“Emil!”
“Papa!”
He spun around, and the dreams and spirits of hope that had lived in him for more than two years became real and human again. Adeline was jumping down from the first car with Walt and Will right behind her. They ran at each other and fell into each other’s arms.
Emil held Adeline tight when both their legs wobbled and they sank to their knees, hugging and kissing each other. The boys came in to hold them, all of them shaking, sobbing, and bursting with a happiness so beautiful and pure, none of them would ever forget it.
“We’ll never be apart again,” Emil said. “I promise you that.”
“Never,” Adeline said.
“Never,” Walt said.
“Never ever,” Will said.
They held on to each other as if they’d all arisen from the dead, barely hearing the conductor put their little wagon beside them. Finally, when the train began to pull out of the station, Adeline drew back her head from the crook of Emil’s shoulder, blinking away her tears and smiling in awe as she gazed up into his eyes and saw they were burning with brilliant love for her, just the way she’d dreamed it.
Overwhelmed, she choked, “Our life is a miracle, Emil!”
“One miracle after another,” Emil said, and kissed Adeline like it was the very first time.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
September 23, 1951
Aboard the USS General R. M. Blatchford
Fog had formed after sunset and turned the cloudy night as black as any Emil Martel could remember. Nearing midnight, it grew dank cold, the kind that gets in your bones, but he refused to leave the foredeck of the troop transport where he stood near the bow, peering west, eager for any sign of light.
Earlier in the evening, there had been many other pilgrims on deck with Emil, all looking for that first glimmer of new life. But one by one they’d slipped off to their cabins, and now there remained only a handful still keeping watch.
Adeline came up behind him and put her arms around his waist. “You don’t want to come to bed? They say we can’t get off until morning anyway, and my stomach is at it again.”
“I want to see this,” he said. “I want you and the boys to see it, too.”
“Okay,” she said, snuggling up against him. “Then I’ll wait with you and pray my dinner stays down for the first time since we got on this ship.”
“That would be a gift.”
“Wouldn’t it?”
As far as the Martels were concerned, every day that had followed their escapes from Communism and their reunion in the West had been one more miracle, a gift from God for which they were deeply and constantly grateful. Emil and Adeline had not cared that they all lived for a short time in cramped quarters at the displaced persons camp. And they did not mind toiling out in the fields as hard as they had under Stalin while the boys attended school. The food was infinitely better, and they were together again, free to make something out of their second chance at life.
Adeline told Emil everything that had happened to her and the boys after he was dragged away by the Polish militiamen. Emil gave her an edited version of events after he was taken. He described the long march to the train that took him to Poltava. He told her about living in the basement of the museum with two thousand other men and the diseases that had ravaged his fellow prisoners. He even told Adeline a bit about Corporal Gheorghe and how he’d come to Poltava and how they’d been on the death detail and planned to escape together, only to have the Romanian transferred to another prison camp with higher security. And he described in detail how he’d escaped and rode trains west.
But Emil still felt he could not tell Adeline about the massacre in Dubossary and how he was able to confess to the Romanian corporal but not to her. He didn’t want to hurt Adeline or make her feel less about him in any way. He felt she’d been through too much already.
During the summer of 1947, the Martels were moved to more-permanent housing in Lütgenholzen, south of Hanover and about two hundred and fifty-five kilometers west of Berlin, where Emil and Adeline continued to work in the fields while the world tried to find permanent homes for them and for the millions of other people displaced by World War II and its aftermath. Many refugees were going to South America, including Argentina. Others had their sights on Canada and the United States.
The Martels wanted to go to North America, but they needed a sponsor, a relative or someone residing there and willing to give Emil a job and his family a place to live for a year while they got on their feet. They also needed to show that they were in good health. Adeline had never felt better as they settled into their new life. Walt and Will grew, put on weight, and made big strides academically in that first year. But Emil’s health was not good. He suffered abdominal pain and was often violently ill with vomiting and diarrhea. He turned jaundiced and weak.
In the summer of 1948, Emil collapsed in the fields and was rushed to a hospital where doctors discovered eggs and larvae in his stool. Whether it was from the pig manure Emil had spread in the fields or from the garbage and rancid food he’d had to eat at times during his escape from the prison camp, the doctors determined he was infected with a tapeworm that had attacked his liver, leaving him
