Uprooted: Part XIX -- Escape

These Saturday blog entries have been devoted to a serial novel titled Uprooted, a story about Ralph Kand, a young crippled man from Estonia during those difficult and challenging years from 1939-1945. It's a story of alienation, and of the relentless pursuit of freedom and a homeland.

Escape

Blankets of snow had descended on Schrunz making the mountains more beautiful than ever. The ski resorts remained operational but there was no bustle of enthusiasm in the town for what was happening. Ralph continued to set up his speakers and pour strains of Finlandia and Beethoven up the mountainsides when he was able, leaning into the balcony raining sucking his black cigarettes, lost in it all.

During his time here he had found others from Eastern Europe who were not enthusiastic about the approaching Red Army. And as luck would have it they managed to find a guide who promised to lead them through the mountains into Switzerland. It would cost them nearly all their savings but Ralph was willing to pay that price for the freedom he longed for and prepared for yet another exodus, this one a treacherous trek through the mountains.

"We have to go at night," their guide told them, "and it should be when there is cloud cover. The moon can make it bright as day in the thinner air of the slopes."

There were eleven who had been given instructions to meet at a lodgeon the westernmost part of town, but only nine had arrived -- a family of five, a young couple, Ralph and an older man who looked tired.

"My sisters were afraid," he said. "They're not coming."

Ralph mumbled a disparaging remark under his breath and shook his head.

Their guide was a wiry, grim-faced man in a white parka. He looked at the small company of followers and noted that none were dressed in white. "Thank God there's no moon tonight," he said. He then held out his hand toward Ralph.

"What."

"The others have paid already."

Ralph pulled an envelope from his pocket. "It's all there," he said with little enthusiasm.

"Time to go,"  the guide announced. Then looking at Ralph again, "You up for this?"

"I've been dragging this bum leg my whole life. Since I was three. I can probably climb better than you. And I'm a helluva skier."

The guide trudged forward without comment  and the party followed his lead. Every now and then he would pause to let the laggards catch up.The young couple from Lithuania was surprisingly slow on the climb.

The children in the group were young teens and seemed hardy enough but when they began chattering the guide hushed them and said it was imperative that they not make noise.

The trail they were on came to a ridge and their guide quietly gave instructions to be still, that there was a road they would have to cross. He would go forward and make sure all was clear. Ralph had a bad feeling about this but could do nothing and let it play out. The guide's head appeared between two mounds of snow and he ushered them forward with a eave of his hand.

"Hurry," he whispered harshly.

The group crossed the road and found a trail across the road up through the trees. The mountain continued to rise with menacing steepness. Nearly everyone was breathing deeply now, and pauses became increasingly frequent.

"Can we stop for a bit?" the Lithuanian man asked.

"Do you want to turn back?" their guide replied.

There was no response.

"Stay here," the guide commanded quietly. I will see how far we are from the crest. There's another road to cross up ahead. 

The Latvian family was huddled together for warmth beneath a network of branches amidst the trees. Ralph, wonderin how there could still be road this far up the mountain, began shivering against the cold. He didn't have a parka nor a family to press against.

Just then the silhouette of a man appeared from above, but it was not their guide in the white parka and Ralph saw that he was holding a rifle. The other man with neither family nor spouse immediately broke into a run down through the trees. The rifle barked twice and the man fell forward into the snow.

The soldier shouted something in German and Ralph knew there was nothing to do but go along with it. Two more soldiers appeared to lead the group up to the ridge where two vehicles wearing Nazi insignias were waiting.


CONTINUED

Uprooted: Part XVII (Another Dark Day)

These Saturday blog entries have been devoted to a serial novel titled Uprooted, a story about Ralph Kand, a young crippled man from Estonia during those difficult and challenging years from 1939-1945. It's a story of alienation, of the relentless pursuit of freedom and a homeland.

Another Dark Day

The days were getting shorter and snow began to fall. The mountains were spectacular. The room where he stayed behind the resort opened onto a balcony and Ralph had put extra-long wires on the speakers that ran to his record player so that he could place them outside facing the mountainous slopes that swooped down into Schrunz. Then, he would put on Beethoven, full volume. The effect could never be reproduced in any other setting. In this manner Ralph, sipping his vodka, would escape the war, the pain, the insanities of the time and drift up into those ethereal spaces.

There had always been pressure to work longer hours, but one day an edict came that the paperwork must be fully brought up to date. This was not directly given to Ralph but Kapinsky, his supervisor, was unable to conceal his distress. "What they want is impossible."

