The prisoners are forced into a narrow space between the walls of two destroyed factory halls whose window panes have all fallen out, whose floor is covered partly with liquid tar, partly with large chunks of sharp-edged coke fuel. Here they are permitted to sit down, shoulder to shoulder, back to back, as they are used to sitting by now. Civilians wearing armbands stumble around among them and inform them, amid curses, of the rules of this camp: "Anyone who approaches the barbed wire will be shot immediately. Anyone who leaves the spot assigned to him will also be shot!" "A straight-forward camp order!" says Consul Wenger bitterly. He is a German consul, an old Privy Councillor, and has a diplomat's passport - but what good is international law to this old gentleman here; he is driven across the country like everyone else.

In the evening all the deportees are suddenly sorted according to the color of their arrest tickets. This gives rise to vague concern for some - could it be that the holders of tickets of a certain color are going to be shot here? But after this sorting has gone on for hours, everyone is suddenly chased back to their old places in no particular order at all. Nobody has thought to provide any food for these four thousand human beings, but they are given something to drink once before nightfall. The night itself passes quickly, even though the prisoners are bitterly cold in just their shirt sleeves, but this time they at least have fresh air to breathe, and only sharp stones underneath them rather than hot manure.

March-out is very early the next morning, and the four thousand are all herded out together. The destination is Chodzen, a small country town full of Jews. These too curse the prisoners to no end, while others offer them goods for sale. For a while they can make some purchases from these, until suddenly the strelzi drive all of them away with much yelling - and shortly thereafter they offer the Jews' wares to the prisoners themselves, though now at twice the price. Did they simply take the goods from the Jews, or did they buy them from them in order to profit their own pockets - what do the starving deportees care, at least they can still buy a bite to eat!

After this short stay they march on without stop until just beyond Kutno, the occasional air raid being their only opportunities to catch their breath. During one such raid they happen to lie near a well, and those closest to it can hear its gurgling stream of water. Almost all of them close their eyes so as to hear this wonderful sound even more clearly, all open their parched lips in longing.

"If we could hold on to this, this gratitude for just a sip of water, what more evil could possibly befall us for the rest of our lives?" Adelt suddenly says, in his straightforward manner.

"Don't worry," says Dr. Kohnert skeptically, "it'll all be forgotten again!"

They march on for ten hours, they march on for eighteen hours, they march on for twenty-four hours. Just as for the deportees from Thorn, this is the last great forced march, intended to avoid encirclement at the last instant. One more time the prisoners' torment grows to unspeakable severity, time and again the foremost rows thin as one after the other falls back to the rear. In the fifteenth hour of the march they begin to drop in huge numbers, and even Dr. Staemmler is beginning to lose the last of his strength, though he still patrols the column up and down, rendering assistance wherever he can, while the strelzi often beat him severely for it, despite the agreement to the contrary.

"My tongue feels like a piece of wood in my mouth!" even the indomitable Dr. Kohnert finally says. It is the first and only time he says such a thing.

"I'm beginning to see sparks!" admits burly Adelt.

"I'm gagging, as though I had to throw up..." says young Gersdorff softly.

In the twentieth hour of the march an old minister, who so far had miraculously survived everything, also dies. He sinks slowly to his knees, folds his hands and gazes over the wide countryside that is spread out in mournful beauty before him. "I don't want to go on," he whispers with white lips, "please, call me home now!" And he adds, almost bashfully: "Forgive me these words, oh Lord, but Your Earth is not beautiful..." He closes with the words: "For fifty years I have served You... but now I no longer understand You... why did You, in Your goodness, create such people?" And at these words the rifle butt strikes him, his white head of curls turns suddenly red, then two guards grab him by the legs and drag him into the ditch...

The roads are still dominated by troop movements, some coming towards them and some passing them at breakneck speed. Since the roads are hopelessly overcrowded, the prisoners usually have to march beside them on the fields, and the dust clouds from the light soil rise to mountainous proportions. Once they pass very close by some plowing farmers who, strangely, do not curse at them but look them in the eyes with great sadness. "Those are Germans!" one of the prisoners says incautiously. And already one of the strelzi has heard him, whips around, yanks his rifle up, shrieks in a shrill voice: "What's that you say - still more Germans? And not here with you, not prisoners?" Shots ring out. One of the farmers falls across his plow, the panicked horses drag him wildly away across the field. The other farmer falls in the furrow, his legs twitch a few more times before he slowly stretches out on the soil...

