Prince of Ponies
Stacy Gregg
A touching horse story from master storyteller, Stacy Gregg – a tale of survivors and the things we have to reconcile ourselves with when others are left behind…When Maya stumbles across a beautiful white stallion in Berlin, little does she know that life will change forever. Lonely and missing her own family, she befriends Zofia, an older Polish lady. After much convincing, Zofia decides to teach Maya how to ride. As the time draws near for Maya to compete in the Longines Grand Prix, so too does the backstory of what happened to Zofia and her own stallion as a child in war-torn Poland.
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Children’s Books in 2019
Published in this ebook edition in 2019
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Text copyright © Stacy Gregg 2019
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Cover images and decorative illustrations © Shutterstock
Stacy Gregg asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Source ISBN: 9780008332310
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008332327
Version: 2019-07-22
For Brin. Really? Yes, really.
Contents
Cover (#ua1488ab5-50ed-521f-8f18-b6d9b9de5964)
Title Page (#u877bbf00-3036-5dcc-9ad2-a71667e0c8fd)
Copyright (#u3f431501-a1c9-5c7f-bb94-08963c68bba5)
Dedication (#u919cb405-ce2b-5712-93e8-b30613872083)
Poland 1945
Chapter 1: The Master of Horses
Berlin 2019
Chapter 2: The Hunter of Grunewald
Chapter 3: The Emir
Chapter 4: The Devil and the Sea
Chapter 5: The Lesson
Chapter 6: The Red Army
Chapter 7: The Method
Chapter 8: Evil Unchecked
Chapter 9: A Hundred Falls
Chapter 10: Horses for the Führer
Chapter 11: The Sommergarten
Chapter 12: The Black Train
Chapter 13: Countdown to Grand Prix
Chapter 14: The Bunker
Chapter 15: Mira’s Journey
Chapter 16: No Horse Left Behind
Chapter 17: Grand Prix
Chapter 18: Champions
Chapter 19: Return of the Prince
Epilogue: The True Story of the Stolen Horses of the Second World War
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Books by Stacy Gregg
About the Publisher
Poland 1945 (#ua6ce73fb-f17d-52df-aceb-ad201324b9b7)
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Zofia edged her way down the ladder in total darkness, feeling her way with bare feet from step to step. She had considered turning on the lights but dismissed the notion as too dangerous. For all she knew, the Colonel was sitting at his desk right now, staring out across the courtyard. From there he would see the lights glowing in the stable block and know that she was on the move.
In the darkness, the ladder wobbled beneath her, making her stomach lurch, but she knew she must be nearly there. Only a couple more rungs and then she’d be down on ground level …
Made it! She felt the cold concrete floor under her feet and paused for a moment to calm her racing heartbeat. Then she continued, reaching out into the pitch black, feeling her way blindly, inching ahead with shuffling, tiny steps, until her fingertips bumped up against the wall. From here, she had her bearings and now her hands would serve as her eyes. Her fingers crept like Incy Wincy Spider along the stones until they touched the rough-hewn wood of the first door. Over the door, footsteps quickening, and then she was touching stone again, repeating the process from one door to another – one, two, three – until at last she’d reached the fourth door.
Was she certain that she had the right one or had she miscounted?
Yes – he was here! She could hear him on the other side of the door, restless and moving about.
“Shhhh,” she whispered. “It’s OK, I’m here now. I’m here …”
He didn’t like being alone at night. Neither did she. They always stayed together. But tonight the Colonel had forbidden it. He’d taken her aside at dinner, his face very serious.
“It is important that you stay in the hayloft tonight,” he had told her. And when she’d asked him why, he’d simply replied, “Because we have visitors coming.”
Visitors. No explanation other than that. The way the Colonel had said the word, letting it hang in the air, was so sinister she’d known better than to ask anything more. That evening, after dinner was over and she had cleaned up the dishes after the men had eaten, she’d done as the Colonel told her and had taken herself up the frail wooden ladder that led to the hayloft.
The loft was dusty and filled with cobwebs. She never came up here in the winter and with good reason – the loft was freezing! To combat the cold, she tunnelled her way into the haystack, just as a rabbit might make a burrow, then lined her cave with burlap sacks. She moved other sacks round the edge of the skylight, pushing them up against the gaps in the timber to stop the wind whistling through. Soon, though, the wind had no way inside. The falling snow had smothered the roof in such a thick blanket it had sealed off the skylight completely. It was so deep that when Zofia tried to shove the skylight open to peer out and see where these so-called visitors had got to, the weight of the drifts was too much and the window wouldn’t budge.
That had been hours ago. Midnight had ticked by and the snow kept falling and the visitors hadn’t turned up. Janów Podlaski was almost inaccessible in bad weather. And even in the very best weather, it baffled Zofia as to why would anyone would be coming all this way. The stud farm and the neighbouring village had no part to play in this war. They could hardly be considered a strategic location for the Germans, who currently occupied Poland. The big main cities, Warsaw and Krakow, were miles to the west, and it was a long and dangerous journey from there in the middle of winter to this tiny village in the wilderness by the Russian border. On a night like this the visitors must have realised how deadly the roads would be and changed their minds. Otherwise they would be here already.
Alone in the darkness, Zofia had mulled all of this over in her mind. She had got up and tried to prise open the skylight again to see out, but it was no use. She had looked at her watch and been maddened by how slowly the hands moved, and when the hands swept past midnight, and then began to edge towards the half-past mark, cold and lonely, she could take it no longer. The Colonel’s orders made no sense! No one was coming. What was the harm then in her leaving this miserable icebox of scratchy hay and going back downstairs?
And that was how she had found herself wobbling down the ladder and feeling her way in the darkness, until she was finally at the fourth door.
“I’m here!” she breathed through the gaps in the wood as she began to work at the cast-iron bolt. “Please. Don’t be angry. It was the Colonel who made me stay away from you! But now I’ve come …”
The iron bolt protested as she tried to work the door open. Zofia’s delicate hands struggled to take a grip. She twisted her fingers round the nub of the shank, pulling with all her strength until finally the bolt was released with a dull thud.
She was inside the stall now, and so completely cloaked in darkness she couldn’t see her own hand in front of her face, let alone the shadowy form that moved around her in the stall, fretting and stamping.
“Where are you?” she hissed. She tried to follow the sound of him as he circled her. He was moving nearer and, instinctively, she turned, thinking that she was facing him, and then realising she’d been wrong as he took her by surprise and she felt a hard shove against the small of her back.
“Hey!”
The blow pushed her off balance so that she fell forward into the straw on the stable floor. She still couldn’t see him in the dark but she felt his presence, standing above her.
“That is not funny,” Zofia hissed. “I’m cold and tired and I’m not in the mood for your humour.”
There was a soft nicker from the horse and Zofia immediately felt bad for snapping at him. He had only been playing! And she hadn’t meant it – she’d just been caught off guard was all.
“I know.” She softened her tone. “I missed you too. It’s freezing in that hayloft …”
In the blackness that cloaked them, even without her eyes, Zofia still knew by heart every groove and sinew of his body. The way the bloom of his dapples made concentric shadows against his dove-grey coat, and his soot-black stockings perfectly defined his graceful, slender legs. Prince had just turned seven, an age when there was still a smoky darkness to his colouring. Zofia was saddened to think that the pretty dapples would fade away completely in the years to come. That was how it was with horses, and she recalled how his father had been pure white in the end. His mother, whom Prince resembled in different ways, had been a blood-red bay, and everyone had wondered what sort of foal the pairing would produce. Prince had been their first and only son, and when he was born he’d been jet black. As he’d matured into a young colt, though, his black coat had become flecked with white and he’d seemed to grow lighter by the day, so that as a yearling he was steel grey. Then the dapples emerged, and his mane became streaked with silver. In the sunshine on a clear day, when he was at liberty in the yards here at Janów Podlaski, he shone and sparkled almost like a unicorn.
“I’m here now …”
Her fingers reached out to touch him and traced the solid slab of his jawbone, the way his nose had that dramatic dish as it tapered to the broad sweep of his nostrils, then widened out once more, flaring like a trumpet.
