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Marching and Marching Without End

It was much easier than I had expected. When we walked out through the gate, which unlike the previous night had now been flung open wide, we saw dense damp fog hanging over the yard; it was a bitterly cold morning, probably around five o'clock. Hundreds of people milled about in front of the gate; there was no order whatsoever. Schneider was standing next to me. I pressed his hand firmly. Ortwich was nowhere to be seen and I had no time to look for him. I had to take advantage of these moments of upheaval. I groped and pushed my way through the throng. From some large stains on the outside of the warehouse wall I could tell that I was near the spot used by my group, but without my glasses I could not recognize anyone from the distance.

Suddenly a familiar voice called me by name. "You too!" it added. "Of course. All the quality among us ends up here." Before me stood a tall blond man with a bushy beard and shabby, dirty clothes. He had his arm around the shoulders of a boy some fourteen years at most, who clung to him confused and frightened and watched the turmoil around him with huge eyes. More by his voice than by his face I recognized Herrn von Rosenstiel from Lipie. The two stood before me like a pair of wood-cut altar figures, and I will never forget how Rosenstiel held the boy close to him as though trying to protect him from all the dangers threatening him here. But we did not have the chance to converse at all, because suddenly I heard my name being called.

"Where? Where?" I heard. "There he is, over there, with Rosenstiel!" Lemke, Udo Roth, old man Stübner and Wilhelm Meister – all of them rushed towards me, shook my hand like someone they had believed dead, pounded on my shoulders, laughed and shouted all at the same time. Some guards took notice of us; Lemke grabbed my arm and dragged me away, back to the group I had belonged to. They were already lined up ready to march off.

At first I did not understand what they were so excited and happy about, and they must have seen my bafflement. Udo Roth whispered to me: "You were barely gone last night when they shot Reverend Reder. Here on our square." I asked for details, but none knew more than the bare fact itself. Later it turned out that in the time right before the outbreak of the war Reverend Reder had been on vacation. He had spent it near Danzig, outside Poland. That's where he was served his arrest papers. He cut his vacation short, drove back to his home town and reported to the Polish authorities, was arrested on the spot, carried off with the rest of us – and here he had paid the ultimate price for his loyalty to his German congregation.

We knew none of this at that time. I had not known Reverend Reder; we had been dulled by events and accepted his fate like all the other news. What was in store for us now was more important than what was past.

At first that morning we were very cold; we hopped from one foot to the other, pounded each other on the back, beat our arms. We were overtired, hungry, chilled to the bone, our bodies had no reserves of warmth, and we did not warm up until the sun finally burned the fog away. It turned into a very hot day. But with the warmth came exhaustion; standing in the sun, we would all have loved to get some sleep.

Suddenly, under that bright blue sky, a deep silence fell over us. No-one spoke, no-one hopped around or beat his arms. A low hum could be heard above us, coming closer quickly, and now everyone could hear the airplane soaring down at us from out of the silence in wide loops like a silver lark. Its still wings flashed in the morning sun, it was already large and clearly visible but came lower and even lower. "I can see the crosses," a trembling, hoarse voice said beside me. Then a shadow fell over us, the engines thundered across our upturned faces, we did not dare to move a hand or raise a cry. But if the silent cry of our hearts had been audible it would have drowned out the roar of the engines up there above us.

The airplane raced away like thunder above us, disappeared behind the trees lining the main road, and only now we heard that the Poles were screaming and raging; only now our ears registered that a few shots had been fired – but there it already came again, a little higher than before, the machine tilted sideways a bit and we thought we could make out a face peering down at us. Already it was gone from sight again. But the silver bird returned one more time, flew a round at even greater height, and then disappeared into the northeastern sky. None of us still had any thoughts of sleep, cold or hunger. We looked at each other. Many of us were so overcome with profound, excited emotions that we trembled with the effort to control ourselves. But courage and hope now shone from everyone's eyes. –

Now we spent more hours standing lined up. The guards ran busily up and down, divided us into groups, officers appeared and yelled orders, and eventually it was noon. We had been on our feet since five o'clock in the morning and still there was no sign that our march-off would begin. That there would be a march for us had become clear from the guards' conversations.

