At the entrance to Bad Polzin, the defenses seemed more solidly organized. Waffen-SS were guarding the road, and a PAK gun, positioned on a hill, covered the approach. Thomas got out of the car to confer with the Untersturmführer commanding the platoon, but he didn’t know anything and referred us to his superior in town, at the command post set up in the old castle. Vehicles and wagons were clogging the streets, the atmosphere was tense, mothers shouted after their children, men brutally pulled the reins of their horses, scolded the French farm workers who were loading the mattresses and the bags of provisions. I followed Thomas into the command post and stayed behind him, listening. The Obersturmführer didn’t know much, either; his unit was attached to the SS Tenth Corps, they had sent him here at the head of a company to hold the main roads; and he thought the Russians would come from the south or from the east—the Second Army, around Danzig and Gotenhafen, was already cut off from the Reich, the Russians had broken through to the Baltic along the Neustettin-Köslin axis, he was almost sure of it—but he guessed the ways leading west were still free. We took the road to Schivelbein. It was a paved highway, long wagons of refugees occupied one full lane, a continuous flow, the same sad spectacle as a month before on the autobahn from Stettin to Berlin. Slowly, at a horse’s pace, the German East was emptying out. There wasn’t much military traffic, but many soldiers, armed or not, walked alone among the civilians, Rückkämpfer who were trying to rejoin their units or find another one. It was cold out, a fierce wind blew through the car’s broken window, bringing wet snow with it. Piontek honked as he passed the wagons; men on foot, horses, livestock congested the road, giving way slowly. We drove alongside fields, then again the road passed through a fir forest. In front of us, wagons were stopping, there was commotion, I heard an enormous, incomprehensible noise, people were yelling and running toward the forest. “The Russians!” Piontek roared.—“Get out, get out!” Thomas ordered. I got out on the left with Piontek: two hundred meters in front of us, a tank was moving swiftly toward us, crushing wagons, horses, straggling fugitives. Terrified, I ran as fast as I could with Piontek and some civilians to hide in the forest; Thomas had crossed through the column to the other side. Beneath the treads of the tank, the carts shattered like matches; the horses died with horrible neighing, cut short by the metallic grinding. Our car was caught from the front, driven back, swept aside, and, in a great racket of crushed sheet metal, thrown into the ditch, on its side. I could make out the soldier perched on the tank, just in front of me, an Asiatic with a pug-nosed face black with engine oil; under his leather tanker’s helmet, he wore little women’s sunglasses, hexagonal with pink rims, and he held in one hand a big machine gun with a round magazine, in the other, perched on his shoulder, a summer parasol, trimmed with lace; his legs apart, leaning against the turret, he straddled the cannon like a horse, absorbing the impacts of the tank with the ease of a Scythian rider guiding a nervy little horse with his heels. Two other tanks with mattresses or mesh springs attached to their sides followed the first one, finishing off under their treads the crippled screaming and wriggling among the debris. The whole passage took a dozen seconds at most; they continued on toward Bad Polzin, leaving in their wake a wide band of wood shards mixed with blood and crushed flesh in pools of horse intestines. Long trails left by the wounded who had tried to crawl to shelter reddened the snow on both sides of the road; here and there, a man writhed, without any legs, howling; on the road there were headless torsos, arms emerging from a red, vile pulp. I was trembling uncontrollably, Piontek had to help me get back to the road. Around me people were screeching, gesticulating, others stayed motionless and in a state of shock, the children let out endless, piercing cries. Thomas quickly rejoined me and searched through the wreckage of the car to retrieve the map and a little bag. “We’ll have to continue on foot,” he said. I made a dazed gesture: “And the people…?”—“They’ll have to manage,” he cut in. “We can’t do anything. Come on.” He made me cross the road again, Piontek following. I was careful not to step on human remains, but it was impossible to avoid the blood, my boots left big red tracks in the snow. Beneath the trees, Thomas unfolded the map. “Piontek,” he ordered, “go search through those carts, find us something to eat.” Then he studied the map. When Piontek returned with some provisions tied up in a pillowcase, Thomas showed the map to us. It was a large-scale map of Pomerania, it indicated the main roads and the villages, but not much more. “If the Russians came from there, then they’ve taken Schivelbein. They must also be heading up toward Kolberg. We’ll go north, try to reach Belgarde. If our people are still there, fine; if not we’ll see. By avoiding the roads we should be all right: if they’re moving so fast, it means their infantry is still far behind.” He pointed to a village on the map, Gross Rambin: “The railroad passes here. If the Russians haven’t reached it yet, we might find something.”
We quickly crossed the forest and took to the fields. The snow was melting on the plowed earth, we sank into it up to our calves; between each plot of land ran rivulets full of water bordered with barbed-wire fences, not tall but hard to pass. Then we traveled on little dirt paths, also muddy, but easier, which we had to leave whenever we approached villages. It was tiring, but the air was brisk and the countryside deserted and quiet; on the roads, we walked at a good pace, Thomas and I a little ridiculous in our dress uniforms with our legs all smeared with mud. Piontek carried the supplies; our only weapons were our two service pistols, Lüger automatics. Near the end of the afternoon, we reached Rambin and paused in a small grove of beech and ash trees. It was snowing again, a wet, sticky snow that the wind blew into our faces. A little river flowed on our right; to our left, a little farther on, we could make out the railroad and the first houses. “We’ll wait for nightfall,” Thomas said. I leaned back against a tree, pulling the folds of my coat under me, and Piontek handed us hard-boiled eggs and sausages. “I couldn’t find any bread,” he said sadly. Thomas pulled out of his bag the little bottle of brandy he had taken from me and offered us each a swig. The sky was darkening, the snow flurries were beginning again. I was tired and fell asleep against the tree. When Thomas woke me my coat was dusted with snow and I was stiff from the cold. There was no moon, no light came from the village. We followed the edge of the wood up to the railroad, then walked in the dark in single file along the embankment. Thomas had taken out his pistol and I imitated him, without really knowing what I’d do with it if we were surprised. Our footsteps crunched on the snowy gravel between the tracks. The first houses, dark and silent, appeared to the right of the rails, near a large pond; the little train station at the entrance to the village was locked; we stayed on the tracks to pass through the hamlet. Finally we could put our pistols away and walk more easily. The track bed was slippery and crumbled beneath our feet, and the spacing of the ties kept us from walking at a normal pace along the tracks; at last, one by one, we left the embankment and walked alongside it in the virgin snow. A little farther on, the tracks once again went through a large pine forest. I felt tired, we’d been walking for hours, I wasn’t thinking about anything, my head remained void of any idea or any image, all my effort went into my footsteps. I was breathing heavily, and along with the crunching of our boots on the wet snow it was one of the only sounds I heard, a haunting sound. A few hours later, the moon rose behind the pines, not quite full; it cast patches of white light on the snow through the trees. Later still, we reached the edge of the forest. Beyond a large plain, a few kilometers in front of us, a yellow light danced in the sky and we could make out the crackle of guns, hollow, muffled explosions. The moon illuminated the snow on the plain and I could make out the black line of the railroad, the bushes, the little scattered woods. “They must be fighting around Belgarde,” Thomas said. “Let’s sleep a little. If we approach now, we’ll get shot by our own men.” Sleeping in the snow wasn’t very appealing to me; with Piontek, I gathered some dead branches together to form a nest, rolled myself up in a ball, and fell asleep.