I ran through the woods until my legs went numb from the cold and gave out. I hunkered down next to a felled tree, silent in the dark, listening for any signs of life coming to investigate my shadow sprinting for land. My shivering was uncontrollable. I stripped off my jumpsuit. The dilemma of clothing was now my focus. In a military uniform, there was risk of being consumed back into a unit, or some officer changing my orders. Dressed as a civilian, there was risk of being thought a spy and shot or shipped off to a camp. With the prospect of a German search party finding me at any moment, I decided to put on my German sailor’s uniform and move forward with my own papers. My frozen feet sloshed around in my wet boots.
The land map and one of the button compasses from Uncle Martin led me southwest toward Oldenburg. I walked all night. By morning, icicles on trees hung down like blue fangs, and shone in the first light.
After eating a canned meal and wrestling with the acidic pains in my stomach, I leaned against a tree and crapped in a sick green splatter onto the leaves. I marched due west all day, only coming across one road, which was like a dark river that I lay in front of, making sure no one was near before sprinting across.
My feet were in horrible pain from the cold when a storm gathered like a giant bird.
I kept thinking of Ottawa. Of finding my father there. It kept me walking. This went on for three nights, skirting south and then north of anywhere on the map where a town might be, moving no more than sixty kilometers a day, paralleling several roads from deep in the woods, hiding in the snow. The snow and ice soaked through my boots and clothes and turned my skin pink, bright red, then white. Blisters on my feet bubbled up, burst, and formed again.
On my fourth day since scuttling the Beaver, the rotten blisters and sores on my feet got so bad they turned into trench foot and large sheets of skin peeled loose. By morning I needed shelter to fend off hypothermia and what I feared was frostbite on my toes. The wind swirled in my ears and I didn’t hear the vehicle that turned onto the road behind me until the driver and passengers had me in full view. It was a German military jeep. I cursed myself for being careless. What a pathetic four-day escape. As the jeep came to a stop next to me, four soldiers got out and, at that moment, I cared little about what happened to me as long as I could get warm.
The slightest suspicion from them would mean their pistols would slip from their leather holsters, and they’d demand papers. I tried to decide which to show them. In my right pocket were the papers that said Private Lem Volmer, from Munich, in route to a guard station near the former demarcation line in France. Though there was my sailor’s uniform. On either side of me the ditches and thick woods walled me in.
“What is this?” an officer among them asked. “A long way from the water, sailor.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You’re not German,” the man said.
“No, sir. I’m a Dutchman.”
“Ah, Dutch.” He looked at me then, judging my reaction to what he said. “The Dutch have been giving us a lot of problems,” the officer said. “Where the hell did you get that uniform?”
“I’m in the Kriegsmarine, sir. I have papers.”
“You’re not one of these border jumpers?”
“No, sir.”
“Let’s see those papers.”
I kneeled on the ground next to my backpack, reached in and felt the muzzle of the Luger. I knew what Uncle Martin would do in that instant. How he’d be driving alone in these men’s jeep within minutes. But that was not me. Next to the gun my fingers pinched the bag with the newspaper clippings and commendations I’d received from Major Oldif. My papers for the Beaver mission were in there. I handed my orders and accommodation to the officer.
On top of my paperwork was the certificate of ownership that came with the medal. DER FÜHRER was written in large, bold lettering below a picture of the Knight’s Cross with a swastika in the middle. There was a seal pressed over my own name, Jacob Koopman, Oberfahnrich zur See, Midshipman. The officer read it, looked up at me, then back to the picture. Then he raised his arm and saluted me and told his soldiers, “This sailor wears the Knight’s Cross.”
As the other soldiers saluted, I saluted them back, raising my arm above my head, trying to uncurl my frozen fingers to face these men like they were my brothers.
“Very kind of you,” I said. “But I’m freezing to death.”
The soldiers made room for me between them in the back of the vehicle. We drove past more fields and into another forested area.
“How was the medal won?” the man driving asked.
“I sank a ship,” I told him, letting the words flow out of my mouth for the first and last time in my life, as if they held no weight at all. The officer shifted in his seat to look back at me. “I was sent out again but had to scuttle my boat north of here and started walking but got caught in a storm. You’re the first people I’ve seen since.”