We were moved back and forth and reassigned over and over again, but finally we were all divided into four big groups of eight hundred to one thousand prisoners each. A tall, slim officer appeared on the scene. He had a yellowish-pale face framed by dark hair. He was very elegantly dressed and went from one group to the next, silently but firm of step, and addressed each group. Having reached our group, he planted himself wide-legged some ten meters ahead of the first row and declared, in a shrill command voice and with arms akimbo, that we would now march off. He expected strict discipline. The guards, he said, had orders to shoot anyone who left his row without permission. And indeed they would act on these orders.

After this address, which was cold and matter-of-fact despite the hateful undertone of his voice, he went on to the next group. The guards assigned to our group approached and almost all of them threatened that "they would show us good" if we did not do as we were told. The sergeants placed the guards in such a way that they would accompany our marching columns at equal intervals to either side of our rows. But for the moment we still stood lined up in rows of four, myself in the last row, my back to the sugar warehouse but some distance from it.

I felt a light touch at my elbow and looked sideways at Mutschler, who stood beside me. He rolled his eyes at me, silently gesturing behind us. I cautiously turned my head a little more and saw how two guards led old man Diesing past behind us. They had taken hold of the old gentleman by either arm, and in this way he shuffled painfully past. His gray hair stuck out tousled from his head; some straw was in it; his face was haggard beyond words, his chin and cheeks covered in thick white stubble. He looked at the ground before him, holding his old gray felt hat in one hand. I turned my head farther right and gazed after him. Two more guards were walking behind him.

"So it's true," I thought, "they really are going to load the oldest ones onto carts." A rumor had spread through our ranks some two hours ago that old and sick prisoners could report to the main gate; carts stood ready for them there.

Ahead and to the right of me stood old man Stübner. I tugged at his sleeve. "Stübner, don't you want to report as well?" He looked back at me, understanding my intent. But his face was pale and he stared at me in anxious agitation. "Why are four guards going with him? And all of them with guns!" he whispered back.

A horrible suspicion hit me, and suddenly I had to choke back vomit. I looked back again at old Diesing. He was just then stumbling with difficulty around the edge of the warehouse. All comrades to the right of me were looking over their right shoulder, all were listening for a sound from the back. Our ranks were silent. Ahead of us, the guards were talking, and the square itself was as noisy as ever. Talking was not forbidden.

I saw how some comrades ahead of me flinched a little; I too seemed to have heard a frightened, muffled cry. Then two shots rang out in quick succession. I saw two guards behind us run to the edge of the building, and now we clearly heard another single shot. "Those pigs, those damned pigs! An old man, a seventy-year-old man!" Mutschler ground out beside me. "Hush!" Udo Roth whispered sharply. We fell silent. Behind us, the four murderers returned. They did not speak, and returned to their places. I looked after them. One of them busied himself with the lock of his rifle.

Of the three or four thousand Germans standing here in the factory yard, only forty or fifty of us had noticed what had happened. But what was going on in the other groups?

After another hour – it was about one-thirty in the afternoon – we saw the first division march off. Now a Polish lieutenant appeared. He called a few guards over – the sergeants, apparently – and gave them orders. We were to do a right turn. Twenty minutes later we began to move. I hoped to take a glimpse behind the warehouse corner, where old man Diesing's body lay, but the first of us had to turn left again right away. We marched out of the yard. A column of some two hundred men were already waiting on the road, and we had to join up with them. At the very front I saw some women, perhaps sixty in number. So they were to march with us.

Finally, after yet more waiting, the march began. We had had nothing to eat or drink that day, nor the day before. As we had stood lined up since the early morning we also had not had an opportunity to buy any rations again via the women. Even at the very start of our forced march we were weak, tired and listless.

Now we were back on the wide main road on which the panje carts had brought us from Wloclawek two days earlier. It ran along the entire length of the factory grounds and then continued straight as an arrow to the southwest.

It was very hot and there was not a cloud in the sky. We trotted along the sandy street in a cloud of dust raised by thousands of tired feet, floating over and amongst our rows. There was not even a breath of wind. At some distance from either side of the road stood autumn-tinted poplars, rustling golden columns flanking our march. The road ran up a small ridge lying at a right angle to our direction; in the uniformly flat land covered with vast green fields of sugar beets, it seemed like a great height. At the top I looked back. An endless black trail of people extended behind me past the horizon, over which the tall smokestack of the sugar factory reached into the sky.