His velvet muzzle sought her out now as Prince took in her scent. The soft-palate breathing as his nostrils widened, so distinctive to Arabians, made his breath in the darkness sound like the flutter of butterflies. Sweet exhalations of warm air brushed her skin, scented like clover honey. She paused for a moment there in the dark, happy to be back where she belonged, reunited with her horse.
Her happiness, like all happiness, did not last. The soft fluttering suddenly became an agitated snort. Flashes of light outside the window startled the girl and the horse. There were headlights coming down the driveway! In the pitch black their twin beams glanced off the walls like searchlights, penetrating the bars of the stable-block windows, illuminating Prince’s stall.
Zofia’s heart began hammering. The visitors! They were here after all! She needed to get back to the hayloft.
She waited for the headlights to flicker past. She was just about to stand up when another set of lights came shining in through the window. A second car was arriving, and then a third.
As the car doors slammed outside, Zofia crawled across the floor of the stall on her belly until she reached the wall below the window, and then, carefully, making sure that the headlights wouldn’t catch her shadow in their beam, she popped her head up just high enough so that she could see.
The three black town cars were lined up in a row in the snow. On their bonnet each car flew a tiny flag with the red, black and white symbol of the Nazi swastika. Zofia saw the symbol and felt certain now that she was in real trouble.
She should never have come down here. The Colonel had been clear in his orders to her to stay hidden and she’d stupidly ignored him. Now the house lights had been turned on and in the driveway she could see the men getting out of their cars. They were not ordinary German soldiers either – their uniforms were not like the ones the Colonel and his men wore. These were special police, officers of the SS, dressed in black greatcoats and long boots, with red armbands emblazoned with swastikas, matching the flags on their cars.
She had to get out of here now! Run before it was too late and get back up the wooden step ladder into the ceiling then pull the ladder up behind her and close the trapdoor. Except such a sequence of actions in the cold silence of the night was not without risk. Even if she could make it up the ladder, she wouldn’t have time to drag it back up into the ceiling and if the officers saw it, they’d come looking maybe, knowing someone was in the loft.
As she peered out over the window ledge one of the German officers looked in her direction and she ducked down, heart pounding, afraid she’d been seen. So now she couldn’t even look at them. All she could do was crouch low and listen to their voices in the cold night air, speaking to each other in clipped German.
There were more car doors slamming, and laughter, and then she heard a voice she recognised. The Colonel. Zofia took the risk, poked her head up once more and saw him on the doorstep, wearing his full German uniform. It looked strange to see him dressed like this. In the time since the German army had taken control of Janów Podlaski, she had seldom seen the Colonel in his military clothes – he usually just wore his jodhpurs, like a civilian. And when the officers saluted him, he looked distinctly uncomfortable as he saluted back, arm raised straight out into the air: “Heil Hitler.”
“Heil Hitler, Colonel,” one of the SS officers replied. “I apologise for the lateness of the hour, but the snow made it impossible for us to get to you any faster.”
“Of course.” The Colonel nodded in agreement. “Your accommodation for the evening has been prepared and there is a meal ready. I’m sure you must be hungry. The horses can wait until morning.”
“Ah,” the officer replied. “Thank you, Colonel. However, such matters are not my decision …”
The officer turned his gaze to the second car in the row of three and at precisely that moment the driver’s door swung open and yet another officer in SS uniform stepped out with great formality to open the passenger door.
The man who emerged was in a different uniform to all the rest of them. Bald, stout and not wearing a hat on his bare head, he did, however, wear epaulettes on his shoulders that clearly marked out his seniority. While his top half was very much dressed as a military man, on the lower he was dressed as a horseman in jodhpurs and long boots.
The Colonel looked anxious as he stepped forward and, uncertain whether to salute again, he tried to do so, and then changed his mind, did a half-salute and feebly offered his hand in greeting.
“Dr Rau,” he said. “I am delighted. It is a great honour to have you at our stables. I was just saying to your men that perhaps you might wish to eat dinner and be shown to your rooms? It is late and …”
But the man did not take his hand.
“I have not come all this way to enjoy your hospitality,” he said coolly. “I am here for the horses and you will take me to the stables immediately.”
“Of course,” the Colonel said. “As you wish, Dr Rau. They await your inspection.”
They await your inspection. As the Colonel said these words Zofia knew she had left it too late to run. Already the flustered Colonel, accompanied by eight SS officers, had fallen into step beside the man they’d called Dr Rau, and now they were striding briskly, making their way through the knee-deep snow to the stable door. It was too late for Zofia to make it back to the hayloft. In just moments they would be here to inspect the horses and she had no escape. She was trapped in Prince’s stall with no way out.
There was the sound of boots crunching on snow and then the heavy wooden doors were slid back at the entrance and the lights came on and Zofia was no longer in darkness. She could see. Which meant they could see her too. When they reached Prince’s stall, there was no way they would not would find her. The stall was bare except for a thin layer of straw on the concrete floor. There was nowhere to hide.
And then she looked back at Prince. The horse was wearing a dark navy woollen stable rug. He was dressed in it to keep him warm, but right now her need was greater than his. Zofia’s trembling fingers worked the front buckle and unclipped the back straps and slid the rug off Prince’s back. Then, curling herself up in a ball in the furthest corner of the stall, she draped the rug over the top of her, hoping to make it look as if it had been tossed aside by a careless groom.
She hoped she’d covered herself and that no part of her body was sticking out because she didn’t have time to adjust it – the men who’d been working their way along the corridor from stall to stall had reached Prince’s door. She heard the bolt being slid back and then, from her hiding place, she peered out at the shiny black boots of the Nazi officers, standing right there in front of her in the straw!
“So.” The voice was that of Dr Rau. “This is him, then? The one you told me about?”
The Colonel cleared his throat. “Yes, Dr Rau. This is Prince of Poland. He is purebred Polish Arabian, descended from the very best bloodlines that we possess here at Janów Podlaski. He is the finest horse in these stables.”
Dr Rau gave a hollow laugh. “You are being arrogant, Colonel. You dare to tell me which is your best horse? Such decisions are mine to make and mine alone. This is why the Führer appointed me. This is why he gave me my title: Master of Horses. You understand what it means?”
“I-I meant no insult,” the Colonel stammered. “I simply meant that I think him to be my best horse.”
“Your best horse?” The Master turned this phrase over slowly on his tongue. “He is not your best horse, Colonel. He is not your horse at all. None of them are yours. I come here tonight on the instructions of Hitler himself. These horses belong to the Führer now. They are to play their part in his plan for the glory of the Third Reich.”
“I am sorry, Dr Rau.” The Colonel sounded confused. “I do not understand. I thought you were coming to inspect the stud farm. What is this plan that you speak of?”
“Ahhh.” The Master almost purred with pleasure to be in possession of such top-secret information that the Colonel clearly did not know. “You are aware, Colonel, that the German army have made it part of their mission as a conquering nation to secure the very best artworks in the world? In our hands now are masterpieces by Raphael, Rubens and many more. They are works of such great beauty, the Führer demands that we ensure that they be taken by the SS and kept in secret, to ensure that when the war ends, they will belong to Germany.”
“But these are horses,” the Colonel objected. “They are not priceless paintings or sculptures.”
“Yes,” Dr Rau replied. “Horses are an even greater treasure. They are living, breathing art.”
Beneath her rug in the corner, Zofia saw Dr Rau shuffle his feet in the straw and take a step closer towards Prince. He had his gloved hand on Prince’s halter! Zofia’s heart was pounding.
“This horse, Prince of Poland, has all the traits of the Aryan race. In time he will be pure white like his father. And his bloodlines are impeccable …” The Master hesitated, seemingly unsure as to whether he should unfold the whole plan to the Colonel, but was unable to resist. And so he continued.
“As we speak, my men are gathering together the very best horses in the whole of Europe – Lipizzaners from Austria, Thoroughbreds from France, and now from Poland we take these Arabians. All of them are a part of the Führer’s grand scheme. For it is not just the humans, the Aryan race, who will bring glory to the Third Reich. We will also create a new super-breed of horses. The horses in your stables will be moved to Dresden. Here we will open a new stud farm, with all the best stallions and the very best mares from every breed. We will combine these horses and create the perfect, ultimate war horse.”
