Under the trees they are granted a brief rest, then they enter the first suburban street and march towards the northernmost bridge in Praga. But as they approach the suburb of Praga the Commandant realizes, just in time, that its streets are already a battleground; the barking of the tank guns is clearly to be heard. They are rushed back through already-destroyed streets and finally reach Warsaw proper in the Jewish Quarter of Nalewki. Here the streets are black with caftaned Jews, who soon realize that the new arrivals are a column of deported Germans. Promptly they beat at them furiously with their umbrellas, spit at them in loathing as if in a ritual prayer - and yet their antics strike these seasoned sufferers as almost comic. "We've survived worse!" old man Rausch comments.

He is doing this day's march beside a man who cannot be much younger than himself but who, like Rausch, is still continuing on his way with surprising vigor. "I was friends with a man in Thorn," he says, "who had already gone through the same thing once before in Siberia. I heard he's among our number too. I wonder if he made it."

"Who is he?" Rausch asks him.

"Old man Rausch", says the stranger.

"But that's me!" the old Siberian cries, and adds, "and who are you?"

"I'm Bruck!" says the old man. "You're Rausch?" he then repeats in amazement. "And we're walking side by side here - and don't even recognize each other - though we're really the best of friends?"

"You're Bruck?" Rausch shakes his head, he too can hardly believe it. "That's a good example," he says after a while, "so that's what we poor sots look like, so bad that even our best friends no longer recognize us!" He clears his throat, then continues: "But that we found each other just at the very end, that's nice despite everything, isn't it - because I can't shake the damned feeling that there's something special in store for us yet! But together we can get through that too, don't you think..."

His premonition was correct. For a while they still need to make their way through the Jews; they hardly pay any attention to their shrieks of abuse, some even have to repress chuckles at their behavior. More than anything else, the barefoot prisoners enjoy the asphalt they feel under their tired feet for the first time in what seems like ages. God in Heaven, what a relief it is for their injuries - no more grinding dust, just a wonderfully smooth surface that feels like a cool compress against the soles of their feet. Despite their utter exhaustion they suddenly walk along with new energy; after this strange relief they will no doubt survive the last assault as well.

The Jewish Quarter is behind them, the first barricades appear, and thus begins the final chapter...

The barricades consist of all sorts of vehicles, sometimes of overturned streetcars, often only of stacks of huge crates, and on top of them stand not only Polish soldiers but also crowds of civilians. Already as the deportees move through the first of the narrow passageways that were left open in the center of the barricades, an ear-splitting yelling and screaming begins among those on top.

The same instant projectiles begin to crash down on the prisoners from all sides - a dense hail of rocks, a thousand sharp-edged pieces of wood. The people have lined up with incredible speed at the passageways to make the prisoners run the gauntlet, and strike at them with slats and boards quickly pulled from the roadblocks themselves. The most dangerous blows are those aimed down at the prisoners' heads by the people on top of the barricades.

"Give me your arm, Bruck!" Rausch cries hastily. "If we link arms it's easier, we can each support the other! Wrap your jacket around your other arm and hold it over your head..." The two old men just barely have the time to get ready somewhat before the crowd pulls them through the narrow passage as well. A younger man right in front of them suffers a blow from a soldier, who smashes him in the face with a frying pan so that the blood gushes in a wide stream over his chest, but his comrade helps keep him on his feet at the crucial moment of collapse. The two old men make it past this roadblock without major difficulty; it is not until the third barricade, already deep inside the city, when they can already see the open prison gates, that old Bruck is hit severely over the head.

"Up, man, up!" cries the Siberian. "We're almost there, just stay with me a bit longer, just another twenty steps..." Old Bruck's knees are about to give way when he hears his friend's shout and feels his comrade drag him on with the last of his strength...

"Run!" someone yells. And they do, they actually begin to run one more time - the last surviving five hundred run gasping towards the gate, pump their tired legs once more across the asphalt, whipped along by fear - but a whole number of them are no longer capable of this final exertion and they collapse despite their comrades' help, they collapse under the blows still being rained on them from all sides, their last spark of life goes out in the very face of the beckoning prison gate that would have meant their safety.

In the prison yard of the Dzielna they all drop to the ground, wipe the blood from their battered faces and try to catch their breath. "Well, in any case, we have arrived at the end of our march!" says old Rausch, gasping for air. "There's no way they're going to get us out of here again, since evidently Warsaw is already completely surrounded..."

