fifties. The Nazis had thrown him into Oranienburg Penitentiary, a massive prison on the outskirts of Berlin, in 1935 because of his membership in the Communist Party.
Our conversations were short but never frivolous, always touching on politics and the events of the last twelve years. When he learned of Jean and Michel’s disappearance, he invited me to stay with him.
Since I knew his political leanings, and that we had a mutual hatred for “the god with a moustache,” I accepted without hesitation.
Arthur owned a small lakefront cottage that he shared with his wife and seventeen-year-old niece, Trautchen, whose parents had been killed during one of the bombing raids on Berlin. I slept in the guesthouse, a converted greenhouse situated between the house and the main road. Under the bed I stored my only possessions: two knapsacks, one with my cigarettes and the other stuffed with the silverware from the loft. Although Arthur didn’t ask anything of me, I kept his table stocked with fish and asparagus.