“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.