War Girls Complete Collection Chapter 226

Chapter 4

“T

here’s no way we can go there,” Richard said, taking a deep breath. Even from this far away the image of destruction cloaked him in a wave of depression. And the putrid stink of rotting corpses, burning ashes and acrid gunpowder made him gag.

Nothing had prepared them for the sight before their eyes. He could sense how Katrina recoiled from the impact. The road ahead was filled with equally disturbed people, who now turned around to find a way to bypass the city on their westward trek.

“Let’s find out what’s going on,” Katrina suggested.

“And how?”

Displaced persons like them milled about the roadway, along with Russian soldiers going back and forth between their camp and the besiegement girdle with the heavy weaponry.

“Let’s ask one of the soldiers,” Katrina suggested.

“That’s too dangerous. We’d better return to the last village we passed through; maybe someone knows more.”

Katrina nodded, and they backtracked about an hour until they came upon a small village.

“You stay back, I’ll go and ask,” she said.

Richard wanted to protest, but he understood that danger lurked and didn’t press the issue. Alone, she could talk with the locals without raising suspicions. Still, he sat there, on tenterhooks until she finally returned an hour later.

“It’s bad. Real bad. Nobody can get in or out. The radio says the Germans are building a runway for aircraft to relieve them. But it’s only a matter of time until they have to give up. For weeks now, no food has gotten inside.” She swallowed. “A farmer said there’s no road to get to the village of my relatives, except through Breslau.”

“We could walk through the forest…”

“No, it’s on the other side of the Oder, and there’s only one bridge left. He said many refugees have tried rowing boats or even swimming, but due to the snowmelt and heavy rains it’s not possible.”

He put a hand on her arm, not sure what to say.

“One man in the village offered us shelter in his barn. It’s far enough away so you won’t have to talk to anyone.”

“You want to wait here until the siege is over?”

“What else can we do?” she said, suddenly sounding tired.

“Not much. Although the chances of finding your family are slim, and we might be better off moving on.” His heart broke at the devastated expression on her face when she took in the import of his words.

“But where would we go?”

It plagued him that he didn’t have a ready answer for even that simple question. In fact, there was no place they could go. As long as the war raged on, he was a wanted person. His forged papers might be good enough for some disinterested patrol in the countryside, but not for the SS border patrol. He’d be shot or hanged the instant he set foot into the Reich.

On the other hand, he couldn’t stay in Poland either. People were already being scrutinized more carefully than before and as Katrina had pointed out, his accent belied his fake identity with every word he uttered. Hiding out in a barn seemed to be the best of possibilities.

“We’ll wait,” Richard said after another glance at Katrina’s dirty and tired face.

“We’ll wait,” she whispered and picked up the handmade backpack to hand it to him before she led the way to the barn the man had offered them. “I’m so tired and worried that I just want to lie down and forget.”

Richard hugged her close. “I know. That seems to be the only thing we can count on each day. Being tired and worried.” He almost added hungry to the list, but he and Katrina had an unspoken pact not to mention that topic as it only made their burning stomachs harder to endure.

As April drew to an end and May arrived with warming sunshine, more and more displaced persons on their way to Breslau arrived and then turned away in defeat, not able to get inside the besieged city or through it. The caravan of bedraggled people changed direction, looking for a way around the besieged city, their ultimate destination relative safety within the new, narrower borders of Germany.

Nobody knew what would happen, but everyone knew they couldn’t stay in the places they’d called home for generations.

Richard and Katrina, though, settled into a daily life of scavenging for food in the fields and the woods. Many fields had lost their owners to the war and the two of them weren’t the only ones to dig with their bare hands in the hard earth for forgotten potatoes from last year. Katrina sometimes talked to the locals, but Richard always kept to himself, aware that his disguise wouldn’t hold up under closer inspection.

As he stood to stretch, his gaze fell on the columns of smoke hovering over the city like demons ready to sweep down. He bit down a sarcastic remark. The sorrow-stricken inhabitants probably had greater problems than a random demon.

“There are more fires and more smoke every day,” he said.

Katrina nodded. “The villagers say the Germans are bombing their own strongholds and are blowing up the buildings that have survived the Russian attacks. They lined that damn runway with the lives of hundreds of the children they forced to build it, while the Russian strafers hunted them like rabbits.”

