Chapter 37 Audrey 
VECHTA, GERMANY | APRIL 1945
Audrey and Wen shuffled side by side in the small inner courtyard. It was their daily exercise hour, and the women all walked in the same direction like some sluggish human cyclone, heads bent against the relentlessly bitter wind.
Audrey was just thinking how she would rather have walked laps around her own cell when, out of nowhere, the air itself broke apart. Some unseen force shook the ground, and the women screamed. They instinctively ducked down with their hands covering their heads, as though that might help in the slightest. The guards shouted, and four more bombs fell nearby. Audrey remained on the frosted ground, thinking this might be the end, but Wen rose on unsteady legs, staring at the sky as a plane crossed over the prison compound.
“What are they doing?!” one of the inmates cried. “What is it?”
Audrey lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the glare as she looked up at Wen. A grin cracked across her friend’s cheeks the way it had that very first night in their cell, and she laughed aloud, a cloud of hot breath bursting in front of her mouth.
“It’s the Allies,” she said. Her amber eyes danced, watering with cold and relief. “They’re here.”
Audrey kept her eyes on the sky as Wen’s words sank in. She hardly dared believe that perhaps, after so long, this nightmare might be coming to an end.
Another week passed before the area surrounding the prison was shelled again. It was clear now that the airfield to the east of the prison was the Allies’ target. She and Wen lay in their bunks in the middle of the night, feeling the reverberation of the bombs falling as the air raid siren wailed in the distance.
“They’re so close, sometimes,” Wen said from the bunk above. “Does it frighten you?”
Audrey shook her head, though Wen couldn’t see her. “No. Surprisingly. Are you afraid?”
Wen snorted. “No. This kitty has already used her nine lives. You know I’m living on borrowed time now anyway.”
“I think we all are,” Audrey said.
Wen dangled one arm over the edge of the bunk, and Audrey took hold of it. They lay like that for a long while until Audrey felt her friend’s fingers start to grow heavy with sleep. Audrey gently released them, and she heard Wen turn over on the mattress, adjust the blanket.
“Hey, Audrey,” she said. “What—”
A roar unlike anything they had yet heard shattered the relative quiet of the prison. A second later, they felt the vibration of a blast so close that for a fleeting moment Audrey fully expected to die. A chunk of the wall above the cell door crashed to the floor. A chorus of screams issued from down the hall.
Audrey threw off the covers, springing from the bunk. “I think they’ve hit the prison!” she yelled, her mouth dry.
Another bomb ripped through the air and shook the earth as Wen leapt down from her bed. Chaos sounded outside the door. A shell whistled overhead and they both hit the floor.
When the walls stopped shuddering, they rose to their feet.
“Let us out!” Wen cried, hammering on the door. “For God’s sake, let us out!”
The other women were banging on their own doors, and guards continued to shout to one another beneath the constant air raid siren shrieking its warning call into the night.
Wen turned to Audrey. “This is it, isn’t? This might be it!”
Audrey swallowed. How many were already dead? She didn’t want to die in this prison, not like this. “They’re still after the airfield, but there’s a chance the bombs will miss us here.”
Wen looked confused. “I don’t mean to die. I mean to escape!”
“Escape?” Audrey said, breathing fast.
“Get your coat,” Wen said, grabbing her own.
Audrey pulled hers on and they both slid into their shoes.
There was a jangle of keys down the hall.
“Someone’s coming.” Wen pressed her cheek against the window, straining to see. “They’re unlocking the doors! Get ready.”
A guard was outside their door now. “Inmates, stand back!” he called.
They did, though Audrey could tell Wen was summoning all her available strength, readying for a fight.
The door opened and the ashen-faced guard beckoned them forward. “Move, move, single file, to the rear doors, go!”
They complied, scurrying down the hall. Audrey yelped as another bomb shook the building, but Wen practically ran ahead of her now, following the other women rushing out of the cellblock. They burst out into the cold air of the courtyard at the back of the prison. Most of the inmates were already assembled, watching the sky with frightened faces. Then Audrey smelled smoke. The sky was alight. The men’s wing of the prison, just to the east, was engulfed in flames.
