The Red Meadows

By Ole Juul

The narrative unfolds from a Nazi military hospital prison, where Danish saboteur Michael Lans languishes and retraces through memories and dreams of the events leading up to his capture. He plays with his wound, longs for his love interest in Ruth, and befriends a sympathetic German guard, Steinz. He relates his outings with Ruth, his suspicions of one of his fellow saboteurs, and of the undertaking of the sabotage of a Nazi aircraft factory after which he was captured. Torture and interrogation do not break him.. In the face of death, he reminisces about Ruth and his companions..

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 24, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469170565

Ole Juul

Neil Sogge was born and raised in western South Dakota, He graduated from South Dakota State University in 1985, and on graduate school level received a Masters of Library Science in 1990 from University of California, Los Angeles and an English Masters at Western Washington University in 1995. Later he enrolled in Long Ridge Writer’s Group on a correspondence basis and completed the coursework in 2008. Scandinavian languages and their translation is a passion with him. He lives in Bellingham, Washington..

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Neil Sogge.

ISBN:          Softcover                                 978-1-4691-7055-8

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-7056-5

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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In honor of and in the spirit of Ole Juul (1918-2009),

who acted as a Danish freedom fighter during

World War II and helped many Jews flee

to safety in Sweden.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

CHAPTER 1

I do not know where I was for the past ten minutes. An hour or more could have elapsed. I frankly had no idea how long Steinz had been back on duty. I call him Steinz, because I have heard others call him that.

Steinz has a wife and a daughter. But he has not seen either of them for three years. Before the large-scale bombardment on Munich ensued, both of them were flown out of their home area, an outlying villa quarter. An old school friend on vacation, so to speak, had told him all that had transpired. The details were sobering. The old comrade said that Steinz’s wife Ilse and young girl were probably working on a collective farm. As it was, the farm was built in a hurry, because all the available men—including men up to sixty years of age, along with teenage boys—were mobilized to the front lines. Except for a handful of some old farmers, it was all women from town who managed the farm work.

Steinz is amiable. A good many men are taller than him, but he is strong and sinewy. He used to toil in Munich in a synthetic rubber factory. For all intensive purposes, the factory is gone now. Steinz says nothing was found again of the Munich factory. There were just dead people. Among those killed were Steinz’s sister and her husband, so he had been home in Munich in the process of burying them. The bombardment was devastating.

Steinz talks at length about the bomb raids, giving himself over to building houses in thin air, constructing large factories akin to fantastic castles. Warmth radiates from him, this storytelling prince, who then transforms into a bee. He pinches his mouth, squints his eyes, and hums like a bee floating around flowers for nectar. Zoom! Zoom! Zoom! All at once, the houses topple and then distressful voices penetrate the environs, ‘Help! Help!’ cowering under the American and English flyers. The storyteller folds his hands, ducks his head. Zzzz-Zzzz uuoiuu… . the sirens scream over the town. As the machines fly out, fires burst out all over the factories.

Steinz saw the strain and energy drain he effected upon me from his macabre fantasy play, so he thoughtfully stepped out for a walk. A new imagination seized me. Not all the people in the town were Nazis, no, some of them actually welcomed the prospect of Hitler falling and being vanquished by the allies. Droves of Germans, in fact, were of this attitude. Pity for these Germans overcame me, faces shell-shocked, mouths dropped, agape, frightened, and fortunate all at once. My imagination conjured up a German man about to be trapped. He heard above him the slow cracking in the ceiling of his house. He kept staring above, stupefied, until the ceiling gave way, pinning him to the floor. He had worked with a group that notified English agents in Switzerland, about the factories in town, about their layout, munitions and ballistics production and anti-aircraft mechanisms, and he broke to others the probable certainty of when the bombing attack should come. But he never could have anticipated that his house should be hit. The image of his face drew from my memory—a handsome young man with long dark hair resembling a lyric poet. I could almost read his poetry in my mind:

How swift do sheep follow

How lame their heady gallop

To follow a white fluffy lobo

To gallop to their slaughter in a hollow.

