In some villages, the women come out to line the road with buckets and pans of soup or acorn coffee, which they set up on chairs beside the road and hand to the first lucky prisoners who pass by. Sometimes it’s just hot water, but we’re grateful for anything warm. Our guards mostly ignore the women and let us pause for a second or two to drink whatever’s on offer, though occasionally there’s the stain of coffee or soup in the snow, and we know that a guard farther ahead has overturned whatever the woman had made. Once there are small pieces of vegetable in the stained snow from spilled soup, and men scoop them into their tin cups to warm later or pick out the frozen vegetable cubes to suck as they walk.
One elderly civilian man is handing out newspapers, urging them on men who don’t understand what he’s saying.
“We can’t read bloody Polack,” someone says, pushing them away.
The man tries in German. “For insulation, to line your clothes,” and Ralph takes some, translating loudly for those around us and thanking the man. Behind us the pile of newspapers is quickly depleted. At our next stop we wrap the papers around our bodies, shoving them down the trousers and up under the battle dress. To my surprise I can feel a small difference.
In one nameless ordinary village, a woman swaddled in shawls ladles thin gruel out of a pot, and we stop to fill our tin mugs. When I look closer she’s not old at all, but about the same age as my mother, with prematurely gray hair. She never takes her eyes off me. My friends thank her in English and German, and she replies in Polish. We shake our heads to show we don’t understand. She slowly translates into German. “Perhaps…some other mother…will do this for…my son,” she says. Ralph repeats her words in English. I put my head down, because tears have filled my eyes.
That night—our seventh on the road—we are led again onto a farm, but this time we are too far back in the line to be able to find spaces in the outbuildings. We drag our sledge from one shed and barn to another, but every inch is taken by exhausted men, crammed and scrunched without space to lie down.
“Move over,” says Bill, but there’s nowhere for them to move to, and as we leave the last building, I begin to panic. As night falls, the temperature’s dropping fast again, and we’ll be the unmoving bundles of rags in the snow tomorrow morning unless we can find shelter. Ralph finds the bald guard and pleads with him in German. “Please take us to one of the other billets, the next village perhaps. There’s nowhere left for us. We’ll all die. Please.”
The guard looks exhausted. I can see ice beginning to form in his one-day stubble. He looks us over and hesitates for a second.
“We can pay you,” says Ralph. “We’ve got some tins left.”
The guard still hesitates. “A hundred cigarettes,” he says at last.
Ralph replies, “We’ve only got a few cigarettes. Coffee maybe? Please. We’ve come all this way together.”
The guard weighs up effort and reward; then he shrugs and says, “These are my orders. Tell the other prisoners to move up and make room.”
“For the love of God!” Ralph begs. “Even just for two of us? For the boy?” But the guard turns and shuffles away. Ralph swings back to us, desperation in his eyes. “I’m so sorry. He won’t do it for anything but a hundred fags.”
Max says, “It’s good to know my life is worth twenty-five fags.”
The guard disappears into the snow. It’s no good going after him.
“We could maybe build a shelter against a wall of a shed,” offers Bill doubtfully. “We could use the sledge somehow.…”
Thin snow begins to fall again, and I make a decision. Checking we’re out of sight of the guards, I stride out toward the farmhouse, the others following behind.
“What’re you doing?” Bill asks, but I don’t answer.
I knock firmly on the back door. It opens a couple of centimeters, and the light from a kitchen candle falls out into the snow. In the slit of the door, I can see an old man, skeleton thin, with luxuriant white hair.
I speak very little Polish, but we all understands as he hisses, “Go away!” I’ve put my boot in the door so he can’t shut it. He’s muttering something else, about the Nazis. Probably that they’d shoot him if he helps us, or that they are coming back, having been billeted on him.
“Varshahvay,” I interrupt gruffly in my best imitation of a Polish accent. “Varshahvay”
He releases pressure on the door a tiny fraction so my foot isn’t so tightly jammed, and he peers out at us in the sliver of light from his kitchen. I point to us and say, “Cztery. Us four. Varshahhvay,” and we can see him hesitate.
He tries to look behind us into the darkness, to see if we are being watched. Then he lets go of the door handle and slips through, joining us out in the yard. The snow is falling thicker as he scans the four of us, and flicks his head to look all around him like a wary bird.
“Warszawy?” he asks, and we all nod.
He reaches back into the kitchen for a shovel and his coat, then scuttles away down the side of the house, and beckons us to follow. Measuring distances with his hands from a window, he stops and begins to the clear snow, heaped waist deep against the outside wall. After a few minutes, he’s tiring, though the snow is light, and Bill takes the spade from him, digging down to ground level. All the time the farmer’s looking around him, terrified. Then the spade makes contact with the hollow sound of a wooden trapdoor, and we scrabble the snow aside, until the door to the cellar can be opened. We grab our kit bags from the sledge, and he hustles the four of us down, as quickly as possible. We half-tumble over one another down the little ladder onto a hard stone floor. Ralph tries to bring the sledge with our last parcels, but the farmer pushes him away with the shovel, down into the cellar. The trapdoor bangs shut above our heads, and we are in total darkness. We can hear the farmer shoveling snow onto the trapdoor, and for a second, I think he’s burying us and this will be our coffin. Then Bill’s fumbling for a match in his kit bag.
“My bloody hands are too cold,” he whispers, trying to strike it over and over.
“Maybe the box is damp,” suggests Max. “Try the floor.”
We hear the swish of a match on the stone floor, and there’s a flare of light as it catches. Bill stands and lifts the match above his head, and we see we’re in a small cellar, with empty shelves where food was once stored. There’s just enough room for us to lie down, and we have our blankets wrapped around us, but no provisions, and our sledge is outside.
“I’ve got a few candle stubs,” says Max, and we hear him opening his kit bag and rifling through it. A match is struck again, and after a candle’s lit, our shadows leap up the walls. Max lines up three more candle stubs, but we can all see they won’t last till morning.
We sit down on the hard floor, and each opens our kit bags to see what food might remain. Bill has a wizened turnip. I have a tin of pilchards and Ralph has prunes. Max says he doesn’t have anything.
There’s a hasty discussion.
“Once he’s gone, we could go back out and look for the sledge,” suggests Bill.
Ralph isn’t sure. “But we might get caught coming out.”
“Better stay here,” agrees Max.