The Colonel’s voice was anxious. “You mean to say you are taking my horses?” he said. “To Dresden?”
“As I’ve already told you, Colonel,” the Master replied, “they are no longer your horses, and be calm – I do not intend to take them all. Only the best stallions will serve the purpose of the Führer.”
He stroked Prince’s muzzle.
“You were right when you said this one is the very best horse in the stable,” he said. “He is magnificent.”
Underneath the rug, watching him touch her horse like that, Zofia felt a fury that made her sick to her stomach. And then the Master continued and things became so much worse.
“Prince of Poland is truly the greatest horse in your possession,” the Master said. “So great, that he is not going with the others to Dresden.”
“But I thought you said—” the Colonel began, but the Master cut him dead.
“In the morning, he will travel with me, back to Berlin. Hitler himself has a special plan for this horse.”
The Master gave Prince a hearty slap on his neck to confirm his decision, and then he wheeled about.
“Now,” he said, clapping his hands together. “I think we are done with the inspection. I should like to eat.”
And with that, he marched back out of Prince’s stall, with his SS officers in his wake, leaving the bewildered Colonel to bolt the door behind them.
In the darkness once more, Zofia waited until her heart stopped pounding and she was certain they had gone before she emerged from beneath the rug. She was still shaking, and as she lifted her hands up to take hold of Prince’s halter, she realised just how close she had come to being discovered. At the same time, though, she knew it had been lucky that she had been in the stall to witness this, for now she knew the Master’s plan.
“Did you hear what he said?” Zofia whispered to Prince. “It is worse than we ever imagined, Prince. Hitler, the Führer himself, wants you.”
Prince’s ears swivelled as she spoke to him. He was listening intently. Did he realise the danger they were in? Zofia knew now that there was nothing else for it and no time to waste.
“When the Master comes for you in the morning, you’ll already be gone,” she said to him. “You and I, we have no choice. We must run. We leave tonight.”
Berlin 2019 (#ua6ce73fb-f17d-52df-aceb-ad201324b9b7)
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Mira took a tight hold of the leather leash and felt Rolf strain with all his tiny might against her control.
“Be good!” she warned the dachshund. “Or you will not get any treats.”
It was a hollow threat and they both knew it. Mira was not the one to decide anything in this relationship. Rolf was in charge and Mira was his girl, hired by Frau Schmidt to do the dachshund’s bidding.
At half past one, Rolf had greeted Mira, as always, at the back door of Frau Schmidt’s mansion in Roseneck, and from there she and the little dog set off on his preordained Monday-afternoon outing. The first stop on their itinerary was lunch – which was where they were heading now.
Roseneck was an aristocratic neighbourhood, the pavements were broad and tree-lined, trimmed on one side with mown lawns and on the other with elegant hedges and tall fences that blocked Mira’s view of the grand houses. Rolf blazed a trail through these streets with an almost comical sense of importance. Barrel-chested, pointy of snout and floppy-eared, his belly was so low to the ground beneath his long, silken coat it was almost as if he was levitating as he trotted on his stumpy legs. His lush feathered tail dusted off the concrete behind him.
Soon they reached the shops, passing the corner café where elderly ladies like Frau Schmidt would sit and chat for hours on the white leather banquettes and dine on the dainty fruit tarts displayed in the window. Beside the pretty café was another bakery; this was the one where Mira’s mother worked. It was a very modern bread shop by German standards – her mother made Turkish breads here too and Syrian flatbreads along with the traditional German pumpernickel and rustic farm loaves and pretzels, all of it displayed side by side on wooden racks in the plate-glass window.
Mira looked in, hoping for a glimpse of her mother, who had left for work at 4 a.m., long before Mira woke. There was no sign of her, so they turned the corner and pressed on past the florist’s, the windows filled with pink and white long-stemmed roses, and then the Pets Deli, the first stop of their morning journey.
The Pets Deli was busy – as always. Dogs swarmed on the pavement and Mira had to duck and swerve as Rolf beetled through the throng, darting between the legs of the low-haunched German shepherds, diverting round the broad-shouldered Dobermanns in their studded collars, and barging past the bristle-coated wolfhounds to get in the door.
“Good morning, Frau Weiss,” Mira greeted the woman, who was slicing venison on the machine behind the counter. “Can Rolf have his usual table, please?”
Frau Weiss grunted, “It is ready. Go on through.”
Rolf did not need to be told twice. He was already heading towards the rear of the shop, where the doorway opened to reveal the courtyard restaurant.
The dachshund jumped up on to his favourite chair and Mira sat opposite him. Around them, the dogs and their owners were browsing the menu, but Rolf didn’t bother. He knew what he liked and always had the same thing.
Frau Weiss was serving at the table beside them now, fawning over a woman whose blow-dried blonde hair perfectly matched the silken coat of her Afghan hound. Frau Weiss laughed a fake, tinkling laugh as she took their order. Then she came back and, without a word to Mira, she slapped Rolf’s meal down on the table in front of him.
Perhaps she never bothered to be nice to Mira because she didn’t think the girl spoke good enough German? It was true that Mira sometimes got the odd word confused but she spoke it so much better than her mama, who still struggled to make the most basic of sentences. Mira had the advantage because she’d lived here since she was seven and had to speak German at school.
Now she was twelve and it was still Arabic that she spoke at home. When they’d lived in Sonnenallee, all the local kids spoke Arabic too. Sonnenallee, the Arab district, had been their home for the first five years when Mira’s family had arrived in Germany. As part of the refugee programme, they had been given a place to live, a tiny one-bedroom apartment for all four of them. Her mother got a job at the cake shop on the corner of Sonnenallee and Weichselstrasse, a local hangout that specialised in Middle Eastern delicacies like pistachio slice and halva. Mira and her brother and sister went to school during the day and in the afternoons they ran loose with the other kids of the neighbourhood, playing football in the park on the corner of Reuterstrasse, dangling from the climbing frame, until it was too dark to see and they were forced to go home.
Six months ago, they’d moved to Roseneck to be near her mother’s new job. Her mother had said that Mira would get used to the neighbourhood but Mira still hated it here. Her mother had always worked hard before but now it was like she didn’t exist. She’d already left for work by the time Mira woke up in the morning and she was never home until after Mira had put her brother and sister to bed at night and was asleep too. The rent cost more here, Mira’s mother said, and working long hours was the only way to make a better life. But Mira wanted to know why they couldn’t just go back to their old life in Syria. Or at the very least back to Sonnenallee, where she had friends.
In the corner of the dog café, Mira sat at the table and watched Rolf as he polished off his luncheon, relishing each bite with a little growl of delight. He ate in stages, licking the gravy off the liver and veal first, then moving on to the main dish before toothily devouring the bigger chunks of chopped-up blood sausage. Finally his pink tongue circled the dog bowl to get the very last bits and then, licking his chops, he looked up at Mira.
“Ready to go, habibi?” She smiled at him. “Come on!”
Out on the street, Rolf immediately began straining at the leash. His tummy was full and he was keen for his morning walk. And for once they had perfect timing. The bus was waiting for them at the corner.
Mira took Rolf in her arms and jumped on board. They sat like that, her cradling the dog in a seat near the front. It wasn’t a long ride. Only three stops from the shops to reach the gates that led into the forest of the Grunewald.
A paved avenue swept from the street into the car park, and from there the path turned to sandy loam and began forking off in all directions through the conifers and the birch trees. Today they were taking their usual route, which led all the way to the Grunewaldsee lake. It was going to get hot and Rolf might fancy a dip.
Once they were on the sand paths, Mira bent down and unclipped Rolf’s leash to let him loose. As soon as he was free, Rolf shot off, sprinting away and then scampering in a ragged half-circle before running straight back towards her, his little legs churning like mad, his pink tongue lolling out to one side. Mira laughed at him. It was always the same, this moment of over-excitement. Soon he’d calm down and trot along with her companionably. But first he needed to burn off some energy.