After some time we reached the town of Chodecz. Our lieutenant called a halt on the market square. To our surprise, the inhabitants kept calm. A lemonade cart was called over; whoever had money could buy a bottle of lemonade. Jews, who had already done their business with the first group ahead of us, approached. "Want to buy apples? Or eggs? Or water?" So here too, the prospect of profit conquered all the hatred they felt for us Nazis. They brought fruit, sour pickles, water. Men and especially women brought water in big buckets. An old peasant woman brought me a big bowl of wonderfully refreshing buttermilk. She watched me with kind eyes as I drank, and when I asked her about the price she said, in Polish and after a quick glance around, that she was a German, that there were many Germans here in Chodecz, and then she hurried off to fetch more refreshments. I ate and drank indiscriminately all I was given. My body craved sustenance and beyond the buttermilk I stuffed myself with three sour pickles, soda water, apples and pears, and topped it off with water. It was not until I was relatively full that I began to consider the consequences of such a food combination. But nothing happened! Our parched organs took and digested everything they were given without rebelling. Later I learned that many Protestant Germans lived in this remote town in the middle of former Russian Poland. Their pastor had not been arrested and carried off, and was able to do many good deeds for his ethnic German brethren passing through Chodecz.

We had been permitted to sit down on the cobblestones, and since everyone who had neither money nor the good fortune to find a German beneficiary was given a share by his neighbors, we resumed our march with our strength somewhat restored.

After a seemingly endless march we came to a small stand of trees. In a grassy vale to the right behind them, two small blue ponds shone under the clear autumn sky. The Polish lieutenant called a halt. For the first and only time on our journey through Poland I suddenly felt all my strength draining from my body. I had an insane urge to step out of our column, and only my sudden weakness prevented me. Slowly, sentences formed in my aching head. "No-one can stop me from going down to that water and lying down in the grass. It's my right. I haven't done anything wrong. I'm a free man. What right do the Poles have to give me orders! I want to bathe now, my feet are sore and dirty, I want to wash them. That's my right, my perfectly good right." Thoughts like that floated foggily through my brain. They were interrupted by a hard grip on my upper arm and the sight of a pair of calm blue eyes in a face of composed resolve. Had I spoken aloud? I thought I heard my name. "It's okay, Reinhold, we'll do all that later when we come back." Had someone said that to me? Lemke? Or Udo Roth? It seems I said it to myself, and woke up.

A few women walked off into the stand of trees. "What are they doing?" I softly asked my neighbor.

"Decent of the lieutenant to allow the women to go into the bushes!" I heard someone say. Yes, that's how far we had come, that we regarded this basic bit of human consideration as chivalry! We men had to answer our calls of nature in the open field to the left of the road.

I was fully awake again. I saw an old woman, white-haired, hunch-backed and lame on one foot, hobbling into the bushes. I had already noticed her in Hohensalza. She too had been deemed so dangerous to the Polish state that they had arrested her and now dragged her along with us here on this odyssey. Another old woman, tall and of large stature, was being led by two young girls wearing thin silk summer stockings and high-heeled sandals. I saw a peasant woman in wooden shoes, carrying an infant in her arms. How was the woman's parched body to make food for the child?! She spent these days watching the precious life in her arms slowly starve to death.

In Chodecz our guards had shown signs of human compassion; they were themselves hungry and thirsty, and it seemed to have produced something like a sense of solidarity with us. Now the reaction set in. Clearly they were ashamed of their earlier weakness. When our columns moved on again, they began to urge us to speed. It was still very hot and we dragged ourselves painfully through the sand. Some carried suitcases that the women had abandoned. In the town, Lemke had bought a pail in which he carried some biscuits and fruit with which to revive anyone who collapsed. The guards prodded and scolded; we were walking too slowly for them.

We turned off the cobblestones onto a broad country road. A red brick church stood to the left of the road. A few poplars, a few willows and birch trees. Sugar beet fields to the left and right, flat, monotonous. Above us, the sun. The dust settled on our lips, in our hair; the road was worn with deep ruts. The sand crept into our shoes. Some farmers wearing slippers, just as they had been dragged from their homes, carried them in their hands and walked in socks or barefoot. Time and again, someone else took off their shoes. The small boost which our rest in Chodecz had given us was long used up.

Every now and then, Polish farmers stood by the side of the road, cursing and threatening. One old hag worked herself up into such a rage that she turned around, lifted her skirts and showed us her naked behind. Mutschler grumbled softly: "If only she were young!" The guards mocked the enraged old woman, she let loose with a string of invective, picked up a rock and threw it at our marching column. It missed.

