Emil ended up spending three hours wandering around the train station, watching, listening until he knew when the next freight and passenger trains west were leaving. He had more than enough money left to buy his way to Poland but feared having to reveal his lack of documents to do so. In the end, he retrieved the pickax and went back out into the freight yard.
It was still bitterly cold and windy. He found the freight train he was looking for and tried the sliding doors on several boxcars before finding one unlocked. He acted as if he were digging a hole with the pickax outside the car until the train started to move.
Emil was climbing inside with the pickax, when he heard shouts. He got in, looked out, and saw workmen running at him. One was yelling, “Hey, that’s my coat!”
“I left you mine!” Emil cried, shut the door, and threw his weight against it as the train picked up speed.
Emil left that train at the very next stop. He could not chance that the workmen were calling ahead about a thief and stowaway. After dark, he caught the next freight train going west and got off at the next stop. It became a pattern and a way of survival for Emil over the next ten days.
Not only could he find food, water, and warmth in the train stations and depots, they offered him the chance to listen to the rumors and the propaganda swirling through Ukrainian society in the aftermath of the Soviet reoccupation. Everything he heard convinced him that the new life under Stalin and the Communists was the same as the old one: based on fear, tyranny, and the destruction of anyone who had an original thought or dream.
On the eleventh morning of his escape, March 20, 1946, the weather finally broke warm. On the eleventh evening of his escape, shortly after he’d crossed the Polish border and slipped out of a freight car in the town of Chelm, Emil was captured by local police.
He’d prepared for this possibility as part of his plan and began acting a little odd like Corporal Gheorghe, speaking Russian, telling them he was a survivor of Stalingrad who’d been blown up in the first wave of attacks and then walked through the battle unscathed. He was just trying to go home to find his wife and sons where he left them in Legnica. The soldiers didn’t believe him and put Emil in a jail with others awaiting deportation back to the East.
The rest of the men in the jail were miserable and angry. But Emil stayed remarkably calm, believing that this was just a detour on the road to his dream. He was going west. He was finding Adeline, Walt, and Will.
The very next day, he was saved from deportation when guards asked him if he had ever worked on a farm. Still acting like a man who’d taken shrapnel to the head, Emil nodded and was put on a truck with twenty other men who’d escaped various prison camps. They were all taken to a new camp and put to work with other men planting row crops.
Eight weeks later, in late May 1946, Emil heard that the baker in the camp kitchen needed help. Although he had chopped firewood for a bakery when he met Adeline, he had no experience at actually baking. Emil learned fast. For the next four weeks, he arose at three o’clock in the morning and went to the bakery to mix dough and heat the ovens. He ate fresh bread the entire time, gained weight, and made friends with the baker, who had worked for a time in Germany before the war.
In late June, a rumor and then a fact swept through the camp. The planting season was over and so was their usefulness. The work camp was about to close. The prisoners were to be put on trucks at dawn and then on trains headed east.
If Emil was ever to go west, ever to find his family, it had to be now. He thought like the mad Romanian and came up with a relatively simple plan that he reluctantly shared with the baker, along with a request: that the baker exchange his Russian rubles for Polish zlotys so he could buy a train ticket home to his family.
In the end, the baker agreed to his proposal with a shrug, a wink, and a nod. Emil broke his normal routine that night and did not return to his bunk after mixing and kneading the dough and then leaving it to rise. Instead, around five thirty the morning of June 29, 1946, he lay down on the warm floor of the bakery’s back room, behind the ovens, and “fell asleep.” He waited three full hours after the trucks and the other prisoners were gone before leaving the bakery with the baker yelling after him. A Polish guard came. The baker told him he’d found Emil sleeping in the back room when he was supposed to be on the truck with the others.
Emil was taken before the camp’s commanding officer, where he again acted shell-shocked and said only that he’d fallen asleep and didn’t mean to miss the train. The camp commander had wanted to leave the rural area as quickly as possible and was furious at this snag in plans.
When he was asked what to do with Emil, now that the camp was officially closed, the commander thought about it, and then said, “Take the brain-damaged idiot outside the gates; give him a swift kick in the ass; and let him go become someone else’s problem.”
Emil Martel goes west and finds his wife and sons, he thought, hearing Corporal Gheorghe’s voice in his head as he hurried away from the prison gates, massaging his sore rump, and giving thanks to Jesus, God,