Mira watched the little dog as he bolted ahead of her to do his second sprint-and-circle-back, running at breakneck speed round the curve of the path until he was out of sight. She strode on briskly after him, expecting that when she turned the corner she would see Rolf there, panting and exhausted, heading back towards her on the path ahead. But when she came round the corner, there was nothing. The wide path that cut through the forest was empty. Rolf was nowhere to be seen.
“Rolf!” Mira called out. “Rolfie?”
She whistled for him. And then, with more urgency in her voice, she called again, “Rolf!”
The sound of yelping broke the silence of the forest. Rolf! His bark was echoing through the trees to the east of the path and he was going bonkers! Had he caught scent of something? A squirrel, perhaps? Rolf lost all common sense when he was confronted with a whiff of prey. And these woods were big. If he got away from her, it would be all too easy to lose a little dog like him!
Mira began dashing through the trees, following the dachshund’s caterwaul. Rolf’s barking had now become one long, persistent hunting yowl, which meant he must have that squirrel trapped up a tree. Were squirrels fierce? What if Rolf got into a fight with it and it bit him? Frau Schmidt would blame Mira if the little dog should come to any harm.
Mira’s heart was pounding as she came into a clearing in the woods and saw Rolf. He was pronging up and down furiously on the spot, all stiff-legged and wild-eyed as he bailed up his prey. Her relief at finding the dachshund was immediately replaced by shock at the size of his adversary. Because it wasn’t a squirrel that Rolf held captive at all.
It was a horse.
The miniscule dog stood bristling and barking furiously, while right in front of him a white stallion, barricaded in by the pedestrian turnstiles and rails of the rustic fence that ran beside the forest path, was stamping and fretting, turning back and forth in his futile attempts to evade his tiny foe.
Their eyes were locked on each other in the same way that a matador engages a bull in battle. This fight, however, seemed to be rather more one-sided. The horse had to weigh at least six hundred kilos more than Rolf, and he towered over the dog as he manoeuvred back and forth in front of him. Despite the difference in size, the stallion seemed genuinely scared of the dachshund. Mira could see the fear in him, the way his dark eyes turned wide and his nostrils flared and snorted with each tempestuous breath.
With his neck arched and tail held high he was so beautiful he appeared almost otherworldly. At first sight he had struck Mira as alabaster white, but now she saw the faintest bloom of dark dapples on his rump, and the darkness of his mane and tail, which were burnished steel.
The stallion kept trying to outmanoeuvre the dog, pivoting on his hocks, turning and trotting back and forth, and then reversing abruptly, trying to double-back and duck past. It seemed ridiculous that he could be kept prisoner by Rolf. And yet here they were, locked in an impasse.
Rolf, for his part, had failed to notice that the horse was a hundred times his size. Determined to hold his prey, he kept blocking the horse at every turn and making little darting leaps, threatening to bite if the stallion stepped out of line. If the horse stepped too far forward, Rolf would snarl and lunge to push him back. And whenever the stallion tried to go sideways and break into his magnificent floating trot, Rolf would sprint forward and dash to head him off, forcing the horse to skid on his hocks to a stop, pinning him to the fence once more.
Mira watched as the little dog lunged and snapped, and this time the horse got fed up with this game of cat and mouse with his captor and fought back. The stallion lunged right at Rolf! He had his ears flattened back against his head, teeth bared, neck winding and twisting like an angry snake. He struck out and got so close to biting the dog that Rolf retreated for a split second. But then the fearless dachshund redoubled his efforts, barking and snapping. This war between them was escalating! Mira watched as the stallion went back on its haunches, striking out with a front hoof that narrowly missed cracking Rolf on the skull!
“Rolf! No! Get back!”
Rolf was oblivious to how much danger he was in, but Mira could see that one blow of those hooves could bring about his death.
As the horse rose up to strike out again, Mira found herself running forward to grab the dachshund. But Rolf didn’t want to be saved. He swerved away from Mira, evading her grasp, and she had no choice but to throw her body down on the dirt to get a hold of him.
“Rolf!” Rolling in the dust, Mira clung to his collar and pulled him roughly to her. “You must stop this! He will kill you!”
The horse was now directly above Mira and Rolf. With a startled snort, he went up on his hind legs, striking out violently with both front hooves. Mira let out a shriek and shut her eyes, certain the horse was about to come down on top of them and trample them. But somehow the stallion planted his hooves on either side of her and then he went up again and this time he spun on his hocks, turning away to face the fence that had him trapped.
There was no space to jump but the stallion was undeterred. From a standstill, he gathered himself, rocking back on his hindquarters, and then he popped in one tight stride and stag-leapt, effortlessly clearing the rustic rail with daylight to spare.
Mira couldn’t believe it. The horse hadn’t even needed a run-up. He had just launched himself into the air, as if he had springs beneath his hooves! And the way he landed on the other side was as graceful as a cat. As soon as he touched the earth, he sprang away at a gallop and, with a defiant shake of his mane, he set off towards the other side of the woods, weaving between the birches and conifers so that he became a grey blur between the trees.
Rolf was beside himself: his quarry was getting away! He began baying again and, in a last-ditch effort, he managed to squirm and rip himself free from Mira’s hands.
“Rolf! No!”
This time the dachshund only managed a few short strides before the leather went taut at his throat. Mira, anticipating that he would try to escape again, had already clipped the leash to his collar when she’d tackled him to the ground, and had slipped the loop at the other end round her wrist. Rolf only got to the end of the leash before he was yanked back again.
“Let him go!” Mira admonished him. “What were you thinking? You cannot possibly catch a horse! And what would you do with him if you did catch him? You are crazy!”
Rolf wasn’t listening, though. He was still wild-eyed and hyped up, giving hysterical whimpers and gazing longingly into the trees, even though the horse, having galloped away at lightning speed, was gone from sight.
Mira reeled Rolf back, inching along the length of the leash until she had him in her hands once more.
“Where did he come from?” she asked the dachshund. But she was asking herself more than Rolf. It was not unusual to see horses in the woods, but they were always taken out by riders from the riding school. Horses didn’t turn up in the middle of the forest running wild all on their own!
Rolf, twisting and squirming in Mira’s arms, demanded to be put down and she lowered him back, still keeping a tight hold on the leash.
The little dog shook himself with indignation and then he dropped his head to the ground and began to sniff in earnest.
“Rolf,” Mira cautioned him. “No. Leave it. We need to go home.” She knew what he was doing. Dachshunds like Rolf were renowned for their skill as tracking dogs. Mira had read in a book once that an olfactory trail could be left to go stale for as much as a month and a dachshund would still be able to nose out a scent that was strong enough to hunt by. To Rolf, the smell of the white stallion was fresh in his nostrils and it was irresistible.
“Rolf, ugh … no. This way! The bus stop is this way …”
Mira tried to distract him from the scent trail and turn for home. But Rolf took to whining piteously and refusing to budge, and whenever she tried to pick him up to carry him he darted between her legs.
“Rolf!”
Mira sighed. “You’re so stubborn,” she told him. And then she smiled to herself, because it was something her mother often said to her as well. They were alike, she and Rolf. And, right now, it seemed they both wanted the same thing. Because the truth was, Mira wanted to find the horse too.
“You think you could do it?” she asked the little dog. It seemed unlikely in a forest this size and yet Rolf seemed so set on it, so determined to give chase.
“OK, then, habibi, darling one. You can do it. Go. Find him.”
Mira kept the leash round her wrist and held on tight. Rolf took up the trail with a yelp and was once again on the hunt, and this time Mira did not resist. This time he was taking her with him.
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Rolf was so intent and focused as he sniffed it was as if he held the whole universe right there in the tip of his nose. The scent trail of the horse was so strong to him that the path ahead might as well have been illuminated with fairy lights.
Mira felt his certainty as she was dragged down steep slopes where the leaves had fallen so thick that she was buried to her knees. She slid down, over mossy logs and rotting tree trunks, then found herself clambering and crawling back up again. They were deeper into the heart of the forest now and had left behind the broad, sandy avenues where they usually walked.
We should go back. We’ll get lost and no one will ever find us … Mira was thinking this when Rolf stopped in his tracks, and the leash in her hand went slack.
They were here.