Most of the others have the same impression, and so their spirits lift surprisingly quickly. If only they're not forced to march any more, everything else will be a hundred times easier to bear! Even if their captors should give them nothing to eat, even if they put them all in dark-cell arrest, as long as they don't have to run any more on their ulcerated feet... After a while they are divided into groups of ten, and all groups are taken to the Women's Prison. The cells there are intended for only three inmates, but nonetheless they are no more crowded there than they were so far. And when there is a real meal in the evening - a liter of soup for each, soup in which it seems some meat had been cooked! - this night strikes them as the best one since their arrest.

The next morning they are taken from their cells again and actually led to a shower. For the first time in weeks they can peel the clothes off their bodies, a bliss that only someone who has ever been in their situation can possibly comprehend! Many of them also take off their shoes here for the first time, for due to the sudden march-outs nobody dared take them off during rest breaks after many had lost theirs in the beginning, during the hasty departures in the dark. And so they return to their cells clean for the first time. The prison staff even took their laundry away, to be washed, and it is to everyone's amazement when they actually receive it back, clean, two days later.

The old marching buddies have managed to get themselves assigned to the same group, and so they are together again in the same cell. Dr. Raapke even has a few cigarettes left, but unfortunately only a tiny number of matches. But when someone finds a pin, one old prisoner immediately knows what to do: He divides each match into four parts with the pin, and so they now also have enough of these for many a day. It is also this same old ethnic German pioneer who helps to while away the endless days by telling his cellmates about other prisons in which he spent long times, with interruptions.

"We can consider ourselves lucky that we were brought here," he says one time. "If we had ended up in Bereza-Kartuska, that infamous Polish concentration camp, they still have methods of punishment there such as we Germans haven't had since the Middle Ages... For example, when someone is sentenced to dark-cell arrest, his underground cell is also filled with a foot of water so that he can't even lie down for days.... If someone commits an offense against a superior, he's tied together with arms and legs at right angles so that a broomstick can be inserted under his elbows and the backs of his knees, and the broomstick is then hung on a tall rack so that the prisoner hangs from it head-down. Then they tie his mouth shut and force water into his nose through a hose until he passes out from the pain, and then they beat him on the raised soles of his feet until he comes to again from the pain, and then the procedure begins all over again... At the interrogations they use an electrification device, they hold one of its contacts to the prisoner's nose and the other to his chin and then they send heavy charges through the device so that it slams the prisoner's jaw shut each time with downright primordial force. Many of them have bitten their tongues off that way..."

The prisoners shudder; some of them get goosebumps. "Truly a nation of culture!" Dr. Raapke finally says. "And I know for a fact that many of us were there, and no doubt there are hundreds there right now who share that same fate..."

Old man Rausch jumps up in agitation and cries, in his impetuous manner: "After all that's happened, who could expect the Germans in the border provinces ever again to live on a close neighborly basis with the Poles? Isn't every Pole in those border regions at the very least a relative of one of those murderers to whom each of us has lost members of our families? And didn't each and every one of them participate in it all, at least mentally and emotionally even if not with their own two hands?"

"You're absolutely right!" Dr. Raapke says decisively. "Nobody can ever again expect that of us. Not only our own people, but the other nations as well, have to acknowledge that! The Bloody Sunday of Bromberg, the starvation death marches, Bereza-Kartuska - with these three monstrosities Poland has cut itself off and made all neighborly coexistence impossible..."

"Do you believe we'll win?" an old man asks timidly.

But Dr. Raapke only smiles, and says with calm certainty: "Who do you think will win? The Poles, perhaps? But a nation that was able to do what was done to all of us can never win honestly, you can take my word for that... And besides, we're going to win for entirely different reasons too, for reasons that are beyond all matters of military potential, beyond all strategies and beyond all blockade theories: There is only one law that applies without exception and always comes into force, and that's the biological one! England is old, France is old, Russia is young, Germany is young - but in the long run it is always the young nations, the revolutionary peoples, that emerge victorious! We are the revolutionary part of the world, and that part will win in any case because in doing so it only complies with natural law - Poland has foolishly thrown its lot in with the old part of the world, and for that reason it will be destroyed, because feudal states must perforce always give way to socialist ones! And after all, this war is not a struggle for power in the traditional sense, it's rather a struggle of the poor nations against the rich, and as an uprising of peoples it's the same thing for the world that the social revolutions of various classes were for individual peoples; just like their struggle for the more just distribution of goods within their national borders, this is the struggle for reorganization among the haves and have-nots on a global scale! In 1918 the reactionary forces, the haves, won one more time but in the long run it is always the revolutionary forces that win, whether they be revolutionary in an intellectual or in a material sense - and in that respect this second world war is not even, in essence, a war, but in a much more decisive respect it is a great revolution!"