He saw her fighting against her tears and put an arm around her shoulders. Only rare news came from the besieged city, and it was never good.

Most of the intelligence came from Red Army aircraft strafing the city beneath. Richard was well aware that the information Katrina received over the neighborly gossip network was highly controlled and filtered. The Soviets would only divulge what benefited them. They controlled not only the air space, but also the perimeter around the city, shooting anyone attempting to flee and stopping those wanting to go inside.

“Apparently, Nazi Gauleiter Hanke publicly hanged the mayor of Breslau, because he opposed the demolition of irreplaceable cultural heritages like libraries, churches and mansions to create open fighting areas,” Katrina continued.

“Hanke is one of the worst,” Richard said. “They call him The Hangman of Breslau, because he ordered the execution of more than one thousand people as soon as he arrived in the city. When I was still in the Wehrmacht, even the most hardened soldiers would shudder at his merciless cruelty.” A shiver racked Katrina’s body and he pressed her tighter against himself. “It’ll all be over soon.”

“We’ve been hoping for this for such a long time. Sometimes I think it will never end, and every day I’m afraid we’ll die before it does.” She leaned into him, her dirty face pressed into his chest.

“You cannot lose hope. I promise, we will survive this war.”

“How can you promise such a thing?” she asked, looking up at him with defeat in her eyes. He simply had to sweep away the sadness and make her laugh, and he already knew how.

“You can hold me personally responsible for lying if we both die,” he said with a smug grin.

His words had the intended effect and she showed him her white teeth as she broke out in laughter. “You know that you’re hilarious, right?”

“I’d do anything to make you smile,” he said, wondering whether he should kiss her or let her continue laughing. He opted for the latter. Seeing a laugh on her beautiful face had become such a rare occasion since they’d had to flee Mrs. Jaworski’s farm that he wanted to savor it. Treasure it like one of the exquisite blue blossoms she hadn’t had the heart to pick.

“How do you do it?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Make it seem that life is easy.”

Richard paused for a moment. “I guess… since I cannot change my surroundings, I can at least change my way of looking at them. And there’s always something beautiful in every situation.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, pressing a kiss on his lips, until a particularly ferocious blast in the distance shook the earth and parted them. Looking up into the reddish sky over Breslau where smoke billowed, Richard noticed an aircraft taking off in their direction, before it curved and flew southward.

“It’s a Fieseler Storch,” Richard said, wondering what that might mean. Had the Germans found a way to evacuate the city? Would the Russians allow this to happen? They had total air superiority and it seemed peculiar that they allowed an aircraft to take off, despite its being only a small liaison plane that was usually unarmed and primarily used to transport commanding officers or urgent messages. Capitulation negotiators maybe?

“What does this mean?” Katrina asked as she shadowed her eyes and watched the aircraft flying into the sun before it curved yet again and headed westward.

“I don’t know, but I guess we’ll soon find out.”

Only minutes later, a boy of about six years came running from the village shouting at the top of his lungs. “The Nazis surrendered! Breslau is free!”

Richard couldn’t believe his ears. But the boy held a small battery-run radio in his hands and one by one the people digging in the fields approached him to hear the announcement in Polish and Russian.

Over the next days more and more information reached them. Apparently, a delegation of both the Catholic and Protestant churches had urged the commanding general Niehoff to negotiate the capitulation. SS-Obergruppenführer Hanke, though, the cruel leader of the NSDAP in Breslau, had insisted on sacrificing every last human being under his care on the altar of cultish obedience to a lunatic Führer and his ideas of racial superiority.

But when the Red Army marched into the defeated city, Hanke was nowhere to be found. It soon became obvious that in the last moments of the fight when he’d demanded the human sacrifice of thousands, he’d finally shown his true colors and fled the place in the Fieseler Storch aircraft Richard had seen take off.

“We need to go and find my relatives,” Katrina said on the second day.

“That’s crazy. You’ve heard what’s happening in there.”

“We’ll rapidly walk through the city, nobody will bother us,” she answered, pushing out her lower lip in that stubborn way of hers. He sighed, knowing she wasn’t willing to discuss this topic any further.

“Let’s at least wait until the morning.”

She cast him a dark stare. “You won’t change my mind. I’ll go in the morning, whether you come with me or not.”

“I’ll come with you alright.”