They were standing on the ridge of a hill looking down through the trees to a clearing below. To the right was the pitched shingle roof of a small house, with what looked like a barn attached to it. In front of the buildings, two large yards for exercising horses, with a sandy loam surface, were enclosed by posts and rails.
Rolf cocked his head and let out a whimper as the doors to the stables opened. From inside Mira could hear the echo of horses’ hooves on the cobblestones, then a loud blowing snort and a moment later the grey stallion appeared through the doorway. He came out and as soon as his hooves touched the sand he broke into a high-stepping trot, his strides so elevated and bouncy it was almost as if he floated above the ground. He carried himself in a taut composition of muscle and sinew, his neck arched and his eyes on the woods beyond, his tail held erect so that the silken plumes of it trailed out behind him like gossamer as he circled the yard. He swept along right beside the rails as if he were looking for an escape route, and Mira noticed as he did this that the fence round the yard had been altered. The whole yard had been painted with dark brown fence stain, but there was a newly added unpainted rail that had been roughly hammered on at the top of the fence, which added another half a metre at least to the height of the barrier.
The stallion did two laps of the enclosure, and then, with a sudden prop, he slammed on his brakes, making the sand come flying up from beneath his hooves. He came to a dead stop, pivoted on his hocks so that now he was facing the opposite direction, and broke into a gallop. As he raced across the yard making for the rails, Mira really thought he was going to jump. She was reminded of the effortless way he’d popped in a single stride to vault the fence in the forest. But this fence now was almost twice that size. Mira watched as the stallion came up on to his haunches and then, reconsidering, he dropped down again with a jolt and drove his front legs deep into the sand to stop himself, ploughing a channel as he skidded and crashed into the rails, pivoting on his hocks to turn, bouncing away in frustration, then circling round the fence, snaking his neck and tossing his mane in consternation.
Then he halted, sides heaving like bellows, and looked up at the ridge where Mira and Rolf were watching. His ears pricked forward. He’d seen them! From the yard, he raised his elegant head and gave a clarion call, whinnying out to them.
Mira hesitated for a moment and then she gave the leash a yank. “Come on,” she said to Rolf. “We’re going down there.”
They scrambled down the bank together, a tangle of limbs and dog leash, until they reached the bottom, both of them panting, with hearts pounding. Mira picked Rolf up and felt his little feet waggling in mid-air as he tried to jump down again. She didn’t want him to scare the horse, so it was better perhaps if she went alone from here. She took Rolf’s leash and tied the dachshund to the fence. The stallion was standing perfectly still watching them, his dark eyes wide and calm.
Rolf growled a little, as if he were cautioning Mira when she stepped away from him and circled the fence to move closer to the horse.
She climbed up the rails and the horse stepped closer to her. Then he craned his elegant neck so that his muzzle was only a metre or two away from Mira’s face. She reached an arm out to him. The horse didn’t shy away from her, but stepped in again, stretching his muzzle to her hand. Mira wished she had a treat to offer him instead of her empty palm.
The horse stepped closer again and now he was standing almost side-on to her. All she needed to do to get on to his back at that moment was to stand up on the fence rail and turn sideways a little and make the leap. If she did so, she would find herself sitting on the horse’s back!
Behind her, she could hear Rolf give a low warning growl, but she didn’t turn to see what the dachshund was grumbling about. Her total focus was locked on the horse that stood there in front of her. She stood up, wobbling a little as she found her balance, perched on the rail on the balls of her feet, her hands still clinging on to the top rail. Her heart was pounding as she shimmied herself along the rail a tiny step or two, so that now she was in the perfect position just next to the horse’s broad, silver-grey back.
As she leapt, two things happened at once. The first was that the horse did not stay still as she’d expected him to do. Instead, he gave a startled snort at the sight of the girl propelling herself through the air, and he bolted. The second, more remarkable thing, was that Mira found herself suspended in mid-air and then abruptly jerked backwards again, so that when the horse disappeared out from under her, she didn’t fall to the ground. She had been grabbed from behind and now she found herself not falling but being held in strong arms and eased down gently to the earth.
And then, in her ear, louder than the sound of her own heart pounding, came the staccato bark of a woman chastising her in furious German. Mira turned round to see that the person who’d taken hold of her was an old woman, and the lady was yelling at her in rapid-fire language, speaking so quickly that Mira couldn’t possibly hope to keep up with the words.
It was hard to believe that this frail, elderly figure in front of her had been the one who’d just pulled her back from her daredevil leap. And yet that seemed to be the case as she was now standing there, arms waving wildly as she gave Mira a piece of her mind!
The old woman was dressed in an ancient flowery silk blouse tucked into faded green tracksuit trousers. She had brown knitted woollen slippers on her feet and her fine white hair was swept up into a loose bun that was twisted and pinned with a wooden clasp at the back. She was still barking away in German but it had at least slowed down from the rapid-fire shouting to a mild yelling. Mira tried to understand her, listening hard to decipher what was being said. Something about a king? No, not a king exactly. An emir! And then the penny dropped and Mira realised: that was his name! The horse – his name was Emir, and the woman was talking about him.
“What did you think you were dealing with here? Some tame riding school pony?” she was asking. “Emir is sensitive, powerful, highly strung. You are lucky that he did not kill you! If I had not got to you in time, this would have ended very badly for you.”
“I’m sorry,” Mira muttered.
“You should be!” the woman snapped. “Now clear off! Get out of here. This is private property, you know. Not the public forest. If you want a riding school, there is one in Grunewald near the Waldsee. Go there instead!”
“I …” Mira was too terrified to respond.
“Go on! What are you still here for?” the woman barked. “Are you simple-minded? I told you to leave!”
“I need … to untie Rolf,” Mira replied. She pointed over the woman’s shoulder to the little dachshund, who was still hitched up to the fence post. Rolf, seemingly unaware of the tension between Mira and the old lady, was standing up on his hind legs rather adorably and, at the sound of his name, he began yipping and wagging his great plume of a tail.
His foolish antics made the old woman lose a little of her bluster. “Yes, well,” she harrumphed in a gentler tone. “Of course. Fetch your dog and go.”
“He’s not my dog,” Mira said.
“What?” the old woman growled.
“Rolf is not mine,” Mira said. “I take care of him for Frau Schmidt. I’m not allowed a dog of my own.”
“Why on earth not?” The old woman frowned.
“A dog is another mouth to feed.” Mira was repeating her mother’s words, the phrase she used whenever Mira had asked for a pet.
“Who cannot afford to feed a mouth this small?” the old woman scoffed. “Typical, though, I suppose. People always think of themselves first, never of the animals who suffer …” Tutting and muttering away, she bent down and patted Rolf. The dachshund, oozing charm now, stood up on his hind legs to meet her and all the anger in the old woman disappeared and she gave a little laugh.
“Do you know, I had a dog like him when I was your age. Well, not really like him. Olaf was a Polish hound, much bigger than a dachshund, but he was a good dog. And he was so loyal, just like lovely little Rolf here …” She looked as if she were about to continue the story, but her eyes turned misty and she trailed off and turned back to Mira instead.
“Your German. It is strange. You speak with an accent. Where are you from?”
“Aleppo,” Mira replied.
“Aleppo?” the old woman grunted. “Where is that?”
“Syria.”
“A refugee, are you? I’m sure they do not have horses where you are from, so you know nothing and think that you can come along like that and just throw yourself on to his back?”
“We have horses,” Mira objected. “And I know how to ride. I rode in Syria. There was a stable in the city. I went every week on a Wednesday.”
“Well, that makes it even worse! You should know better than to try to mount a strange horse like that!” the old woman shot back. “And just because you rode some donkey back in the desert, don’t think that makes you a rider.”
“It wasn’t a donkey, they were good horses,” Mira insisted. “I do know how to ride. I had proper lessons.”
The old woman screwed up her face. “Perhaps you have ridden a little. But nothing you have ridden in the past could have prepared you for him.” She gave a whistle and the stallion, who had been standing at a distance on the far side of the arena, pricked his ears and stepped obediently towards her. The old woman waited for him to get closer and then she waved one hand in the air above her head and made a clucking sound with her tongue. Suddenly the stallion rocked back on his hocks and pivoted round so that he was facing the far side of the arena and in one swift powerful bound he accelerated forward and leapt up into a trot. His head and his tail were both held high and his front hooves seemed to flick out in front of him, as if he were dancing across the sand.