There was the sound of yelling from ahead. The guards asked what was up. Then they called: "Everyone to the right shoulder!" We were just walking down a slight incline towards a stand of alder trees; dusk was approaching. Dark water shone among thick grass. At the left shoulder of the road a man lay, curled up, face pressed into the sand, his hat beside him in the grass, his full head of white hair discolored red with running blood. His breath rattled. His arms were spread wide, as though in dying he wished to press the earth close to him. The guards drove us over to the right side of the road – we were not supposed to see this. But they were so eager to feast themselves on the sight that they failed to pay enough attention to us.

At the top of the incline behind the stand of alder trees, a younger man some few rows ahead of me stepped briefly out of his marching row and bent down to retie his shoe laces. A guard walked up and shoved him from behind into the ditch; the comrade fell, and before he could even get up the guard had pressed the muzzle of his rifle against his temple and pulled the trigger. It was late afternoon, dusk was approaching, but it was still daylight, still easy to see by. A German human being had simply tried to re-tie his shoes.

From a farmhouse a woman came running over the field. She was still young, she ran quickly. We saw her skirt flapping as she ran. In her hand she carried a pail. We watched her come closer. She was bringing water – filled with pity for us, she wanted to help us. A guard took the pail, which could have refreshed fifty of us, cursed the woman rudely, and dumped the water out onto the ground. The woman stood as if frozen, looked at the man, slowly took up the empty bucket, suddenly tears poured from her eyes, she turned away sobbing and covered her eyes with both hands. And thus she went back to the farmhouse.

A town appeared ahead of us. The first column that was marching the same way ahead of ours had tipped the inhabitants off. The guards had told them who and what we were.

Again there were the curses, threatening fists, distorted enraged faces. Many spat at us. On the market square, which we had to cross diagonally, they came at us with sticks and fence slats. Children and girls threw rocks.

Walking ahead of me was Rosenstiel, tall and blond. "He's fattened himself on Polish sausage, on our bacon, on our bread!" He received punches and kicks, but he continued to look straight ahead. With his left hand he still held his young charge, fourteen-year-old Hans Beierling from Thorn. "Look straight ahead, don't look at anyone!" said Walter Lemke beside me. I was glad that I was not wearing glasses. The march through the town seemed endless.

"Give them to us! Why are you guarding them? We'll rip their guts out!" It was always the same. The Beast in the guise of man.

We looked straight ahead. Just show no fear! But most of us were not afraid. We had become indifferent. Only the slander! – That ate at our pride.

Now it was dark. We had left the town behind us. We had been on our feet since five o'clock in the morning, with two brief breaks. The marching column was silent. We were no soldiers. Even for soldiers it would have been hard, without water, without food. But we were fifty years old and older, with heart conditions, old men, people who were lame or had been beaten until we were lame, we wore light shoes and thin stockings, some walked barefoot, one in slippers. And the women up ahead – they shared in all of it. They were cursed and slandered and vilely insulted, and the guards had been given good advice: "Take that one for the night, she's still young, she's still well padded up front..." That was the least of what they had to hear. Young fellows had walked alongside them, had discussed their various merits, pointed at them, elaborated to each other, drooling, what they would do to them... At least now it was dark, now the women could cry, no-one saw their tears.

We linked arms. Just don't give in. Each dragged the other along, many clenched their teeth, we still managed. There was a palpable sense of pride, of much patience and courage.

But how slowly the journey went on! The dragging of feet across the sand, a bucket rattled, somewhere someone sighed, and how large and bright the stars were, so much more than usual!

Some of the old policemen had been relieved. Now our guards were younger fellows, seventeen-year-olds, so-called Strzelec, members of paramilitary Riflemen's Associations. They were fresh and well-rested, they threatened and yelled. "Marszerowac! Marszerowac!" Shots rang out every now and then near the end of the column.

A tree grew out of the darkness by the side of the road; we approached it, agonizingly slowly, passed it, left it behind us. To the right, a railroad track parallelled the road, a narrow-gauge track or perhaps a sugar beet spur. Again there was shooting behind us.

Suddenly a voice yelled, right in front of me: "Where is the fellow, where is he?! He wanted to shoot me, he threatened me with his revolver!" It was Rehse, marching just ahead of me. Udo Roth's voice chimed in, calming, soothing; a Strzelec came running, yelling and cursing, fortunately he tripped in the dark and fell. Rehse was quiet again. He had probably been dreaming. All of us were half asleep as we staggered and stumbled along.

