We had one more stop, at Frývaldov, and we stood to the side of the truck while the rest of the crates were unloaded. By now it was lunchtime, and the Nazi driver and guard sat on a wall and chewed on sausage and bread. We watched them like starving dogs, and I thought I might faint from hunger.
There was a short discussion, and then the guard gave a small nugget of bread each to me, Bill, the Americans and the Frenchman, but not to the Russian. I nibbled at my bread like a mouse, trying to make it last, and balled up a small amount, which I meant to give to the Russian once nobody was looking. But then hunger overcame me, and I ate it. I reminded myself of the stories of what Russian soldiers had done to women, but I didn’t feel good about my behavior. It wasn’t Christian. The guards passed around a canteen of water, and we all took a swig, wiping the top of it with our sleeves. I handed it to the Russian, but the guard snatched it away.
We passed through a checkpoint, and I realized I’d left my homeland for the first time in my life. It was a shock to know that here, if I spoke, I wouldn’t be understood; in fact, people would laugh at me because Poles found Czech speech funny. I thought I wouldn’t want to be laughed at; then immediately I wondered that in such danger I could be concerned about being ridiculed. I was still such a child.
And then we were descending the other side of the Jeseník Mountains into flat farmland again. Fog was closing in and the trees were charcoal smudges on the horizon. Tall avenues of trees spread out behind our truck on the long, straight roads. The road stretched out behind, taking me farther and farther from my mother, my brother, everything I knew, leaving them in fog.
It was midafternoon before the truck trundled through the gates of an enormous POW camp, with watchtowers and barbed wire fences. Dread clutched my stomach, sending waves of sickness through me. I pressed my leg into Bill’s, from hip to knee, like one last lingering kiss. My imagination galloped ahead, to me being discovered as a girl, dragged, screaming, from Bill, never to see him again. I saw Nazi soldiers lining up to rape me, forcing Bill to watch, until one did me the favor of a bullet through the brain. I hoped he wasn’t thinking the same.
We were unloaded just inside the gates, and prisoners watched us from beyond more barbed wire fences. Perhaps they were interested because we were the only things that lifted the monotony of the hours, though every day must have brought new prisoners through the gates. Perhaps they were hoping to see old friends. They checked out our clothes and faces, and I wondered what movement or expression would betray me as a girl.
“British?” someone shouted.
Bill looked in the direction of the voice and nodded.
“Welcome to the holiday camp,” called the voice.
Bill smiled grimly and shouted, “What time’s the knobbly-knees contest?”
Laughter erupted around us, and the guard looked over. I’d never understood the British need to make jokes out of everything, but now I began to recognize that it was an aspect of courage.
Bill was scanning the faces to see if there was anyone he recognized. He’d told me it wasn’t likely, because men moved through here so quickly into the Arbeitskommando work camps. Perhaps he was thinking about Harry and wishing he hadn’t left him behind. Or just looking for a familiar face in this ocean of strangers.
We were prodded forward through another set of gates into the compound. The two rows of wire fencing looked flimsy until I raised my eyes to the tower and saw the guns, and pictured the guards, wounded or too old for the Russian front, itching to pull a trigger to prove themselves still men.
During our long nights walking, Bill had warned me about what might lie in wait if we were captured. First, we’d be entered in their endless books. Names, ranks and serial numbers again. Then they might delouse us, and here the greatest danger lay. In some camps prisoners would be taken to the delousing station, stripped naked, showered or hosed down and then painted on the underarm and genital area with louse killer. If I was taken there, I’d be finished. We’d be finished. Everything would be finished.
He’d also told me that escaped prisoners were normally put in the “cooler” for thirty days. I could barely imagine half an hour in a damp, cold cell on my own, let alone thirty days away from Bill, away from any other people, so far from my mother.
I bit my tongue, hoped a Hail Mary would contain the fear, prevent it bubbling, like a hot spring from my lips. Hail Mary, I said over and over in my head.
Ahead, I could see block upon block of long single-story buildings that must have been the “huts.” The ground below our feet was mud, which had been stamped hard as a road by so many feet. We were prodded into the third building, where an overweight Nazi sergeant asked Bill for his name and serial number. Bill replied smartly, looking straight forward. I practiced in my head the details we’d agreed for me.
“Which working party did you escape from?” the sergeant asked.
“I can’t remember,” said Bill. “Went for a stroll and got a bit lost.”
I feared they would strike him for his insolence, but the guards seemed to be used to this British humor.
The sergeant motioned me forward and asked my name. I placed two fingers on my lips and mimed writing on a paper.
“Permission to speak,” said Bill.
The sergeant raised his eyebrows and turned to a young soldier with a lazy eye. “Call Sergeant Maddox,” he ordered in German, and as the soldier left, the telephone rang. Perhaps this would be someone reporting a Czech girl on the run.
“Wait,” he said to us, picking up the receiver. “No, the turnips have not arrived,” he said. A conversation about supplies of vegetables! The normality of it slowed the crazy beating of my heart. I focused on translating it into English.
We waited. He regarded us, unseeing, as he talked into the phone, and I avoided his eyes, taking in his office, with its filing cabinets, table lamp, typewriter, coats and hats on pegs, so many ordinary things in this unnatural world, until the door opened again and the lazy-eyed guard returned with a young British soldier, presumably Sergeant Maddox.
Maddox’s worried expression had carved a prematurely deep furrow into his forehead, and his metal-rimmed spectacles were held together with tape. He was probably only our age, but the glasses and the worry line made him look older.
The fat sergeant ended the vegetable conversation with a “Heil Hitler” and waved to Bill to indicate he should speak to the British sergeant.
Bill pointed at me. “It’s a rum do. He can hear but doesn’t speak. I think it’s some sort of shell shock. I found him on the road. He’ll have to write his details.”
Maddox flicked back a flop of brown hair and translated, in correct schoolboy German, pushing his glasses up onto his nose. The sergeant stood up slowly from behind his desk and walked toward me. I kept my eyes fixed on the wall behind his shoulder, trying to read the smallest words on a notice. He bent in very close so I could smell his breath and almost feel his stomach pressing against me. I stared straight ahead, past his ear, at the clock on the wall. I thought he must be able to hear the ticktock of my heart.
Finally he pulled back and called over his shoulder to the young solider, “Beardless boy. Mad, silent, beardless boy. This is our fearsome enemy. The British are as desperate as the Russians. They know we will win.”