“Do you see that trot?” The old woman watched him proudly. “So expressive, the way he covers the ground. He is an amazing mover and the power of his paces is far too much for all except the very best of riders. If you had managed to climb on to his back, he would have put you on the floor in an instant. You are not prepared for a horse like Emir.”
Mira watched, entranced by the movement of the horse. “He must be valuable.”
“He is priceless,” the old woman replied. “His bloodlines are the very best in the world. An Arabian from Poland – like me.”
“You’re Arabian?”
This made the old woman chuckle. “I’m Polish, child. And you are Syrian. So it seems the only one of us here who is a true German is Rolf.”
She cocked an eyebrow at Mira.
“You speak German very well for a refugee. Tell me, can you write it too?”
“Yes,” Mira said. “Yes, at school they say my writing is very good.”
“Then,” the old woman said, “you had better come inside. We will have some tea, I think. I’ve baked some angel wings, and you may have some if you like? Do you like sweets? Bring the dog. He will want some too.”
And without turning to look back to see if Mira was following her, she set off across the yard towards the door to her house, shuffling in her slippers, with Rolf bounding at her heels.
***
The house was divided from the stables by an archway. Turn one way and there were three looseboxes and a hay barn, turn the other and you were almost immediately inside the old lady’s living room. This was where Mira found herself now, staring at a room that was decorated with needlepoint tapestries all over the walls. It was furnished with old wooden furniture and armchairs that seemed to be covered in a floral print similar to the old woman’s shirt, so that when she’d made the tea and put the angel wing biscuits on the table and sat down, she almost disappeared into the upholstery.
“Do you read?” she asked Mira as she passed her the plate of biscuits and tossed one on to the floor for Rolf.
“Yes,” Mira said. “I love books.” And she realised as she said the words that this was what was bothering her when she looked around the room. There were bookshelves on the far wall but they were covered in ornaments. No books. She couldn’t see a single book in the whole house. Mira didn’t have many books of her own. She mostly read what she could from the school library, but she did have a few copies on her little bookshelf in her room, and she loved them. They were her most prized possessions.
“Hmmm.” The old lady seemed pleased with the reply. “Reading is good. I should like to be able to do it myself. But I can’t.” She looked at Mira. “Oh, yes, I tried! And I went to a very good school, so my education wasn’t lacking. My parents expected that I should be clever. My father was a professor and my mother had been a teacher. All my uncles and cousins were very intellectual, but … for me … it was never possible. From the very beginning, the words bounced around on the page and would not behave. My mother couldn’t understand it, because she had always read to me. We had a library full of books! They decided I must be stupid. I wasn’t, of course. It was dyslexia. These days people know all about it. It is a condition that means you get the letters jumbled up in your eyes and your brain and to decipher them becomes impossible. But back then, no one knew this. And so I was just the half-witted girl who couldn’t read. And I guess that was what they always thought of me …”
The old woman trailed off and dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief that she took from her sleeve. “Anyway. It is not reading I wish to do. It is writing.”
She put the handkerchief down and threw Rolf another angel wing, although she did not offer another biscuit to Mira.
“I am dying,” she said.
Mira looked shocked, until the old woman added, “We are all dying, of course, but I am old, very old – I’m eighty-nine, if you can believe it, so I am closer to death than you. One day I will die from old age, and it might not be that long. And before I do, I have a story – one that I would like to see recorded so that it might be told. It is important, I think. I lived in remarkable times.”
She reached out to Mira with the plate of biscuits now, but Mira noticed how she held it back a little, as if the offer of the biscuit itself was contingent on what happened next.
“You will write for me,” the old woman said. “I will tell you my story and you will put it down in words on paper.”
“And why would I do that?” Mira asked.
“Because,” the old woman replied, “I will be making you an exchange. If you will write my story for me, then I will do something for you.”
“What?” Mira asked.
The old woman took a biscuit herself now and mashed it between her gums and followed it with a vigorous slurp of tea.
“I’ll teach you to be a horsewoman,” she said. “And if you are a good student and you mind what I say, then, yes, I’ll let you ride Emir.”
Mira couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“What do you say, then?” the old woman asked.
Mira leant forward and very slowly and deliberately she took an angel wing from the plate.
“Excellent!” The old woman smiled and Mira saw just how gappy her grin was and how much work it must have been to chew that biscuit. “We shall start tomorrow. You will come back to my house. Bring the little dog with you if you like.”
“I have school tomorrow,” Mira said.
“Well, come before school, then,” the old woman replied, as if this solution were obvious. “I wake early.”
“OK,” Mira agreed.
The old woman stood up and made it clear that, with the arrangements sorted, their afternoon tea was now over. As they walked to the door, she made a fuss of Rolf and gave him one last angel wing. “For being a good boy,” she told him, with a pat. Then she opened the door for Mira. “I will see you tomorrow, child,” she said.
Then, almost as an afterthought, she called after her: “You haven’t told me your name. What do they call you?”
“I’m Mira,” Mira replied.
“It is a pleasure to meet you, Mira,” the old woman said. “My name is Zofia.”
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My name is Zofia. And as I told you yesterday, I am Polish. I was born in a forest village, Janów Podlaski, to the east, miles from the excitement of the big cities of Krakow and Warsaw.
Don’t worry, Mira. I promise I will not bore you with the dull, happy days of my early childhood. I don’t want you to fall asleep when you should be writing! I will skip the first nine years of my life because nothing of importance happened, and I will begin this memoir on the date my whole life changed forever: 1 September 1939. The day when Adolf Hitler sent his Nazis to invade us and take over Poland. That was the start of the Second World War, of course, although we did not know it then. Within days of Hitler crossing our border, the French and the British declared war and after that … Hey! Mira, are you keeping up with me?
***
Mira, who had been frantically scribbling away as Zofia spoke, was suddenly shaken back to reality and the tiny living room where she was sitting once more with Zofia, Rolf, a pot of tea and a freshly baked batch of angel wings.
“Yes, I am keeping up,” Mira lied. She had such cramp in her hand from trying to write the old woman’s words and – look! They had only completed one page!
Zofia was suspicious. “It’s important that you stop me if you are being left behind, because I want to make sure you are getting all my words down correctly. This is actual history I’m telling you. After I die, who will know the truth about these events except me? This is a record of what happened and I don’t want any of it to be lost, so from here I will go slower for you …”
Rolf, who was sitting on Zofia’s lap, gave a theatrical yawn at this moment and Mira noticed how his little pink tongue unfurled and snapped back again behind his sharp teeth. Zofia chuckled at the antics of the little dog as he stood up and stretched and resettled himself, then she drank a sip from her teacup and resumed her story once more, speaking every bit as fast as before, so that Mira had to scribble frantically to keep pace.
***
Hitler was such a bully! And a liar! Do you know he said we started it? Can you believe that? He claimed that he was only invading Poland because we had attacked first, but of course it wasn’t true. The Nazis struck without warning, sending troops from the north, the south and the west. We weren’t prepared, and none of our allies came to help us. As the Germans advanced closer and closer to our village, my parents decided we had no choice but to abandon our home and flee to safety.
I remember my mother being very firm with me when we left the house. I wanted to take all my toys but she’d said that I could take only one, a brown knitted squirrel named Ernst. I carried him myself in my tapestry carpet bag, along with a change of clothes. My mother and father carried everything else. Because I had my hands free, I was entrusted with taking care of Olaf. He was our family dog, a strapping great hunting hound, not at all like our little Rolfie here. And there was me, just a skinny nine-year-old, trying to hang on to him. It took all my strength to keep him from pulling away from me on the leash when we set off, but after we had left the village behind and we were on the open road my father said I could safely let Olaf off the leash and, sure enough, he trotted along obediently, staying close to me.
On the road, our ranks swelled and other villagers joined us, all heading towards the river. The River Bug marked the border into Romania, and if we could make it across the bridge, then we’d be out of Poland and away from the German danger.