"Armistice," came a voice behind me. The word had already come up several times. It became entrenched in our thinking, an idée fixe, an obsession. We clung to the belief. Some of us claimed to know that negotiations were underway between Poland and Germany.

I tried to determine our marching direction by the stars in the sky. The stars were much bigger than normal; it was a long time before I realized that they just seemed so big to me because I was without my glasses. We were marching south, almost southwestwards, I thought. So they're already driving us towards the Silesian border. The word ghosted through our column – "armistice" – everyone hoped. Even the groans of those who could barely go on grew fainter.

On the right, a bright glow came over the fields, it flashed brightly, faded, swept back and forth in big curves. A car was approaching on back roads. Was it coming to tell us that we were to be let go? Already we could make out both headlights, now they vanished again behind some bushes, brightened again, went out. We waited; we stumbled on, but we all looked across the field to our right. It remained dark. No light appeared. It remained dark.

Our guards yelled, driving us onward, faster, faster. We dragged ourselves on. Armistice?

To the left of the road, a low garden wall, and rustling treetops above it. We felt the silent peace under the night-darkened park trees. It was a large estate, a manor house. We thought of quiet rooms, of garden paths, of water, sleep. We staggered down the street. The wall seemed never-ending. We stumbled and faltered past. Thirst. Such thirst. Our tongues were gummy, swollen, the dust sat on our lips, in our throats, our lungs.

Suddenly, unrest up ahead. We don't want to hear it. The trees rustle – so soothing. But now the wall has ended. A flashlight blinds us, shines on us, and another one. Lemke, suddenly wide awake, whispers: "Look, there are artillery guns over there!" We listen to a conversation between our guards and a few soldiers. Yes, that's an artillery gun; this is the outpost of an artillery regiment.

We are half asleep and don't understand right away what it means that this is an artillery position. But then someone says it, softly: "we're in the battle zone." They're close, close, they'll catch up to us. No-one says it out loud but everyone thinks it: "they" – that's our soldiers, the German soldiers. We have no other word for them; we need no other word.

After we have left the manor house behind, we see the glow of fire, far off to the left. Houses are burning there! A town is on fire. There's fighting over there. They're close. Some cries come from among our ranks. Whispering. We move closer together, even though our feet ache and burn we tighten our ranks. A shot is fired behind us, another follows right away. One of the Strzelec yells angrily, more and more shots are fired, but it's far back, it's not in our group any more.

Now we also hear a low growling sound, every now and then – it's not frequent, but when it comes the air rumbles and rolls in waves across the open countryside. Artillery fire. Off to the right, to the southwest, we also see the glow of fire now. And from over there as well, we hear the snarling angry rumble, and time and again there is a quickly-fading glow in the sky, like a bright fan opening and closing.

We pass through another town. It's the heart of night, no-one is in the streets. The uneven cobblestones are agony to our worn-down feet. My chafed toes burn like fire, but the Germans are close, our soldiers are close. The Poles are nervous, especially the young ones, you can hear it. Up ahead I hear voices, I can't make out much but I hear threats. Then everyone dozes off again.

Behind the town – it was Krosniewice – we get to rest. We sit down in the ditches, in the damp grass. One asks for water. "Over there," a guard replies. The comrade stands up, looks in the direction indicated. "Is it true? We'll get water there?" "Yes, the lieutenant said so," answers the guard. "It's not far to where the fire is," our comrade tells us, "it's very bright." Now we can see the fire too, we have all stood up to look. It's a red glow on the horizon. But then we sit down again, silent. It was the moon, just rising, glowing like a fire on the horizon. Yes, on the moon, no doubt we'll get water there.

"Behold how the moon rises over the sleeping world," a fervent voice suddenly said from among our ranks, some ten or twelve rows back. "It rises thus over the world every night. And the stars are in the sky and shine down on us as they have done for time immemorial. Trust in the stars, dear brothers, one day we too shall enjoy the peace of eternity..."

There was astonished silence all around. A preacher was speaking. I felt nervous anger rising inside myself. But already a hard voice said from out of the dark: "Someone shut that ass up!" The preacher fell silent.

Three figures, Poles, came down the long row of resting prisoners, searching. They called a name, a guard answered. They went to him. "Where is he? Where?" a horrible voice asked. "That's him, over there!"