The day came that two German officers arrived with instructions from higher ups to get the paperwork current. Kapinsky returned to the accounting offices wearing a frown. Ralph saw it immediately and asked what was going on.

"You can see how far behind we are on the paperwork."

"So, we're getting more help?" Ralph said.

"Actually, yes," Kapinsky said flatly. He then went on to say they needed to organize everything so it could be transported to another place.

Ralph looked puzzled but Kapinsky said nothing more about it other than that Ralph would have to be there early the next day, five a.m. sharp.

The following morning Ralph arrived at the accounting office where he was met by two Nazi soldiers. He was instructed to load the jeep with the boxes he had assembled with Kapinsky the day before. It was all very strange, and in the pre-dawn chill there was a special ominous quality to it.

In the back seat of the jeep, with boxes stacked behind and beside him, they wove their way down through the mountainous terrain as the sky slowly shifted from black to grey. Neither German answered when he asked where they were going. For more than two hours they drove in silence, the terrain eventually becoming rolling hills. The sun never showed its face that day but Ralph correctly guessed they had been heading north when they passed a border crossing. Roadsides indicated that they were in Bavaria.

The vehicle stopped again at another checkpoint and Ralph noticed an immense stretch of walls and barbed wire fencing. At various points along the wall there were watchtowers. The jeep bumped across a set of railroad tracks and paused at yet another barrier where the Germans had to show their papers. A guard pointed to a walled in lane into which the jeep crept slowly. Finally, they came to a small paved lot where numerous other vehicles were parked. A soldier came out to greet them.

Ralph and the soldiers carried the boxes into a brick building with numerous spacious rooms and down through a corridor to a room with a long table at which were seated gaunt men wearing striped prison garb. Ralph was shocked at their appearance, and totally unprepared for the hateful stares he received from these emaciated men. After the boxes were placed on the tables, a cart with boxes of ledger books was rolled in.

An officer entered the room and the German soldiers stood at attention. The officer then explained to Ralph that these men were Jewish bankers who were there to help him get the books in order. The project he was working on was extreme importance to der Führer. There would be a meal at noon, the men were told.

The soldiers left and Ralph presented the boxes to the men around the table. He did not know where he was and did not know how to talk about it with these men who identified him with the Nazis who brought him there.

The paperwork was sorted and by noon a fair amount of progress had been achieved when the doors opened and the food was delivered. To Ralph the portions were modest but the men assigned to help him behaved as if it were a banquet. Ralph, who was seated there amongst them as if one of them, became uncomfortable when he noticed that everyone in the room had ceased talking and was staring in his direction. He noticed their gazes were not at him, however, but at his plate. It puzzled him until he realized the plates in front of the others were licked clean and his still contained the peelings of his potato.

"Aren't you going to eat that?" one of the bankers asked.

"Potato skins are bitter. I don't eat the peelings."

The men continued to stare.

"You want this?"

The man across from Ralph stretched his arm across the table toward Ralph's plate. The man alongside pushed the arm away and a third hand reached from Ralph's left to grab the unwanted peels. Ralph let it happen and there was a rush a cursing from others at the table when that man scarfed it up without sharing.

That afternoon as the bankers helped Ralph organize the ledgers and spreadsheets, Ralph pondered the meaning of these things. It was very late that evening when the jeep returned to Schrunz. At the time, he never understood where he had been and only later learned he'd been to Dachau.

CONTINUED

Uprooted: Schrunz (Part XVI)

These Saturday blog entries have been devoted to a serial novel titled Uprooted, a story about Ralph Kand, a young crippled man from Estonia during those difficult and challenging years from 1939-1945. It's a story of alienation, of the relentless pursuit of freedom and a homeland.

As the Red Army approached Tallin, capitol of Estonia, Ralph secured a spot on the very last boat of exiles fleeing that country in the fall of 1944. When the overcrowded vessel neared Gdansk, a Nazi patrol boat brought them to port where they were placed in a refugee camp. When he and another man slipped away during the night they continued west by train. When they reached Prague, Ralph's travel companion chose to remain there for a time, but Ralph himself felt impelled to continue west. Eventually he reached the town of Schrunz at the westernmost edge of Austria, separated from neutral Switzerland by the spectacular and imposing Alps.

It may be of interest to some readers that in the early 1920s Schrunz was the favorite ski resort town of Ernest Hemingway who wintered there with his first wife, Hadley, and oldest son, who was then just an infant. It was in Schrunz that he revised the manuscript of The Sun Also Rises.