We walked alongside all these other families, hundreds of us making our way to the river. I know it sounds awful to say, but I remember that day as a rather exciting one. There was a sense of adventure about it all. We were all banded together on this journey, and that night the families gathered round an open fire, and we grilled sausages and cooked potatoes in the embers and there was singing. My father had a koza with him – you have probably never seen one and the closest thing I can compare it to is a Scottish bagpipe. My father played it well. He was an academic, a professor of Polish studies, and in Janów Podlaski he was very respected as a member of the Gmina – the district council. Often he would have meetings at our house. As I said, he was very well educated and my mother was too, so I think this made it even harder for them that I couldn’t learn to read or write.
Anyway, I am straying away from the story. My father played the koza that night and we sang. There were couples dancing and we were all singing along and it was only after the embers in the fire had died away to nothing that I went to sleep.
In the morning, we rose early and began walking again, the mood uplifted by the night before. There was talk on the road that day about the river, how it was not far now. We were almost at the border and the sides of the road were dense with forest.
As the day passed by, bands of travellers who were moving faster than we were would catch us up from time to time and our ranks would swell briefly. Sometimes they’d stay with our group, but other times they were too quick to keep our pace and they would leave us behind and disappear into the distance. So I knew that there were people on the road ahead of us, I suppose. All the same, it came as a total shock when, at the end of that second day, in the late afternoon, when we still had miles ahead of us to cover, we saw them all coming back towards us.
It was everyone that had passed us by, and a few others besides! They were heading back with as much urgency as we were going forward! As soon as we saw the looks on their faces, we knew things were very bad. My father ran forward to meet the group, and his face when he returned to us – it was very grave.
“We’re going back,” he said. “We must turn at once for home.”
“But that is crazy, Pavel!” My mother was stunned. “For all we know, the Nazis have already arrived in Janów Podlaski. We can’t go back!”
“We can’t go forward either,” my father replied. “Magda, look up ahead! Do you see the smoke?”
Now that my father said this, we could all see smoke billowing on the horizon. “The Red Army have bombed the village of Kovol,” my father said. “They’re coming, Magda. They’re on the road, and they are heading straight for us.”
“The Russians?” My mother was horrified. “How close?’
“They march nearer the longer we hesitate,” my father said. “We must turn and go home.”
If the mood on the road up until this point had been one of buoyed spirits and camaraderie, now it could be summed up in one word: fear. We were on a road in the middle of nowhere, unarmed, defenceless and trapped between two unstoppable armies. Instead of running from Janów Podlaski, we were now heading home and back into the clutches of Adolf Hitler.
“Mama?” I asked anxiously. “Will the Nazis be there? Will they treat us better than the Russians?”
My mother managed to summon a thin-lipped smile and she took my hand in hers and squeezed it tight. “They can hardly be worse!” she said.
“Why do they want Poland?” I asked.
“Hitler is flexing his muscles and expanding his empire,” Mama replied. “He wants more Lebensraum: living space for the German race.”
Mama stroked my hair with her hand. “The Germans come to rule us, but there is no reason to believe that they will harm us.”
Later, when things had turned truly bad for my family, I would think about what my mama said to me that day and wonder if she knew the true evil of Hitler’s vision and was keeping it from me because she didn’t want to scare me. In this new world, Hitler would rule Poland, the Germans would occupy it and the Polish people would be their slaves. But then, slavery was not even the worst that Hitler had in store for us.
***
We’d been on the road heading back for home for several hours when we heard a sound ahead, rumbling through the forest. As the rumble grew nearer, the earth beneath us trembled as if there was thunder under our feet. My friend Agata, who was walking nearby with her parents, and who until now had been very quiet, suddenly burst into floods of tears.
“It’s the Germans!” she sobbed. “They are coming for us!”
It wasn’t just Agata – others were crying too, and as the thunder grew closer, people began running in all directions.
“We must escape into the trees!” Mama cried.
“No!” my father said. “It is too late now. They will shoot us if we try and run from them. Stay behind me. I will wave the white flag and they will know that we are unarmed.”
My father had his white pocket handkerchief in his hand, ready to wave as he stepped to the front of the cavalcade to face the Nazis. I felt my whole body shaking now as the thunder grew and grew, until at last they came into view.
I have never in my life seen such a sight as I saw that day.
What came at us round the bend in the road wasn’t the Nazis at all. It was horses – almost a hundred of them. Wild and loose, running together as a herd, so many of them jammed on the road that they were pressed up shoulder to shoulder. It was the pounding of their hooves, overwhelming in unison, that shook the ground under us!
Flanking this wild herd, mounted on horseback, were a dozen men. Each of them carried a rope and a whip, and they were attempting to keep the horses moving forward together, which was not easy. They might as well have been trying to herd cats! The most difficult were the young ones, tiny foals who ran, bewildered, at their mother’s side, flagging with exhaustion. Then there were the yearling colts and fillies, who kept breaking loose so that the men on horseback had to ride out in wide loops to bring them back to the herd again. Every time they rode out to rescue one of the colts who had bolted away, they would lose control of the rest of the group, and then there would be even more horses to muster back before they got lost in the trees.
Until this moment, the only horses I had known were the thick-set, plodding creatures who pulled the carts in our village. These horses were totally different. They were all fire and glory, and they almost floated above the ground, their paces were so smooth and balletic. It was as if, with each stride, they were held suspended in mid-air. I was mesmerised by their gracefulness.
Seeing that the horses were about to collide with our party, one of the men on horseback began shouting out orders to his men, and they rode swiftly forward to bring their own horses in front of the stampeding ones, turning about-face to create a blockade. Confronted with the men on horseback, the wild herd came to a standstill. Just like that, a hundred wild horses were brought to a halt, corralled right there in front of us on the road.
“Pavel?” The man who had given the orders now turned to us. He’d recognised my father and my father knew him too.
“Vaclav.” My father shook his hand. “It is good to see you, my friend.”
“Why are you turning back?” Vaclav asked.
“The Russians,” my father explained. “They’re advancing. For all we know, they’re already at the river.”
Vaclav shook his head ruefully. “So we are stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea. If we turn back, the Nazis will certainly seize our horses.”
“Yes, but, sir,” one of his men shot back at him, “if we encounter the Russians, it will be worse! They will eat them!”
As the men were debating what to do, I was admiring the horses. There was one particular colt that caught my attention. He was dark steel-grey, with sooty black stockings that ran up all four of his legs and a white snip on his muzzle. He was so beautiful! It wasn’t just his looks that captivated me, though – it was the way he carried himself. He moved constantly, fretting and stomping, as if he had hot coals beneath his hooves. With his neck arched and his tail aloft, he pawed and pirouetted, flicking his noble head up and down in consternation. I remember that day – how all the other horses seemed to melt away, and at that moment there was only that grey colt right there in front of me.
One of the men on horseback, a young groom, noticed me staring at the colt.
“He’s beautiful, yes?” he said.
“Yes.” I nodded. “He’s my favourite.”
“You have a good eye!” the young groom said. “The Janów Estate breeds the best Arabians in the whole of Europe. And Prince is without a doubt the very finest of them all. He’s worth a lot of money.”
“Is that his name? I asked. “Prince?”
“Prince of Poland is his full name,” the young groom corrected me. And then he untied a rope from his saddle and handed it to me. “Put this on him if you want, and you can lead him back. He’s quite the escape artist this one – always bolting off away from the herd. It would help us if you led him on the journey back, since it appears we are now going home again.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Sure,” the groom said. He tied the rope to the shank of the colt’s halter and then he passed the end to me. I took hold of it, like I was grasping the tail of a snake.
The young groom laughed at me. “No. You must get in close. Hold the colt tight, right up at the shank of the rope. You are safer being close to him – he cannot take a hoof to you if you are right beside him.”
“A hoof?” I squeaked.