"Well, now we've got you, now we'll show you!" one of the Poles screamed in hysterical rage. He must have had some old grudge. We heard a cry, and a dull blow as though a hard object had impacted a human body. A policeman jumped up, screamed at us: "Everyone lie down! You will lie down! Anyone raising his head will be shot!" They surrounded us in the darkness, rifles at the ready, and we could not move... but from up ahead we heard shrieks, a German comrade was screaming, and in between, the words of the Poles, over and over again: "There, take that! And that! And that!" We heard the blows rain down on the victim's body.

Our comrade was reduced to whimpers: "Shoot me dead, why don't you, I was a soldier, shoot me, don't beat me to death like this."

We lay there in the night, in the dark, the stars were high in the sky, the narrow sickle of the moon, I lay facing upwards, on the edge of the ditch, and heard the dull pounding of cudgels and truncheons on the body and arms of a fellow human being, a comrade. It all happened barely ten meters from me. Now they were dragging him off across the field. My ears picked it all up – the sound of the body bumping across the field, through the sugar beets.

"Here's some brush, we'll finish him off here!" they said, out of breath from all their hard work. We heard every word, it clawed into our hearts, all of it, every groan, every whimper and scream and the sound of every punch and blow. And now they were kicking and trampling him.

The stars shone, and the moon; the night breeze wafted across the field. When the order came, we lined up and stumbled on.

After two minutes' marching we had forgotten the incident. My feet burned like fire. I had cut the back of my right shoe open with a knife. It helped a little.

A train rolled up beside and past us on the tracks of the narrow-gauge spur. We had to stop while it crossed the road before us. We leaned against each other and slept. We tottered back and forth, some talked in their sleep, groaned, sighed. I did not sleep. My eyes burned with exhaustion. Lemke too, standing to my left, was awake. Those most exhausted propped themselves on those still awake, on all sides; thus we stood supported by those at the end of their strength; their breath was ours, and we held them up. Up in the sky the moon shone yellow. A bat flitted back and forth above us. Then we began to move again, the way was clear, staggering we walked on. "Marszerowac! Marszerowac!" the guards roared.

Yelling voices carried over to us from one side. The sound of driving cars and carts grew louder by the minute. The crack of whips, human voices, curses, sobbing. We were approaching a major road. On it, a hunted people were fleeing. It was the paved main road from Posen to Warsaw. We pushed our way into the rushing stream. What was going on around us wasn't that important, far more important was that the smooth concrete road was easier on our feet. This was no bumpy cobblestone, no rutted back road with potholes and cart tracks. We no longer needed to lift our feet, we only had to slide them ahead, dragging across the ground. For many, it was what saved them at the last moment.

Cars drove with dimmed or no lights; city carriages piled high with bedding, with boxes, with furniture and baskets under which the people were barely visible; panje carts on which women sat and children slept; bicyclists; pedestrians pushing wheel barrows or baby carriages overloaded with luggage. Infantry columns came towards us, munitions transports, supply cars, horse-drawn, and then the stream of refugees spread out again to take up the entire road. Many of them yelled at us, every now and then we heard a cry of pain, but most of them were too tired, too weary. Those sitting in the cars slept or stared at nothing. Women wept. We were pushed onward.

Ahead of us the sky grew lighter. Dawn approached. Fog rose from the fields. We slept while walking, kept our arms linked left and right, we were tired, so tired. One supported the other. Stübner was seventy-two years old, Heinecke over sixty and with a heart condition, Lehmann-Nitsche over sixty and lame on one leg, Naue still suffered the effects of a head injury a Pole had caused him two years earlier with a fence slat, Milbradt had rheumatism and could barely still hobble along. All of them were held up and supported by the rest of us who were younger, stronger, healthier. None from our group was to be left behind. For we heard the cries from the back of the column, we heard the gunshots and the cursing of the guards; and we knew what it meant. It galvanized us time and again, no, leave no-one behind, no-one. Rehse moaned pitifully to himself; he believed the Poles had it in for him in particular and were coming to get him. "Hide me!" he begged, sobbing, "hide me, don't give me away!" He was already half out of his mind that night.

In the dawn, the hay ricks to the left and right of the road looked like dark mountains.

We crossed railroad tracks. Mills stood to the right. A train station, walls blackened by fire, no roofs left on the buildings, no windows left in the walls, clouds of smoke. A track, a thick iron track, reached up into the sky bent grotesquely into a half-circle. Beside it, a large crater. An iron wheel lay at its bottom. We staggered past.