Great confusion reigns in Kutno. What a contrast to the slogans that scream boastfully from almost every wall: "Every threshold is a fortress!" "Every house is a Polish stronghold!" "Every Polish child is a hero!" In truth there is little left to be seen of such heroism - it all degenerated into an orgy of Slavic sadism long ago! At the corner of a house decorated in this manner, two prisoners suddenly jump in front of a truck; they too do not want to go on, they too prefer a quick death to an evidently endless martyrdom. The truck rolls over them with a sharp crunching sound and drags both of them along for a short distance, but at least they do not die under the blows of rifle butts...

After twenty-four hours of marching they get their first real rest; on the Starawies estate everyone is permitted to lie down for four hours in a barn. They do not get anything to eat here either, but at least everyone receives enough to drink. They all lie on the ground gasping for breath, many of them are seized with heart spasms - whole rows of them die of exhaustion here, flickering out like tired candle flames. Wasn't this one over here just talking to his neighbor? Now he suddenly stretches out with a sigh while his eyes glaze with a milky veil...

When the march resumes at four o'clock in the afternoon, the entire barn floor is dotted with black lumps, but the strelzi first walk up to these lumps, stab their bayonets into each one just to be sure... The estate's farmhands are ordered to bury the dead that very same hour. It seems that they have buried one while he was still alive, since the soil dumped on him still moves for a long time afterwards; another one is dispatched when they slice his belly open as though butchering a pig, tear his intestines out and stuff a dead dog inside him instead.

Once more the abductees must march without rest for eighteen hours, and now their ranks thin even more than before. Time and again they must shuffle to make up their number per row again. "The Pole just collapsed," whispers Dr. Staemmler when he returns to the front of the column. "You remember him, he stood by the side of the street in one of the towns we passed through and was the only one to show disapproval of how the crowd treated us, and so they simply pushed him into our midst. 'But I'm a Pole!' he kept yelling. 'If you stand up for the Germans you're no better than they are!' he was told. All his pleading did him no good, and so he had to march on with us to this day - well, just now he ended under a blow from a rifle butt exactly like so many of us..."

Strangely enough, the column can still cross the Bzura on a bridge - probably because they are crossing this river farther to the south. As the vanguard has reached the middle of the bridge, one of the men walking in the first row suddenly leaps out of line and jumps off the bridge, seven meters down into the water. A whole handful of guards instantly fires at him, but not one manages to hit his target - who wasn't trying to escape anyway, all he wants is a drink. And so this seventy-year-old farmer, Koerber, calmly rejoins the end of the column after he has drunk his fill from his hat.

Are we going to get through? Will the Commandant manage to get us through? is gradually becoming the only thought buzzing through the heads of the three thousand. The Commandant himself shows no signs of concern. He rides alongside the column on his bicycle as always. But as of yesterday he has dreamed up a new form of devilry, whose fiendishness the prisoners do not realize for quite some time. More and more frequently the Commandant rides up to one marching in the column, suddenly puts his arm around his shoulders, very friendly, and strikes up a pleasant conversation with him. "Well, how are you holding out?" he says with a smile.

"Oh, thanks, Commandant, I'm managing all right..." The prisoner freezes inside - could it be that the Germans...?

The Commandant puts his arm ever more tightly around the prisoner's neck while at the same time driving more slowly - so that his victim has no choice but to slow down, to fall back more and more from his row, to let the rest of the column pass him. "And do you have any children?" the Commandant continues.

"Two, Commandant, two boys..."

"No doubt you're looking forward to seeing them again?" he asks, smiling.

"And how!" says the German disingenuously. He feels the Commandant's arm ever more heavily around his neck - what's the meaning of this, he thinks with growing bewilderment.

But already they've arrived at the end of the column, and the Commandant abruptly draws his arm back and with pinched lips he calls out to the rear guard: "Away with him..."

It takes no more than that for the German to understand. "Oh," he has just enough time left to cry, before he falls...

The Commandant, however, quickly cycles back to the front, skims the rows with narrow eagle eyes, chooses another one around whose shoulders to put his arm, and says in a tone of warmth and sincerity: "Well, how are you holding out?"

And begins to drive more slowly...