The young groom nodded. “Prince is pretty handy with his front hooves. I was leading him back to the stables the other day and he rose up on his hindquarters and struck me across the back of the head. Knocked me out.” He saw the look of fear on my face. “He was just playing. He’s spirited, that’s all – not a bad horse, just a hothead. You can do this. Just keep your eyes on him and stay at his shoulder and move with him whenever he moves. Yes, there! You’re doing much better already. You see how you can use your body to block him and keep him in line? That’s it …”
Looking back, it was crazy to give me such an unpredictable horse to handle. I was only nine! But it certainly took my mind off the Russians. I had my eyes glued to Prince as he danced and fretted. I should have been afraid, I suppose, with all the talk of deadly flying hooves and this half-wild horse dancing wildly at my side. But there was so much else to fear that day that the horse slipped down the list of things that I needed to be afraid of. And, after a while, it seemed to me to be second nature to have him bouncing and prancing along beside me.
That groom needn’t have bothered to tell me to watch Prince, because at that moment I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He was so beautiful the way his sinew and muscle rippled beneath grey steel. The black stockings that marked his elegant ballerina legs, and the gossamer silver of his silken mane. The proportions of his face were so perfect they were almost unreal, from the deep curve of his concave profile to the taper and flare of his sooty velvet muzzle. And his ears. He had such small, delicate ears, curved in a little and short and sharp. They swivelled about to catch my words as I spoke to him. This horse was smart, and he was listening intently to everything I said. Horses do not talk, of course, but they are good listeners.
As we walked down the road that day, with the sun setting, I talked and talked with Prince beside me, his ears swivelling the whole time. I told him all about my life and my family. I knew nothing of his own family at that point, of course. It was only later that I would find out that Prince’s own parents, like mine, were here on the road with us. In fact, Prince’s sire, his father, was that impressive, powerful white stallion the head groom himself was riding. Prince’s mother was with us too, running with the mares. She was a dark bay with limpid brown eyes. I wish I’d realised who they were, because I would so have liked to have gazed at them, just that once. After this day was over, I would never get the chance again.
We were on the road and I was just thinking it must almost be time to set up camp for the night, when the planes came. There was the roar of engines and then the black shapes silhouetted in the sky above the trees. Three aircraft, coming from the south-west. There could be no doubt that they were German Luftwaffe, the airborne attacking force, and a moment after they came into sight, the planes directly opened fire!
There was screaming and suddenly everyone was running everywhere. The horses were completely forgotten – all anyone cared about was getting to cover as the planes flew closer and closer, all the while firing on us relentlessly. I saw a horse fall in a hail of machinegun fire, and at that moment I knew this was all too real.
“Don’t they see we aren’t soldiers?” my father was shouting. “There are women and children here!”
Bu the Germans didn’t seem to care. They were firing at us.
I wish I could say that I held my nerve enough to keep hold of Prince, but that would not be true. What happened next was not because I held him. It was my own nervous habit that bound us together. As we’d been walking, I’d been fiddling with the rope, looping it round my wrist. I didn’t realise how dangerous this could be or that, the instant the gunfire began and Prince startled and bolted, the rope would jerk into a tight knot and I would be literally dragged off my feet and into the forest behind the runaway colt.
I remember being flung about on the ground as if I were a sack of hay, and then the roughness of the bracken against my skin as Prince dragged me off the road and into the trees. And then I must have hit something with my head, because when I woke up, everything was woozy and I felt a lump on my skull almost as big as my fist, throbbing and hot from where I’d been struck. Prince, all heaving and sweaty, was still there, standing over me. And the rope was tight as a hangman’s noose round my wrist, so my fingers had turned white from lack of blood. When I wrenched off the rope, they tingled for ages with pins and needles, and there were rope burns and bruises. That rope saved me, though, because Prince had managed to wrap it round a tree when he’d bolted. The rope had pulled taut and had tethered him tight to the tree trunk, so in the end he can’t have dragged me very far. He’d tried to break free, but no matter how hard he pulled on that rope, it had only tightened more round the trunk and bound him to the tree. So the rope held him, and it held me. I had to cut myself loose with a pocketknife, but I left Prince tethered to the tree until I could figure out what to do.
I was still woozy. The last thing I remembered before I was knocked out was the machinegun rattle and the sky filled with German planes roaring above. Now the noise was gone. The sky was silent. And the forest too. And when I shouted out for my parents, again and again, there was nothing. Everybody had gone and we were alone …
***
Zofia rose to her feet, forcing little Rolf to stand up and leap off her lap on to the carpet. “We will finish now,” she said.
“No!” Mira was distraught. “We can’t stop now. I need to know what happens next!”
“It will have to wait until next time,” Zofia said, pointing at the clock above the fireplace. “Mira, you are late for school.”
(#ulink_fc48ee82-b728-53fe-a018-7259c51d7e29)
The bus was running so slow that day! Mira sat in her seat with Rolf in her arms, feeling more and more anxious. By the time she’d handed over the dachshund to Frau Schmidt and run the two blocks down the street from there to her school, she was almost a full hour late for class.
“You need your teacher to sign your late slip,” the secretary at the office told her. Mira filled in the slip. She wrote her name and the date and then, under “Reason for lateness”, she scribbled the first thing that came into her head.
“What is this that you have written here?” her teacher, Herr Weren, asked her when she offered him the note as she entered the class.
Herr Weren read from the late slip out loud to the class: “Reason for lateness: Hitler invading Poland.”
He turned to Mira. “That is not funny, Mira.”
“I’m not trying to be funny, Herr Weren,” Mira said.
“Well, you are very successful, then!” Herr Weren said curtly. “Perhaps you had better stay behind in detention when everyone else goes to morning tea today and make up for wasting all of this time.”
“Yes, Herr Weren,” Mira said.
When the bell rang, Mira stayed in her seat. Herr Weren took out a newspaper, kicking his chair back and putting his feet up on the desk.
“Am I allowed to have my morning tea?” Mira asked.
Herr Weren looked up from his newspaper and raised an eyebrow. “Under the rules of the Geneva Convention, I believe you have the right to eat,” he said. Then he gave a chuckle at his own joke, which Mira didn’t understand. But she figured that he meant yes, she could, and so she unpacked her lunchbox from her bag. There was some hummus and carrots and a heavy brown German kind of bread that Mira didn’t like much at all, which her mother brought home from the bakery.
The clock on the classroom wall ticked very loudly. Herr Weren looked up at it wearily, already bored with disciplining his pupil. He put down his newspaper. “I think that’s enough,” he said. “You can go out and play now, Mira.”
“Do I have to?” Mira said.
“What?” Herr Weren was confused. “Yes, Mira, I’m letting you go now.”
“Oh.” Mira’s voice was heavy with disappointment. The truth was, she’d been delighted to get a detention and she was less than thrilled that it was now over.
Herr Weren walked to the door and held it open for her. Mira stuffed her lunchbox back in her bag and slung it over her back. Herr Weren stood waiting. She was moving so slowly, this child!
“Is there something wrong, Mira?” he asked.
“No, Herr Weren,” Mira said.
“Come on, then! Off you go.”
Outside in the playground the other kids had already eaten lunch. The boys were mostly on the field playing football. The girls’ activities, on the other hand, were much more divided. There was a big group of girls playing Fang on the field, and there were more playing netball on the courts. Mira hurried past them. There was a place, just at the end, where she usually sat at break times. No one else went there, and all she had to do was wait and hope that no one came by before the bell rang. Today, though, when she rounded the corner, there were already three girls there. They were playing a game they called elastics. Two of the girls, Hannah and Gisela, stood with knotted pairs of tights stretched like bands round their legs. They stood with their legs braced wide, so that the tights made a taut loop round them, and the third girl, whose name was Leni, had her back to Mira and was jumping back and forth, scissoring her legs across the tights as the other girls chanted a rhyme:
“Jingle jangle
Silver bangle
Inside – out – on!”
Leni was taller than the other two girls, so she had the advantage in this game because of her longer legs. She was wearing blue shorts and a white T-shirt and her ice-blonde hair was cropped in a very short bob, rather boyish in style; the other two girls were both much mousier, with long hair in ponytails.
“Hey!” Hannah caught sight of Mira before the others. “Look, Leni, it’s Cockroach.”
Leni stopped jumping. She turned round and smiled at Mira. It was a smile that made Mira feel sick. She knew what was coming.
“Cockroach!” Leni greeted her. “Have you come to play with us?”
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