Audrey spotted the prison director. She ordered everyone toward the gate and the guards began poking them into a herd. Audrey seized Wen’s arm, heart in her throat when she saw the rifle in the nearest guard’s hands.
They’re just going to shoot us, she thought, and abandon the prison.
The male prisoners were already burning to death just yards away…
The prison director shouted over the tumult. “Ladies!”
Another shell rent the air, and everyone crouched, screaming. When the shock subsided, they all rose on unsteady legs.
“Ladies!” she shouted again. “I’m opening the gates. You can stay here and take your chances with the bombs, or leave. But the surrounding fields are full of mines. The choice is yours.”
Audrey’s jaw dropped. Wen gasped beside her. The other women were yelling questions, crying. Two guards stepped forward and unlocked the iron gates, swung them open with an almighty creak, but no one moved.
Incredulous, Audrey glanced at the director. She shouted at one of the guards, something about assembling the Kubelwagens for the staff—the prison’s utility vehicles. She wasn’t even watching what the inmates were doing. Was this a trick? If they left, would the guards just pick them off from the watchtower and claim they tried to escape? Or was the end of the war really so close? If the Allies were here, then Nazi Germany’s days were over—and the director knew it. If they released all the prisoners, the staff could leave, too, and have a chance to flee home to their families.
A haze of smoke hovered over them. The flames from the men’s prison were shooting into the sky, an eerie midnight sunset, and the sound of desperate wails carried across the wind, mingling with the shriek of the siren. Audrey couldn’t stay here. Clutching Wen’s hand, she stepped forward, distancing herself from those dreadful sounds. Wen followed without hesitation.
They reached the front of the crowd and walked through the gate, into the night. Audrey’s body tensed, but no shot rang through the air, no bullet ripped a hole in her chest. Other women were trailing them now, some sticking together in pairs whilst others set out on their own. None of them looked back. A sense of terror mixed with elation at their sudden, unexpected freedom descended on Audrey.
“Go, Audrey, go!” Wen urged.
“Which way?” she shouted over the siren, struggling to catch her bearings in the chaos. The men’s prison and the airfield—the target of the Allied bombs—were to the east. To the west, the woods.
“Left, to the woods,” Wen said. “West. The Dutch border is close. We need to get out of Germany.”
Others had the same idea, and a group of them broke into a jog around the side of the prison fence. They pulled up short when they saw the guards from the men’s prison milling around at the back. The Nazis fingered their rifles, some looking serious and some laughing, imitating the screams of the inmates as they burned to death inside.
They spotted the women, and several were suddenly alert, pointing their guns at them.
I was right, Audrey thought, with a sickening swoop of fear. This is for sport. A spring hunt.
One shot cracked and they all screamed. A woman fell not far from Wen and Audrey, shot through the neck. Her head was nearly severed from her body, blood shining in the light from the burning prison and its searchlights. Audrey looked away, waiting for her own death to come.
“What are you doing?” one of the guards said to the sniper. “Don’t waste your bullets.”
More laughter.
“Have at it, ladies!” another called, gesturing to the empty field to the west: the only way into the protection of the woods, the only way toward the Allies.
The minefield. The fail-safe for the prison.
“Wagers on how long it takes to get ’em all?” a guard shouted to his comrades.
“We have to go,” Wen said, panting beside her. “We have to.”
Audrey saw herself reflected in Wen’s eyes along with the orange glow of the sky. What were the chances they would make it? How thoroughly was the field booby-trapped? Another Allied plane screamed overhead, a shell quaking the ground once more as the airfield took another hit. Audrey closed her eyes at the sound, breath heaving. She opened them again as a woman to her right shouted.
One of the inmates had either lost her mind or found her courage, and sprinted forward. They all watched for a full minute as she fled across the field toward the woods. She made it halfway before she hit a mine. The blast shocked Audrey to her core. She was already so weak, running only on blistering adrenaline. And the sight of the woman’s body blown sideways, no longer in one piece, made her knees falter.