We drove through a small German garrison town. The first house we drove past had a huge Nazi flag hanging from it with the swastika against the bloodred cloth. It snapped in the wind as we passed. The streets were full of soldiers in sweat suits jogging up and down the road for exercise. One house had a group of officers out back taking target practice at a scarecrow they lined up against hay bales.
We drove through the center of town, passing a row of quaint old village homes. I imagined that inside the walls of some of those buildings were starving and terrified men, downed RAF lying fetal in piles of their own excrement, waiting in the darkness for the world or the war to end.
The soldiers took me to a small, forested mining compound well outside the town. About half a dozen large troop transport vehicles left as our jeep pulled in. The military green, canvas-topped trucks roared by us with their tops snapping in the wind. Each one that passed was empty.
“You can follow me, and we’ll get you dry and fed,” the officer said. His long stride was hard for me to keep up with.
He led me to a small bunkhouse next to a mining silo. “You can have that bunk for the night.”
“Shall I radio your unit now?”
“Maybe we can wait until after I get some sleep.”
“Not a problem. We’ll radio them tomorrow. We’ll have trucks going east in the afternoon if that will help.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, already stripping off my wet clothes.
“That looks awful,” he said and pointed at my bleeding feet. “Let me get the place warm for you.” He walked to the end of the barrack, which was a small wood frame bunkhouse with eight beds that all looked unused. The rafters were untreated pine with nails poking through from where they’d shoddily laid the boards. A wood-burning stove sat at the far end next to a shower and toilet stalls.
“Take a shower, and I’ll have this going when you’re done.”
“Thank you.”
Once warm, my feet throbbed in pain. When I’d eaten, slept for a few hours, and dried my clothes off over the stove, I dressed and put my backpack on. I was terrified that the officer would take me into custody, so I started walking around the compound. There were soldiers at the gate. Those soldiers must have lived in the only other bunk room. At the food tent, when no one was looking, I squeezed the air out of bread loaves, stuffed my pack with them, and shoved in cans of noodles with meat sauce and sausage with gravy until my pack and pockets were full. Then I headed to the far woods on the hillside that rose above the compound and the gravel quarry to the right of it. I decided to slip out of the compound before my location was reported. As I walked to the woods another row of transport trucks rumbled in. The few soldiers who were outside started walking to the trucks.
“Guten Morgen,” one of them said to me as he walked over.
“Guten Morgen,” I said, walking to the face of the woods to make a show of standing behind a tree to urinate. When no one was in sight, I stepped farther into the forest and up the hillside.
Fifty meters through the trees and below me was a clearing where giant mounds of upturned dirt, clean gray gravel, and another substance that looked like a mountain of thick terra-cotta soil ran parallel to where I walked. In front of the first heap a bulldozer left idling burped out puffs of smoke that shimmied the main chassis. A row of troop transport trucks came in and snaked along the backside of the mountainous piles. Farther through the woods, soldiers led about twenty people of all ages off the back of one of the trucks. It looked like a family of seven was in the lead headed by a skinny dark-haired man and his graying wife of about fifty. They had two girls who looked to be in their twenties and a dark-haired young man around thirty with them. An old woman held a toddler to her chest. She whispered to and tickled the child as she walked out of sight behind the first knoll. Behind the family were men in dark blue jackets with those awful yellow stars on the chest. Several of the men wore wet and stained tweed jackets. Soldiers pushed the people around the backside of the gravel mountain. The largest cloud in the cold blue sky had an orange hole burned through its center by the sun.
The family was ordered to strip and add their clothes to the already arranged mounds of shoes, pants, undergarments, and jackets. Children’s clothes piled up in their own mounds, frozen together in a giant lump the size of an automobile. When everyone was naked, they were led behind the last hill of dirt. I moved parallel to them from up on the wooded hillside and saw a giant pit on the other side of the hill. Clay stairs cut down into the dirt where it looked like a thousand-person puddle of naked bodies with interlaced limbs bubbled up from the earth. The bodies were powdered in white quicklime.
