“It’s nothing, Martin,” I said, unsure of what my real identity should be.
“Quite a big hoopla for nothing.” He reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “You little shit, I had no idea where you were until I saw this.” He pulled out the newspaper with the picture of my oval face staring off the page.
“Come with me,” he said and hooked his hand under my elbow and led me toward the door.
In the dark lawn between the tents and barracks, Uncle Martin walked to the back portion of the camp, near a dilapidated utility shed.
When we got to the side of the shed, I stopped not wanting to walk into the shadows after my uncle.
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t kill my family,” he said. “Now come here.” In the shadows, Uncle Martin stepped forward and hugged me. “You scared the Christ out of me, slipping off like that.”
My head was in his chest, and I felt his chin lean onto the crown of my head. I hugged him and clutched at his back.
“I couldn’t handle what we did to those men in the Ems.”
“That’s okay. I shouldn’t have forced you like that.”
“I couldn’t keep doing it and I couldn’t stop you. You’ll die killing them like that.”
“You didn’t do any of that, so don’t regret a thing.” The shadow of the forest swayed behind him. When he let me go, I still held onto him until he stepped away from me and bent over into the bushes and pulled out a large backpack. “Here,” he said, laying the large bag at my feet. “You have to get as far away from this as possible.”
“What? Why?”
“I promised your mother I’d save your skinny little ass, and in this bag is how you’re going to do it.”
“Where would I go? Look what I’m doing here. The Germans will win, Martin, and the sooner they do, the sooner all this will end.”
“That’s not going to happen, Jacob. You’ll be killed. I may not be meant to survive this war, and I’m okay with that, but I sure as hell don’t want it destroying you too. I need you safe and alive. This family’s lost enough. And that Major Oldif is using you like a piece of meat to lure other stupid Dutch kids who want to be heroes and have no idea what they’re getting into. Your little fame here, Jacob, is a propaganda ploy and nothing more. You have no idea what these people really want, do you? What their Fatherland would look like?”
Uncle Martin kicked the bag at my feet. “I have papers, maps, a compass, a gun, ammunition, food, and enough money and gold, everything you need to start a new life. Now you have to make it out of Europe. Your German papers will get you far, but once you cross the Rhine, you’ll need to start using all the ones in the bag. The pictures of you are from your parents’ house and were pasted onto these IDs.
“I want you to get to England. I left a note with the names of several ship captains that can help you. If you find one of them, tell them who you are and catch a ship to Ottawa. There are good Dutch people there.”
“You aren’t coming too?”
“Jacob, my whole life has been preparing me for this. Stay and fight is what I’m supposed to do. I know this much if I know anything.”
“But there’s no way out, you said so yourself.”
“There is for you and you have to find it. You can’t see the whole picture here, but what you’re mixed in with is vicious. Take this pack and leave, get out of Europe. Follow the instructions and find the men I listed. Find one of these men. They can help you once you get out of here. Your life is all that matters, not this war, not these countries, just your life. You’re the last of our family, and we’ll be erased if you’re lost.”
Martin looked down on me with his wet eyes. A large vein in his neck slipped under a blade of ink on his skin that rose above his collar.
“Don’t regret what you’ve done. You can’t. I don’t. What else can you do, Jacob? You have to survive.”
“Ensign,” someone called to me. “You’re pissing in the woods and missing your own party.” Uncle Martin stepped back into the shadows and pulled the backpack with him. He propped it up behind a tree and turned back to me. I was looking at a condemned man when Uncle Martin said, “Come back later for the pack. You have to leave, Jacob, please, promise me you’ll get out of here.” I turned back from his shadow to the officer in the field behind me. The man staggered. He cupped a cigarette in his right palm.
“I’ll be back in a second,” I called to the man.
“Hurry, hurry,” the man said. He swayed back and forth in the lawn and waited for me to finish peeing.
Martin stood behind the tree in front of me. I stepped forward and pretended to be finishing up. The man behind me mumbled a song to himself. My uncle nodded to me, kissed the palm of his hand and reached his arm out and cuffed the side of my head. “Get to Ottawa,” he said. “You have to get to Ottawa.”
“Will I see you again?” I asked.
“Meet me at that flagpole at one A.M.” He pointed to the large field at the center of camp. “Be there at one.”
“Ensign,” the officer behind me yelled. “You’re missing your party.”
I turned and left my uncle in the dark woods. The officer, a man I’d never seen before, had an oily face with a scattering of dark, spiky whiskers. He threw an arm around my shoulder and started singing in a raspy falsetto as he led me back to the tent, where a gramophone now played.
Once the tent cleared out and the soldiers and officers who had gotten the most drunk stumbled off to their bunks, I snuck back to the woods and retrieved the bag. It was heavier than it looked, packed so tightly that it felt like a solid bag of bricks. I lugged it to my cot and stowed it in my locker. A couple hours later, when my few bunkmates were snoring, I opened the locker and started looking through what Uncle Martin had left me.
The first thing in the pack was a letter scrawled out in my uncle’s handwriting that said,