We had travelled for ten days or more. The closer we got to the mountains, the colder it became. I had my jacket and the poncho, and Martina and I traded them back and forth, but one of us was always cold. The poncho was good for rain, but it was just a thin layer of fabric. Martina’s handmade shoes had been useful for creeping soundlessly through the forest in the fall, but now that it was so cold out she risked frostbite, or being injured on icy rocks.
We ran out of ration boxes just as the mountains loomed large and the temperatures plunged.
After a night of walking through bitter wind and ice pellets, the morning was no better. We were plunged into a blizzard. “If we fall asleep in this,” I said, “we’ll freeze to death.”
Martina’s lips were blue and her face was gaunt with hunger, but she smiled. “The good thing about this snowstorm is that it’s hard to see through.”
“A good thing?”
“Maybe the bandit hunters will stay inside. Maybe we can get to a village and beg for supplies.”
“It’s worth a try,” I said. “There’s not much else we can do anyway.”
The snow was heavy enough to cover our footprints, but when we got to the edge of the forest, Martina suddenly pulled me behind a tree.
A single soldier in white camouflage walked past, a mere metre in front of us. I held my breath and willed myself to be absolutely still.
He kept on walking.
Martina followed behind him, and I followed her. Each of us stepped carefully into the footprints that he had already made.
The man approached a military truck that was idling on the roadway. We hid behind a tree and listened.
“This area is clear,” he said to the soldier at the steering wheel.
“Get in then,” said the driver.
We watched as they drove down the road. I was hoping they would keep going, but I heard the truck idle once again and the smack of doors opening and closing. They hadn’t gone far at all. They were methodically checking the entire area.
Martina grabbed onto my hand and pulled me out from behind the tree. She darted across the road, not paying any attention at all to the footsteps she was making. I felt like shouting at her, telling her to stop, but the soldiers would hear me. I had no choice. I had to follow her.
When we got across the road, I could barely see a thing through the blinding white of the storm, except for the silhouette of a small building up ahead. Once we got right up to it, I saw that it was a peasant cottage similar to the one my grandfather had lived in. The wooden door hung uselessly on broken hinges, and drifts of snow had formed on the threshold.
Martina paused at the doorway for just a moment, then stepped over the snowdrift and inside. I followed.
A wooden kitchen table was overturned. Shards of pottery lay scattered over the floor. Something that looked like it had been meat stew was frozen in solid splats around an upended copper pot by the hearth.
I opened up a wooden storage box. Clothing for a young child, a Bible, hand-carved wooden toys. “There’s nothing here for us,” I said.
Martina took a wooden ladle from the hearth for herself and handed me a set of tongs.
I watched her tap various places on the walls and floor, and then I understood. She was listening for a hollow sound.
I followed her lead, tapping and listening. Suddenly she got down on her knees and ran her fingers along the edge of a row of tiles. Her fingers slipped into an opening and she tried to pull, but it wouldn’t give. I got down beside her and together we dug our fingers under the narrow lip and tugged. All at once, a trap door yawned open.
An injured woman holding a sleeping boy stared up at us with pleading eyes. “Please don’t hurt us.”
The woman refused to come up, so we went down, closing the door behind us. The hiding place was lit with a couple of candles and it was much warmer than the woods, but a cold draft of air blew in from somewhere.
In the dim interior stood a bucket of water and an opened sack of dried bread, and wooden shelves holding a few jars. Another wall was covered with cloth. From the rafters hung bundles of onions, garlic, beets. The woman had a bruise on her cheek and blood crusted on her brow.
“Is the child sick?” I asked her.
“No,” she said. “I gave him a paste made from poppy pods to keep him quiet. I was afraid the soldiers would hear him.”
I rooted around in my knapsack and brought out the first-aid kit. “Can I take a look at your scalp?”
She lowered her head and held the candle close to it. There was a ragged gash just above her eye, but it was no longer bleeding. I gently cleaned the dried blood with a damp rag, being careful not to disturb the scab that had formed on the wound itself. “The soldiers did this?” I asked.
“They took my husband and older son,” she said. “They left me for dead.”
“And the boy?”
“He was down here, sleeping. They didn’t know about him.”
“You can’t be giving him poppy pods every day. He’ll die.”
She pushed away my hand that held the bloodied rag and glared at me. “Do you think I don’t know that? But what else can I do? I can’t let them find us.”
I dabbed some iodine gently across the scab. “You’re right,” I said. “They would hear the child. They’ve gone for now, but they could be back.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know what the answer is.”
The woman looked at me more closely, then at Martina. I’m sure we looked awful — dirty and thin and too young to be of help. But from her expression, I could see that she was beginning to relax. “What do you want?”
“Can you help us get some warm clothing, maybe some food?” asked Martina. “We want to get away from here.”
“Eat this now,” the woman said, giving each of us a piece of dried bread from her bag. “Find a place on the floor to sleep. I’ll see what else I can do for you.”
I took the poncho out of the knapsack and spread it on the floor. It was such a luxury to be indoors that Martina and I were asleep within minutes.
When I opened my eyes some hours later, the first thing I saw was a grey woollen coat draped over Martina as she slept. I sat up.
“That is all I could get,” said the woman. “No boots — I’m sorry. But here’s some food.”
She set a small burlap bag beside me on the floor. I opened it — dried salted fish and a chunk of smoked pork fat. Good travelling food. I knew better than to ask where she got these things. No need to make her feel bad about taking things from a nearby house where the people were already dead.
“Thank you,” I said.
Martina sat up, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. She noticed the coat draped over her. “Is this for me?” she asked. The woman nodded.
“We’ll be on our way,” I said. “You have been most generous.”
“The snowstorm is over,” said the woman. “And it’s nighttime. But you can’t leave the way you came — your footsteps would show in the new snow. Come this way.”
She drew back the cloth that covered one wall to reveal a low tunnel dug into the earth. “If you go that way,” she said, pointing to the left, “it will take you under the path and into the woods.”
All at once, I understood. Not all of the villagers had been killed or had escaped to the woods. Some were still here, hidden.
Martina got into her new coat and I put the food into my knapsack. “Stay safe,” I said to the woman. “And thank you for helping us.” She nodded, then dropped the cloth back down.
We crawled the length of the tunnel in pitch darkness, our hands on the dirt walls to keep our balance. I thought about Pecherska Lavra in Kyiv and all the tunnels under it. How many connected tunnels were hidden under this small village and other villages too? I hoped the Nazis would never find them.