A town appeared from out of the fog ahead of us. Clouds of smoke drifted over it. We stopped again. There was a head count. We were given some bread, one loaf per sixteen men. The morning cold had awakened us. We were not allowed to have knives, they had been taken from us, but some of us had one anyway. Udo Roth divided our loaf into sixteen equal pieces but no-one could eat his portion. Our mouths could not produce saliva, tongues, lips, throats were parched powder-dry. "Put it in your pockets, we'll get water somewhere and then we can eat it," said Lemke. His pail was empty; he had distributed all his remaining fruit and biscuits during this night's march.

We tottered on, into the town that still lay sleeping, and had to sit down in the market square. We looked around us. Many houses had been knocked down, others were still standing. Somebody said that this was Kutno.

It grew light. The first inhabitants of the town appeared in the basement or main doors or at the windows. And now the howling roar descended on us again; in just a few minutes the square was filled to bursting, always the same curse words, the same threats, the same gestures. Jews, most were Jews. Our heads dropped onto our knees and we slept amidst the raging, roiling fury.

After just an hour, the order came to march on, eastward. The rest had given us new strength, but still, when we were to get up it was like walking over red-hot iron. The first few steps were almost more than we could take. But the guards used cudgels and sticks, we had to help comrades even weaker than ourselves, had to pull them up, support them, drag them on – talk sense kindly or even harshly to those who wanted to be left behind – it helped us get through the first few minutes.

Outside Kutno, a man ten rows ahead of us staggered out of line and fell into the ditch, into the grass. A Strzelec lost his patience, ran over, screamed vile curses, pressed the muzzle of his carbine to the man's head and fired. Without a sound our comrade rolled the rest of the way into the ditch, his face staring upward. The shooter, a young person no older than sixteen, stood beside him as if turned to stone. Suddenly he began to shriek horribly. "I shot him, my God, my God, I shot him, I'm a murderer, Mother of God help me, I shot him!" He staggered away across the field, took a few steps, his voice cracked, he collapsed among the sugar beets, his screams grew duller: "I murdered him, an innocent man, murdered a human being, matka boska, matka boska..."

Other guards ran over and sought to calm the screamer; we marched on, past our comrade's lifeless body. His head lay in a pool of blood. He was wearing a colorful shirt – it was checked green and white – a pair of torn pants, and gray stockings but no shoes. His left hand was cramped around a small bundle of his possessions.

Suddenly a man ran away across the margin of a field. I had not seen him leave our column, I only noticed him when the guards began to shout. They knelt down and shot after the fleeing man. It was senseless to try to escape now – it was broad daylight. He had either wanted to die, or had lost his grip on sanity. A bullet hit him – or was he trying to fool the guards? He fell into a depression in the ground. Two Poles ran over. Two, three, four shots from their carbines. They came slowly back. These two did not shriek in mortification because they had murdered a human being.

"Look up!" a German voice said behind me, not too loudly. "Look up, comrades, above us, look up!" The man barely stifled a sob, but we could hear that it was a sob of joy. Our senses were strangely heightened during these days.

We looked up into the morning sky, we heard the hum above us that became a drone. A German plane raced over us, from the front of the column, the machine was sideways in the air, they looked down on us from their seats up there, they raced along the entire road, along the entire immense length of our column. They had to, yes, they had to see what we were, they had to see the bayonets, the guards on either side of our lines, and also that we ourselves were unarmed. Columns of fleeing Poles looked different, they included panje carts, cars, trucks, they were disorganized, milling, screaming masses. We on the other hand, we walked in strict rows of four. They had to have recognized us. Get help! Tell our people behind the frontlines what you saw, fetch them here, tell them to hurry, three thousand Germans are being hounded to death here, beaten, shot by the wayside, hurry...

None of us spoke a word, no cry tore free, no-one waved. Only our eyes followed his flight path.

There he was again, much higher this time. He flew large circles above us, over and over, he rose higher and higher. From up there he had to be able to see the entire length of our marching column.

Then suddenly he vanished into the blue of the sky. We did not see or hear him again.

"He's gone to report where we are," said someone's voice. Not loudly, but firmly. Had it been me? Or Walter Lemke? Or old man Stübner, who was an ever-unbroken spirit even though his old body was on the verge of collapse? It didn't matter. Everyone thought it: "He's gone to report what he saw here."

It grew hot again. But the visit from the German plane had given us strength. We marched on, and marched on, and on and on and on.

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Long Night's Journey Into Day.
The Death March of Lowicz.

Erhard Wittek