Schrunz

Ralph arrived in late October. Schrunz is the primary village in the Montafaron Valley. A cold rain had been falling for three days straight. Ralph took refuge at one of the local pubs as a means of staying out of the weather and also to make necessary connections.

By the end of his first night in Schrunz he'd learned several hard truths. First, there would be no passage through the Alps without encountering Nazi border patrols. This would be as far west as he could go. Second, unless one had a job one could not obtain a food ticket. The Nazis needed every available hand to contribute to the war effort, whether by labor or on the front.

Finding a room to let was an easier task than expected. Schrunz, being a ski resort town in the winter, had been hard hit by the war. Tourism revenue had fallen off a cliff. As a result there was an ample supply of rooms for lodging. By the end of the first week he'd decided on a small room that faced the mountains in the rear of a chalet on the north side of the valley, a fabulous view. The room was tidy and clean, and Frau Marsden who ran the place seem congenial enough.

There were several places in town to meet locals for idle chatter and information. Ralph had learned German during the Nazi occupation and was now finding it useful.

The pub where Ralph felt most comfortable was the Blue Moon. The Nazis had a cement works operation near Schrunz and many of the men and women in town worked there in one capacity or another. Some of these men were regulars at the Blue Moon. Two of these whom Ralph got to know were a Frenchman named Carpentier and a Czech named Kapinski.

Carpentier, a road builder from Paris, met and married his Austrian wife several years before the war. When the fighting broke out she asked him to bring her back to Austria to be near her aging mother.

Kapinski was an accountant who grew up outside Prague. When plans for the hydroelectric plant near Schrunz were being assembled, German officials recruited him to be a team member. At first he thought the notion insane to built a hydroelectric facility here in the middle of nowehre. But once on the scene he understood. The steep terrain would be ideal for advanced power generation.

Ralph never intended to settle down, but now he felt trapped. Unable to travel further west he found himself resigned to his beautiful cage. When Kapinski and Carpentier came in together that evening they immediately invited him to pull up a chair at their table.

"Ah, if it isn't the Estonian," Kapinski said, waving his hand as if pulling handfuls of air toward him.

Ralph moved across the room, grabbed a chair in a manner that caused Carpentier to grin. Both men were much older than Ralph. They found his exuberance entertaining. They also liked him because he had new stories to tell, and he was able to drink heavily without becoming stupid.

"I've decided to stay," Ralph said. "Now I need a job."

"What can you do?" asked the Czech.

"I'm a fast typist. And I'm good with numbers."

"That's good," said Kapinski. "We need help with the paperwork at the cement works. I'm in the accounting office."

"He's head accountant."

Ralph glanced at Carpentier, studied Kapinski, then looked past to catch a glimpse of the waitress gliding past a table near the wall. "Fraulein!" Ralph shouted. "Drinks all around for my friends."

"Irma," Kapinski said. "She calls herself Irma."

* * * *

Working again was good for Ralph. The paperwork was endless because all the healthy men had been extracted and put into uniforms. He never learned Kapinski's malady but when he saw that Carpentier was missing part of his hand he wondered that he hadn't noticed sooner. Carpentier was skillful in the manner in which he concealed it.

As winter set in the mountains were idyllic. His room at the chalet was just over a mile from the cement works office. Most days it was an pleasant walk, the snow-capped mountains rising up to kiss the sky. The offices were not so aesthetically welcoming. Boxes of papers were everywhere, piled in the corners and around the base of the walls. Loose sheafs of paper covered every surface in the room. The work was important enough that German soldiers would be brought in to keep them "motivated."

Some days they were instructed to stay late, but it seemed impossible task make real headway as the problem was staffing. They needed more accountants.

"What we need is shredders," Carpentier said one evening at the Blue Moon. "Wouldn't it be funny to discover that our failure to keep up with the paperwork was actually damaging the Nazi war effort?

Ralph asked why the rooms are just barely above fifty degrees. "If it were any colder my coffee would get ice on it."

"They're saving fuel. Heat uses energy. It's all physics," Kapinski said. "Last year we sometimes had to wear gloves in the office."

"You're lucky you don't have to work on that hydroelectric project. Those men are out in the cold from dawn to late. And I mean very late."

Ralph had sometimes walked to the project during his lunch break and watched as they poured concrete, studied the network of pipes, handles, gauges and general construction debris. He had been impressed by their industriousness, and the scale of the pipelines.

CONTINUED