They all remained silent for a long time, until at last someone says softly: "Your theory is absolutely correct, and if it were not to come true, history would no longer make sense!"

After the first few days passed quickly, the next begin to drag on and on. At times an odd-job man manages to pass them news from the front, but these are usually so contradictory that it takes a lot of skillful reading between the lines to get at the core of truth in them. Fortunately for the prisoners, they continue to hear the distinct sound of artillery fire; this way at least they know that the German troops are still holding their old positions. Very nearby the prison is a heavy Polish anti-aircraft battery, and from the fact that it is put into action almost hourly they happily deduce constant German air raids. At the same time, however, the presence of this battery is an disadvantage for them in that the German artillery persistently aims for the flashes from its muzzle, which means that heavy 15-grenades detonate regularly in their vicinity.

Initially, the women in the Dzielna have a harder time of it than the men, but they too can finally get themselves cleaned up right after their arrival. A compassionate woman whose clothing barely still reveals that she is a deaconess immediately resumes the chore she has performed so many times before: bandaging the many sore feet. The daughter of a master locksmith is in especially bad shape, and the entire soles of her feet are one seething mass of watery blisters. The deaconess washes them carefully, and gradually the girl's toes reappear from under the filth.

"Oh, what is this," the deaconess suddenly says in surprised alarm and stares at the girl's toe nails, which are a bright, garish red, "could it be blood-poisoning?"

But the girl blushes deeply and says with suspicious haste: "Oh, no, it's nothing..."

At that moment another young woman walks past; her name is Trudy, but everyone calls her "Little Sunshine". She is a "painted woman" well known throughout her home town and was also one of the deportees, but everyone soon honestly came to like her because she did not lose her courage for even a moment. "Would you like a bit more polish to re-paint them?" she laughs. "Despite all that's happened I still have the bottle with me..." And not a few of the other women smile and think, this girl will probably never in her life paint her toenails again!

Already the next day, however, all of them are ordered to report to the laundry room, to launder incredible masses of convict clothing. And there they must stand now in the heat and the steam for twelve hours a day. Some of the laundry is already crawling with worms, while other clothing comes from the field hospitals and is often stiff as a board with dried blood. But even this work has its little joys, such as when they occasionally discover a shirt belonging to a prisoner-of-war, labeled neatly inside: Private Meier... After a week even this work must cease, since the water supply is cut off. That same night they hear wild yelling outside in the streets, and despite some pistol fire things do not calm down again. The following day an odd-job man tells them that there have already been hunger revolts in the city, since there is no more bread to be had in all of Warsaw.

During these days the quality of their rations quickly deteriorates. The first thing to be lost is the soup, then there are no more potatoes either, and finally all they still get is a kind of bean tea, a pale liquid with a few lone beans floating in it. These are also the days that claim the lives of a few more elderly people; the worsening rations virtually knocked them down, and one prisoner dies of dysentery which also suddenly breaks out. By now it has been some fourteen days that they have spent here; in the beginning it was bearable, but nobody will last much longer under these conditions. Again the gnawing hunger makes its appearance, as does the everlasting thirst - no food is supplied to the prison, and the water mains are still broken...

Just as they are about to lose the last of their hope, an incredible bombardment begins. "That's the final phase!" cries Rausch enthusiastically. "Now we just have to get through this, and then Warsaw will be in German hands!"

The old Siberian prisoner was quite correct. For two days thunder crashes all around them, as though the earth were bursting and being reborn. Almost all the window panes explode, and the thick walls vibrate more and more severely. Occasionally one of the grenades also hits the prison, but once again the cellblock in which all the ethnic Germans are imprisoned is spared - not one of the thousands of detonations does any serious damage here. Eventually everyone's eardrums ring to the point that they can no longer hear a word anyone says; some show signs of losing their minds again, and one of them begins to preach: "I am the Lord thy God, I shall deliver thee, so it is written..."

