With the warmer weather and wanting to avoid all human contact, Emil slept in forests by day and walked mostly at night for almost three weeks, navigating by the stars to put as much distance as he could between himself and that last prison camp outside Chelm. He waited until the morning of July 19 to walk into the farming community of Pulawy, northwest of Lublin, Poland, and ask to buy a ticket to the last stop before the German border.
The clerk gave him a strange look, but said, “That would be Rzepin.”
“Rzepin, that’s the place,” Emil said. “My great-aunt lives there.”
The clerk was skeptical but sold him the ticket. After buying food for the ride, Emil took a window seat, put his hat over his eyes, and slept as the train took him across the country. He had to change trains twice, once in Warsaw. His plan was to leave the third train at Rzepin, then cross the German border in the dark on foot.
Twelve hours after he’d started, however, when the third train of his trip made an extended stop in the city of Poznan, Emil recognized possibility when he saw it. It was early evening, still a few hours from darkness, and he had grown hungry again. Emil left the train, entered the main station, and saw a large group of men, close to fifty of them, gaunt, shabbily dressed, and sitting cross-legged on the floor under the watch of three Soviet armed guards.
He bought the usual staples of his bland diet and asked a clerk at the ticket counter who the men were and was told they were German prisoners of war going home. There had been some sort of agreement just reached that allowed for a prisoner swap. These men, all originally from western Germany, were going to be swapped for eastern German prisoners of war.
Feeling breathless, and remembering again how the Romanian was always talking about the opportunities laid before you when you have a clear vision of where you want to go, Emil said, “You mean they are all going to west Germany?”
“To Braunschweig in the British Zone. I assume that’s west.”
Emil thanked her and moved to one side where he could eat and watch the German prisoners and the Soviet soldiers. The men sitting cross-legged on the floor all seemed relaxed, happy to be going home, even if it was as prisoners.
And why not? Emil thought. They might be in prison in the West for a while longer, but when they’re out, they’ll be free men. You can’t say that about the men coming the other way.
Then he remembered something else Corporal Gheorghe had told him about most people seeing the door of good fortune open, but then not acting, not walking through the door, not taking a chance, only to see the door slam in their face.
You decide; then you act. You choose faith; then you walk through the door.
Another, larger group of German prisoners came into the station with their fingers laced behind their heads at the same time the conductor entered from trackside to call for all passengers westbound. Emil made his decision and acted in faith, stuffing the rest of his food in the pockets of the jacket he carried.
The original three Soviet soldiers ordered their prisoners to stand and lace their fingers behind their heads at the same time the bigger group tried to move past them to get better seats on the train. There was some bumping. Grumbling. Cursing. In the mild upheaval, Emil slipped in among the prisoners and laced his fingers behind his head.
No one checked Emil’s documents before he boarded the train. If they had, he would have shown them his ticket to Rzepin and gotten off at the next stop. Instead, the train was waved through at the German border, picked up speed, and took Emil swiftly west.
He modified his cover story on the ride, telling the men who asked that he was Corporal Emil Martel, an ethnic German who fought for the Wehrmacht. He’d survived Stalingrad and fought at the Dnieper River where he lost his documents before being captured and put in a prison in a place called Poltava.
“But you are not German,” sniffed one of the men. “Why are you here with us?”
Emil fixed him with a steady gaze, then smiled, and offered him some dried sausage. “No, I’m not German. But Reichsführer Himmler himself thought I had purer Aryan blood than most. Because of it, my family was protected by the SS and brought to Germany. They are waiting for me.”
The man seemed slightly taken aback and accepted the meat. “Where?”
“Braunschweig,” he said. “They’re in a camp near there for refugees.”
“British Zone,” the man said, his suspicions dulling as he chewed some of the sausage. “That’s not far from where they’re taking us.”
“I’ll just be happy knowing my family is near and safe until I am freed.”
An hour and a half later, the train passed south of Berlin and Adeline and the boys. Emil would later figure out that he’d gone within eighty kilometers of them.
The train finally stopped east of Wolfsburg. Emil and the other prisoners were ordered out onto the narrow platform while the three passenger cars they were riding in were transferred to another engine. It was sweltering hot by then, and the prisoners were irritable and restless when they were told to show their documents before getting back on the train.
Emil went boldly near the front of the line, ready to bluff his way on. But he’d no sooner told the soldiers that his documents were lost at Stalingrad than he found himself ordered to stand over against the wall of the train depot. The car behind the locomotive was filled with prisoners before the soldiers checking documents moved on to