The giant tangle of bodies was so very human, yet the least human thing I’d ever seen. When the family rounded the mound and came into view, they hugged one another, but not one made a sound. They clutched one another as they were led to the pit. A soldier sat on the lip of the pit with his feet dangling off the side. In his lap he held a trench sweeper, a Maschingengewehr 42 machine gun. He was smoking a cigarette.
Once they saw what was ahead of them they all stopped. Soldiers pushed at their backs but they leaned away from the pit. Then a man with skinny legs and wire-rim glasses walked down the steps. He must have known he would be trapped in there forever. I waited for him to crouch down or try to scramble up the walls like a crab in a bucket, but instead he looked upward, away from what he stood on, and stayed perfectly still. The girls were pushed forward, and the rest of the group followed down the clay stairs into the pit. They were the first stark naked women I’d ever seen. The men walking down behind them seemed to be holding back tears. Even from as far back as I was in the woods, I saw how their flesh raised in goose pimples, and the old woman’s body shivered around the toddler’s chubby backside. The child’s little foot hung loose and kicked at the woman’s puff of gray pubic hair. When they were all in the pit, had walked, tripped over, and then stood on the pile of dead bodies, one of the daughters from the family pointed to herself and looked at the man with the gun and said, “Twenty-three years old,” in German.
The man holding the gun pointed the tip of the gun at himself. “Me too,” he said. Then he aimed the barrel at her and sang her a verse from “Lili Marlene,” the same song I’d sung along to with all the soldiers at the training camp in Kiel.
Time would come for roll call, time for us to part,
Darling I’d caress you and press you to my heart,
And there ‘neath that far off lantern light,
I’d hold you tight, we’d kiss good-night,
My Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marlene
When he finished his verse, he aimed, leaned back to brace himself against the gun, and opened fire. Flames shot from the muzzle, and the muscles in his arm shook against the recoil. The lyrics echoing up the mountainside were chased off by the rat-a-tat-tat of gunfire. The people in the pit fell in a bloody mist. Most were still. Some twitched. The girl who yelled her age was not quite dead. She’d been shot in the stomach and legs. Her back draped across her family members, her chest heaved upward as if trying to expel the bullets, and her head rocked obscenely back and forth, rolling over the collarbone of a dead man who bled from the throat.
Another truckload of naked men and women turned the corner and walked to the mound.
I felt the sudden sense of the world shifting, of morals and laws and civilized human behavior kicked loose. I lay down at the base of the tree. At that moment more than any other since I lost him, I wished Edwin was with me. I wanted him to see this, to look close enough that he could capture the moment in paint or charcoal so others could see. If others could see this, I felt, there would be no more allowing it to continue. I crawled on my hands and knees up the hillside, deeper into the woods so the soldiers wouldn’t see me. There was another chorus of gunfire behind me. From the sound of the gun, the executioner had moved the muzzle from right to left and then back. It sickened me that I knew that. The cracking sounds echoed off the dirt mound and pushed on my back as I crawled.
When I could stand up without seeing the mounds of dirt through the trees I started to run. As I sprinted through the woods, taking long, panicked strides, more shots rang out, like a stone skipping across a river.
As I ran I couldn’t stop imagining what lay beneath the snow at that mine camp. What other atrocities had been buried. What other lives had been packed tight beneath the earth. The tangle of folded bodies swelled in my mind. Limbs and digits running like roots through the dirt, stretching out and linking hand to hand, until some bucking jointed monster would dig itself out of this landscape of the damned and proclaim what a foul method it had been laid down by.
I couldn’t let go of the image of the soldier’s feet dangling off the edge of the pit. Hundreds of people in that pit beneath him, and it was only about two-thirds full. That the executioner seemed so casual sent an anxious nausea through my body and I wanted to vomit again. How would I navigate my way to safety? How, without any papers, could my father have been able to sneak through such a web of evil happenings?
Bare branches of alders and elms curved over my head. The straps of my pack dug into my shoulders. There was a salty, dry taste in my mouth. I didn’t want to hear birds or airplanes or any other sound beyond my own heart and lungs drumming in my ears, drowning out the thoughts of the blood-covered people I’d seen in the pit, of how I, with the push of a single button, had easily killed more people than that.