It takes four hours for the deportees to see through this new method, and from that point on everyone follows the bicycle's progress with staring eyes. "Is he coming for me... for God's sake... is he looking at me?" Many already begin to tremble when they just see him from afar.

"Everyone put their glasses away!" the message passes quietly from row to row. "It seems he's only choosing people who wear glasses, he's probably hoping to wipe out the educated ones among us," whisper the prisoners to each other, "since in Poland wearing glasses is already enough to be considered educated!"

When they already see Lowitsch in the distance, they also hear the first machine gun fire - artillery fire has already thundered around them for hours and they have long grown used to the howling of the shells. The pace they are expected to keep up is growing more and more unbearable; even Dr. Staemmler is beginning to stagger, and gradually even the strongest start to hallucinate. Suddenly, courageous Adelt suddenly cries loudly, "czolo stac" - and in the very next moment everyone is flat in the dirt in the field. It is the Polish command for "vanguard stop"; in the general confusion nobody notices that this time the order was given by a German. By the time the counter-order comes, they have all spent a few minutes lying down, and even these minutes were enough to preserve some of them from imminent collapse.

An hour later they reach the city of Lowitsch and stop near the barracks, while grenades crash explosively into the houses all around. The Commandant leaves to make inquiries, and most of the guards follow him. They remain at this rest stop amid the artillery fire for half an hour until suddenly some policemen chase them on. "The Commandant isn't with them any more!" the whispered news travels through their rows. "Maybe we've been encircled after all, maybe he's taken to his heels...?"

The policemen lead them out to a little forest, but there all their hopes collapse again: whole hordes of strelzi stand in front of the grove, all of them have their rifles in hand - are they waiting for them for the final massacre? "Up that hill!" the policemen scream. The order fills the prisoners with insane dread as they suddenly feel that even while they are running up the hill the strelzi will mow them all down! The hillside is exactly in their field of fire, that's why they're standing at the ready here...

"We're not going on!" a thousand voices abruptly cry as one.

"We have to try to negotiate..." Dr. Staemmler exclaims.

"That's exactly what I will do," says Dr. Kohnert calmly. "Just come with me," he adds, and approaches a nearby policeman. But when the Pole sees the two coming towards him, he begins to wave his gun in the air. "For God's sake," cries Dr. Staemmler, "he's going to shoot us..." And with these words he leaps the last few steps towards him - all he wants to do is to knock the rifle barrel aside, but already the Pole pulls the trigger - shot through and through at close range, Dr. Staemmler falls onto his back, and is dead before he draws his next breath. The policeman glances only briefly down at him before he flees as fast as he can to the strelzi.

At that instant a tank appears at the edge of the forest and rumbles directly towards them. Dr. Kohnert turns to the Reverend Krusche, the leader of the second column, and says with a strained smile in his voice: "Well, come along, Reverend, this is our last march! At times like this it's always good to have a minister along!"

Deep inside he still does not give up hope; no doubt this tank is going to crush them now, but maybe, if he can only negotiate quickly enough... And so he pulls out his last handkerchief, waves it over his head for all to see, and walks with calm, firm steps towards the tank, while the entire column crowds along at his heels.

But hardly has he taken a dozen steps when he suddenly feels as though his heart would burst - this tank bears a white cross, this tank is a German tank! No, he is not mistaken - written on the tank's front, in German, is the proud name "Ziethen" - and already it stops, the turret opens, a young officer leaps out...

In the next moment the prisoners also recognize him, and hundreds suddenly fall into each other's arms, sobbing and kissing each other's bloody faces...

One hour later they are all quartered in now-occupied Lowitsch, showered with all sorts of blessings by a hundred caring field soldiers. The eighty-year-olds are cushioned on clean straw; one among them is well-known Dr. Busse, one of the most famous livestock breeders in Europe. His white-haired, wrinkled head is covered with blood-suffused black blotches, and bright blood trickles from his split lips. Lying beside him is an eighty-two-year-old plant nursery owner from Schönsee, but both will survive despite all they went through, and both will be back home in just a few days.

Only one of them will not see his home again; he lies in a small room, silenced forever. And this one man is the devoted doctor who, in his constant patrolling of the column, walked the entire distance of this death march probably three times over and who saved hundreds of lives with his medications and ministrations - Dr. Staemmler - who, after miraculously surviving a thousand deaths, died at the very last instant, in the face of the first German tank...

Death in Poland
The Fate of the Ethnic Germans