Over the next five minutes, Josef watched eight more frightened faces burrow out from within the packing cases. They were all Austrian Jews. Josef had heard that since the Anschluss at the end of March, life was now as difficult for them there as it had been for many years in Germany. In fact most of their transports were Austrian now; the majority of German Jews that could leave had already gone.
Of the nine that evening, two were children: girls, one of about six or seven, the other slightly older, ten or eleven, perhaps. Of the adults, four men and three women, only two were elderly, in their sixties or more. Josef was relieved to see they were still quite mobile. It was the old ones who were always the most difficult to get over the mountains. He wondered if it was an extended family group, but he couldn’t be sure. He knew nothing about them. It was Gunter who dealt with the details of each run over the hills. Josef only knew the coded phrase for the driver and the number to expect. He had been told to expect nine, to tell the driver it was nine, and nine it now was.
We must go.
Josef briefly shook the hand of the driver again then watched the truck silently roll away, the driver letting gravity pull it back toward the trees where its engine coughed into life. The sight and sound of the departing truck left Josef with a momentary spasm of loneliness that he had to fight to shake off as he hurried to catch up with the group filing up the hill to the cowshed.
When he reached them, the youngest child shied away from him, slipping and falling sideways out of the line. Josef stepped forward to help her up, but one of the men, possibly her father, got to her first.
“Don’t touch her, German,” he spat at Josef, stepping in front of him and wrenching the little girl up from the wet ground. Back onto her feet, the child, covered with a thick scum of soil, started to cry, beating at the man with tiny, clenched fists.
In response she was tugged forward roughly, without regard to the fact that one of her feet had emerged shoeless from the sucking ground. This made her cry even more, her screams becoming so hysterical that Josef instantly pushed past the man to snatch the struggling girl up under one arm. Clamping his other hand over the little girl’s mouth, he hissed at the man, “Get her shoe and follow me quickly!”
Josef ran with her up the slope toward the cowshed, the tiny, muddy girl flexing and coiling in his grip like an earthworm in the beak of a bird until he could thrust her in through the doorway. Released inside, she started wailing again.
“Shut up!” Kurt shouted from the back of the shed, breaking his customary reticence to speak. It did no good until one of the Jewish women arrived to seize the little girl, telling her to be quiet and pulling the child tightly into her wet clothes to smother her sobs.
The remainder of the group entered the simple stone building. When the man handed back her shoe the girl turned to him and, taking the shoe, lashed out at him with its muddy heel, starting to howl all over again.
A different, rougher voice commanded, “Silence her. Immediately,” prompting the woman to say forcefully, “Ilsa Rosenberg, that’s enough,” and clamp her own hand over the distraught child’s mouth.
The Jews clustered, fearful of the dark silhouettes before them. Gunter Schirnhoffer was deliberately standing in front of a kerosene lamp set in an alcove in the rear wall of the shed, his long shadow slicing into the dirt floor at their feet. Kurt Müller was crouched to his right, also in outline, hunched over, angling his own masked face downward, using the light of the lamp to cut a tent canvas into long thin strips with a hunting knife. Its razor-sharp edge caught the reflection of the yellow light as it scythed through the material. On his other side were two mules, already in harnesses, shuffling from side to side in one of the cow-milking stalls, twitchy and skittish at all the disturbance.
Josef quickly moved alongside Kurt and squatted down into the shadows as Gunter began to address the new arrivals.
“You must all listen to me very carefully.”
Standing in a wide-eyed semicircle before him, the travelers did as they were told.
“There is no time for long speeches or even for me to repeat myself. We are three. We are neither your enemies nor your friends. You will never know our names or see our faces. We are dressed as soldiers, but to you we are simply mountain guides who will lead you into Switzerland. All you need to think about is that you are just ten kilometers away from freedom.”
The Jews looked at each other, nervously excited at the thought of such proximity to escape, until Gunter broke the spell with his customary warning.
“But, mark my words, they are not easy kilometers. We will be going over the border on an old smugglers’ track. It is long, always steep, at places narrow, and difficult. At the top, if you fall, you will have time to wish you were dead before you hit the ground.”
Gunter paused for effect.
“Follow our steps, and make them your own,” he then continued. “We are good climbers. We know the way like the backs of our hands, even in the dark. We will help you as much as we can. You will need to grit your teeth and suffer in silence. For the oldest or the smallest—you choose—we have two mules to carry you at the beginning, but the mules can’t do the final section over the rocks. At that point everyone will be on their own feet. Let me look at them.”
The nine were momentarily confused, forcing Gunter to raise his voice.
“I have already said that I don’t want to have to repeat myself. Each of you, show me your feet, your shoes. I need to see what you have got on your feet.”
The Jews looked at each other again, this time quizzically, until one lifted his leg and pushed forward a foot. The others followed his example as Gunter took the lamp from the wall behind him to look along the row of thin, smooth-soled shoes and low, leather ankle boots caked in wet mud that were now pointing at him.
“Scheisse!” he swore. “As always. Every time I tell him they must send you in boots, in something heavy, and every time it is like this. It is a bad night out there. The ground will be very wet. There will be fresh snow higher up. Scheisse! These shoes are useless. Each of you must take two strips of canvas from that man there.”
Gunter pointed to Kurt, who was sheathing his knife, gesturing him to throw a strip of the cut canvas, which he caught in one hand. Holding it out in front of him, he began to twist the length of material tightly. “Watch what I am doing. Twist the strips tight like this until they make a cord, and then bind them around your feet. It will help your feet grip, protect them a little. Adults, help the children. They need to be tied tightly.”
He turned to point to a corner of the shed. “You will find some long sticks and blankets there. Adults take one of each, and two extra blankets for the children. Keep them rolled up for now to keep them dry. You will need them higher on the hill when we move above the rain into the snow. It is going to get cold up there. When it does, you must keep moving your fingers and your toes all the time to keep the blood flowing, like this.” He held out one hand, rapidly opening and closing his fingers in demonstration. “The sticks will help you keep your balance. If you have brought anything that you can’t carry on your back then you will leave it behind—but not here. We will throw it into the woods on the way up the hill.”
The group remained motionless, rendered mute by the brisk instructions, equally afraid of the coarse soldier in front of them and the unknown journey ahead. Ilsa, the little girl who had fallen into the mud, was quiet now, instead staring intently at Josef, concentrating every hatred her small mind could conceive onto his hidden face. He winked at her in return as Gunter told him and Kurt to help the travelers get ready. The girl snapped her head away with a grimace of disgust.
While the three mountain troopers worked to ready the Jews for the arduous journey ahead, Gunter continued to brief them. “Once we leave this hut, there is to be no talking, no lights, no flames, no cigarettes, nothing but walking. We will go at a slow but even pace. We will stop every thirty minutes for five minutes. Every hour we will stop for ten more. You cannot stop in between, or we will take too long. On the top of the ridge is a small chapel. There we can stop for a longer rest, to warm up and prepare for the final, most difficult section. The entire journey will take about six to seven hours if you do as I say. If you have any questions, save them. There is nothing more that is helpful for you to know. Just concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, and take comfort in the fact that we are paid much less if we don’t get all nine of you to the other side. We will go in five minutes.”