Another shot went off behind them. One of the Nazi guards fired at the ground near one pair of inmates, deliberately missing them by two feet.
“Get a move on, you cunts!” he called. His fellows guffawed cruelly.
“Audrey, we have to go,” Wen said again, breathing hard.
They could either take their chances or stay here until the guards got bored and used them for target practice anyway. They had no choice.
“Stay behind me,” Audrey told her.
She broke into a sprint, barely feeling her feet touch the ground as she ran, and she imagined for a moment that perhaps she was flying, impervious to the web of mines lurking in the dark soil beneath the grass. She kept her eyes on the tree line ahead of her. Her goal. Her refuge.
She would not look down at her grave.
The siren from the airfield faded. Audrey barely registered the sound of Wen’s heaving breath and the blasts behind her as their unfortunate fellows met their ends. Lost limbs. All Audrey heard was the rush of her own blood in her ears as she flew across the field faster than she had ever run in her life, never diverting from her straight path.
The trees were growing closer.
A flood of instinctive willpower pushed her on.
Then she was surrounded by trees and darkness, the canopy of evergreens shutting out the unnatural orange night sky. She fell to her hands and knees, gasping for air, sweat dripping from her forehead, eyes burning from the cold wind. She caught her breath, then spun round and faced the edge of the wood again. The density of the trees only barely dampened the screams from the women who didn’t die cleanly.
Audrey pushed herself up and stumbled back to the edge of the forest. The field was littered with bodies, and pieces of bodies. She could see them all in the light from the fire and, for a fleeting moment, was sure she must be dead too. One girl had stopped in the centre of the field. It was Hannah, the tiny White Rose resister. She shivered with terror, afraid to move any farther. Another woman was moaning for Jesus somewhere on Audrey’s left, too far into the field for her to try to haul the unfortunate woman to safety. But from the looks of it, her death was imminent.
And there was Wen. At the very edge of the field. She must have hit the mine right at the end, because her body was blasted forward to settle beneath one of the first trees.
Audrey rushed to her and fell to her knees. Tears sprang to her eyes as she saw the catastrophic damage to Wen’s leg. Blood was pouring from somewhere in her abdomen too.
“Oh, Wen,” she gasped, cradling her friend in her lap. Wen’s body was shaking from shock and blood loss. She was so far gone, she wasn’t even screaming from the pain. “I’m so sorry, Wen,” Audrey cried, brushing Wen’s hair back from her forehead. A tear coursed down Wen’s pale face. “We tried. We tried.”
Wen managed the ghost of a smile. “I—told—you,” she said, her words stuttering with the force of her chills. “This kitty used up—all her lives. Got lucky. Right the—end.” She lifted a trembling arm and pointed at the edge of the minefield.
She was so close to making it. Inches.
The other dying woman stopped moaning. The air raid siren went silent. The assault must be over. A cold wind brushed the tips of its fingers over Audrey and Wen, entwined together on the frigid ground.
“You were so brave, Wen,” Audrey said through her tears. “So brave.”
Wen locked eyes with her, amber into grey. “So—you.”
Her shakes were getting worse, her breathing shallow, and Audrey couldn’t bear to see her suffer any longer. She braced Wen’s weight with one arm and slid her own shoe off with the other hand. She wiggled her fingers beneath the sole and found the cyanide pill.
“Here,” she said. “Take this. It’ll help the pain.”
Wen opened her mouth without question, like a child to a trusted parent, and Audrey placed the pill between her remaining back teeth.
“Bite down.”
The effect was as instant as Friedrich had told her it would be. Wen shuddered for a moment, harder than before, and Audrey embraced her tightly until she felt her breathing stop. Her body grew heavy.
Audrey choked on a sob, lowering Wen to the ground again. The night sky was luminous in her eyes, staring, unseeing. Audrey gently slid the lids shut.
“So brave,” she whispered.
A sudden gunshot split the quiet air from far off in the distance, and out of the corner of her eye Audrey saw Hannah, the lone young girl in the centre of the field, drop to the frozen ground.