All of a sudden the awesome bombardment ceases, and after one final infernal crescendo dead silence falls. "Now they're overcome, now they're showing the white flag!" the prisoners think. An agony of tension grips them all - what will the next hour bring? But for several hours more, nothing at all happens; then, late in the evening, their cell door is suddenly flung open, and a Colonel stands at the threshold, white-faced. "You are free," he says simply, "you can go..."

Who could possibly describe the reaction to these words? But Dr. Raapke soon calls for common sense and urges the over-eager ones to reconsider and stay until morning. So they spend one more night in their cells and are properly discharged in the morning. Meanwhile, Reverend Dietrich reports to the army headquarters and returns around noon with a Major who is to guide the deportees through the Polish front line. And so they finally march out through the devastated city of Warsaw. All the streets are full of piles of rubble, and some houses look as though they had been blasted from the inside, with only the outside walls left standing. Occasionally they see half-eaten horse cadavers, torn-down streetcar cables above them, and in the old battery positions lie heaps of corpses. Around four o'clock in the afternoon they near the front line at Mokotow; dozens of burned-out tanks lie scattered throughout the surrounding area, and between them, entire rows of battery teams. In the middle of the battlefield they are instructed to wait, while Reverend Dietrich and the Major go on ahead to the German front line.

An hour passes - three hours pass - darkness falls. The deportees crowd together like a herd of sheep, the women in the center. The night grows freezing cold for them in their thin shirtsleeves. The moon rises in silent brightness, and in its light they can see hundreds of returning Polish refugees who were evidently turned back at the front. Since they are huddled on top of a hill, they can see far across the Polish countryside: its sad beauty extends sweepingly to the horizon, broken only occasionally by a pale white birch. In the distance, fog descends quietly over a village, its wretched wooden huts sit on the ground as though cowering timidly in the lap of Mother Earth - but one and the same night sky arches over the watchers as over this village, home to the same yellow moon on its silent passage, and the same stars twinkle on its blackness like silver tears.

Finally, around midnight, the minister returns, everything has been arranged, and now they can start on their final journey. With every hundred meters they put behind them, the battlefield becomes more gruesome. Dozens of white horse cadavers lie everywhere, toppled cannons with gaping muzzles between them, and on top of some of these, overturned gun carriers whose loads of grenades are spilled all around. Stubby chimney remnants are all that remains of the houses that once stood here. Countless burned trucks fill their yards, and the entire area is permeated by such a ghastly smell of decomposition that many women moan softly at the sight of this dreadful scene of destruction.

"Woina na woina!" says the Major who guides the deportees' passage, and shrugs tiredly. "C'est la guerre!" the French would say - "That's war!" Yes, it was - this was war, exactly as they saw it here, to their horror, on their last night-time march to freedom... But this sight not only fills them with dismay, it also announces to them the overwhelming victory, the devastating German victory over Poland to an extent which they had not dared hope for in their wildest dreams.

Finally, as they approach a village, the vanguard sees a troop of soldiers - aren't those German soldiers? And suddenly all sense of marching order is forgotten, the rows spontaneously disband, the entire column breaks into a run...

And then the first of them stand before the soldiers, look at them with staring eyes: the gray uniforms, the brown leathers, the old steel helmets! And a few young girls... throw themselves into the soldiers' arms - break into such unrestrained sobbing... as though they could never stop again.

When Reverend Dietrich took the first head count, he found that one out of every five prisoners in his column had lost their lives on these Polish roads. In and of itself that was not a huge number, but hadn't there been countless other such deportation columns, being similarly herded through the country? And didn't each and every one of them lose hundreds of members, after thousands had already been killed in the cities before? Hadn't the Poles even shot thousands of German soldiers in their army, even though they had always loyally done their duty? Weren't farmers killed behind their plows, mothers while nursing their infants, even children at play?

The fate of a few was discovered. The fate of tens of thousands will never be known. In countless places the vast expanses of this country had become a German graveyard - and Poland's roads are lined for all time by its invisible crosses...

Representatives of the foreign press convince themselves first-hand of the Polish atrocities committed against the ethnic Germans. Background left: Mr. Oechsner of the United Press.

Death in Poland
The Fate of the Ethnic Germans