I say: “We are German airmen who have made a forced landing,” whereupon their faces darken and at the same moment I have the three muzzles of their weapons pointing at my chest. The young one instantly grabs my holster and pulls out my 6.35. They have been standing with their backs to the sun. I have had it in my eyes. Now I take a good look at them. Hammer and sickle—ergo Russians. I do not contemplate for a second being taken prisoner, I think only of escape. There is a hundred to one chance of pulling it off. There is probably a good price on my head in Russia, my capture is likely to be even better rewarded. To blow my brains out is not a practical consideration. I am disarmed. Slowly I turn my head round to see if the coast is clear. They guess my intention and one of them shouts “Stoi!” (Halt!) I duck as I make a double turn and run for it, crouching low and swerving to right and left. Three shots crack out; they are followed by an uninterrupted rattle of quick fire. A stinging pain in my shoulder. The chap with the Tommy-gun has hit me at close range through the shoulder, the other two have missed me.
I sprint like a hare, zig-zagging up the slope, bullets whistling above and below me, to right and to left. The Ivans run after me, halt, fire, run, fire, run, fire, run. Only a short while ago I believed I could hardly put one leg in front of the other, so stiff was I with cold, but now I am doing the sprint of my life. I have never done the 400 yards in faster time. Blood spurts from my shoulder and it is an effort to fight off the blackness before my eyes. I have gained fifty or sixty yards on my pursuers; the bullets whistle incessantly. My only thought: “Only he is lost who gives himself up for lost.” The hill seems interminable. My main direction is still into the sun in order to make it more difficult for the Ivans to hit me. I am dazzled by the glare of the sun and it is easy to miscalculate. I have just had a lesson of that. Now I reach a kind of crest, but my strength is giving out and in order to stretch it still further I decide to keep to the top of the ridge; I shall never manage any more up and down hill. So away at the double southward along the ridge.
I cannot believe my eyes: on the hill top twenty Ivans are running towards me. Apparently they have seen everything and now mean to round up their exhausted and wounded quarry. My faith in God wavers. Why did He first allow me to believe in the possible success of my escape? For I did get out of the first absolutely hopeless comer with my life. And will He now turn me over unarmed, deprived of my last weapon, my physical strength? My determination to escape and live suddenly revives. I dash straight downhill, that is, down the opposite slope to that by which I came up. Behind me, two or three hundred yards away, my original pursuers, the fresh pack to one side of me. The first trio has been reduced to two; at the moment they cannot see me, for I am on the far side of the hill. One of them has stayed behind to bring in my two comrades who stood still when I took to my heels. The hounds on my left are now keeping a parallel course, also running down hill, to cut me off. Now comes a ploughed field; I stumble and for an instant have to take my eyes off the Ivans. I am dead tired, I trip over a clod of earth and lie where I have fallen. The end cannot be far off. I mutter one more curse that I have no revolver and therefore not even the chance to rob the Ivans of their triumph in taking me prisoner. My eyes are turned towards the Reds. They are now running over the same ploughland and have to watch their step. They run on for another fifteen yards before they look up and glance to the right where I am lying. They are now level with me, then diagonally in front, as they move forward on a line 250 yards away. They stop and look about them, unable to make out where I can have got to. I lie flat on the slightly frozen earth and scratch myself with my fingers into the soil. It is a tough proposition; everything is so hard. The miserable bits of earth I manage to scrape loose I throw on top of me, building up a fox-hole. My wound is bleeding, I have nothing to bandage it with; I lie prone on the ice cold earth in my soaking wet clothes; inside me I am hot with excitement at the prospect of being caught at any moment. Again the odds are a hundred to one on my being discovered and captured in less than no time. But is that a reason to give up hope in the almost impossible, when only by believing that the almost impossible is possible can it become so?
There now, the Russians are coming in my direction, continually lessening the distance between us, each of them searching the field on his own, but not yet methodically. Some of them are looking in quite the wrong direction; they do not bother me. But there is one coming straight towards me. The suspense is terrible. Twenty paces from me he stops. Is he looking at me? Is he? He is unmistakably staring in my direction. Is he not coming on? What is he waiting for? He hesitates for several minutes; it seems an eternity to me. From time to time he turns his head a wee bit to the right, a wee bit to the left; actually he is looking well beyond me. I gain a momentary confidence, but then I perceive the danger once more looming large in front of me, and my hopes deflate. Meanwhile the silhouettes of my first pursuers appear on the ridge, apparently, now that so many hounds are on the scent, they have ceased to take their task seriously.
Suddenly at an angle behind me I hear the roar of an aeroplane and look up over my shoulder. My Stuka squadron is flying over the Dniester with a strong fighter escort and two Fieseler Storches. That means that Flt./Off. Fischer has given the alarm and they are searching for me to get me out of this mess. Up there they have no suspicion that they are searching in quite the wrong direction, that I have long since been six miles further south on this side of the river. At this distance I cannot even attract their attention; I dare not so much as lift my little finger. They make one circuit after another at different levels. Then they disappear heading east, and many of them will be thinking: “This time even he has had it.”
They fly away—home. Longingly I follow them with my eyes. You at least know that tonight you will sleep under shelter and will still be alive whereas I cannot guess how many minutes more of life will be granted me. So I lie there shivering. The sun slowly sets. Why have I not yet been discovered?
Over the brow of the hill comes a column of Ivans, in Indian file, with horses and dogs. Once again I doubt God’s justice, for now the gathering darkness should have given me protection. I can feel the earth tremble under their feet. My nerves are at snapping point. I squint behind me. At a distance of a hundred yards the men and animals file past me. Why does no dog pick up my scent? Why does no one find me? Shortly after passing me they deploy at two yards’ intervals. If they had done this fifty yards sooner they would have trodden on me. They vanish in the slowly falling dusk.
The last glow of evening yields to blue, feebly twin kling stars appear. My compass has no phosphorescent dial, but there is still light enough to read it. My general direction must remain the south. I see in that quarter of the sky a conspicuous and easily recognizable star, with a little neighbor. I decide to adopt it as my lodestar. What constellation in the Russian firmament can it be? It is growing dark and I can no longer see anybody. I stand up, stiff, aching, hungry, thirsty. I remember my chocolate—but I left it in my fur jacket on the bank of the Dniester. Avoiding all roads, footpaths, villages, as Ivan is sure to have sentries posted there, I simply follow my star across country, up hill and down dale, over streams, bogs, marshes and stubbly harvested maize fields. My bare feet are cut to ribbons. Again and again in the open fields I stub my toes against big stones. Gradually I lose all feeling in my feet. The will to live, to keep my freedom, urges me on; they are indivisible; life without freedom is a hollow fruit. How deep is Ivan’s penetration of our front? How far have I still to travel? Wherever I hear a dog bark I make a detour, for the hamlets hereabouts are certainly not inhabited by friends. Every now and again I can see gun-flashes on the distant horizon and hear a dull rumble; evidently our boys have started an artillery bombardment. But that means the Russian break-through has gone far. In the gullies which cut through the occasionally rising ground I often lose my footing in the darkness and slump into a ditch where the gluey mud stands knee-deep. It sucks me in so tightly that I have no longer the strength to pull myself out, and flop with the upper part of my body sprawled on the bank of the ditch—my legs deep in slime. Thus I be exhausted, feeling like a battery gone dead.