The young German, a communist, had directed an illegal press that sent news on flyers to the front along with much needed food provisions. The house shifted and then fell over him, before he could think to escape so that before him, overhead from him from the oddly buckled crushing wreckage loomed the open sky. The bombing flyers, like cold steel and stoic machines, rolled wave after wave over the houses, and from these he saw fall long streaks over the town. He could not escape, he could not move, as much as he tried to raise himself up with his elbows—for both his legs were broken, and shrapnel had bored into his chest, puncturing one of his lungs. Death, he knew would come soon. But to see the American flyers brought a smile to his face, a smile to see them stream long bomb stripes over the town, setting afire the houses around him, while they burned. His lot was hopeless, with his skin scorched, and his screams for help muffled amidst the engulfing flames. He was being burned alive. The other people already lay buried and dead under collapsed houses. He knew he would die, he did not feel any more pain. Still there was a vestige of life: his smile directed up at the American flyers. Then the bizarre occurred, fire jumped to his hair, singeing it, and on the other end crawled up his clothes. In Samsonian strength he was then able to prop himself up on his elbows and scream: It is I, Joan of Arc, who has to defend the homeland. Vive la France! This he screamed continuously until he could no longer use his last remaining lung.

A dazzling beam from a flashlight awoke me. Steinz was standing over me.

A bad dream. I had an unpleasant dream—. I burst out laughing before I could explain any further. Steinz let himself into the cell and sat next to me.

Shortly, he also offered me a cigarette. I told him I had smoked the last one quite some time ago. Then I took one from his packet.

Do you have any matches handy? I used the last of the matches you gave me, I said. He fished out a match that was loose in his pocket.

Are your fingers still burnt from the last match? he asked.

I nodded. Then Steinz inquired about my injured leg. I told him it no longer bothered me, but I was lying. I also wanted to spare Steinz the trifle about it, because he had so many others to think about.

After he left the cell, I sat on my pallet and lit the cigarette. I inhaled. I felt the draft all the way down into my lungs. But it was too much at once, so I gagged. All the same, it was good to taste the smoke.

I had obtained six cigarettes from Steinz, six cigarettes in forty-three days. I was driven to take the first one after having a dream about Ruth. I dreamt she was blind and was searching after me, while I lay sleeping in a field, a large amber cornfield some place in Jutland. Ruth roamed over the whole land looking for me, taking out of the way all the other people she met, in order that she would find me, and finally she came to the field where I lay sleeping. But then she walked northward. I awakened and could see the path she had taken through the corn. I tried to get up, but I was bound to the earth. The corn pinned me down and strangled me about the neck, so I could not even shout out to her.

I must have either thrashed about or shouted in my sleep, because Steinz came rushing in and arousing me.

Michael Lans! You need a cigarette. It usually helps. He pressed a cigarette into my lips.

I had not had a cigarette prior to that going back twenty-three days. I smoked voraciously, I burnt my lips. When Steinz came back in the evening, I promised I would come to visit him after the war in his little villa outside Munich and bring a whole carton of cigarettes for him. He dismissed this with a laugh and a slap on my shoulder. Don’t think about it, he said.

I have never taken dreams seriously, but this dream unsettled me. Dreams usually quickly lapse from my consciousness quickly, but I could not put this dream out of my mind. I dared not allow myself to think that something I dreamt happening to Ruth had actually happened.

The following morning I asked Steinz to take out a letter for me and put it in the letter rack, and he agreed to do that. I borrowed a pencil and two pieces of paper from him and began to write to Ruth after I ate breakfast. I spent the whole morning composing the letter. With only two sides on each paper, I wrote my letters so tiny that I could not make them out under the poor lighting. I wrote to let Ruth know about my life in the cell and not to be distressed by it, that I had it good and had a pleasant prison. My release would come soon, I wrote, because my case was good from what I could tell.

I knew my written assurances were not true, but it was the best way I could think to write to my dear Ruth. If by some miracle I could find my way to freedom and meet up again with Ruth, I vowed to myself that I would tie myself, bind myself to her forever.

I folded the letter when I had finished it, and I concealed it under the pallet in a crack in the wall. Steinz would read it and would feel awkward. He is married and has a child and therefore knows what it is to yearn after a loved one.

Steinz came in the afternoon and asked how I was coming with the letter. Fear seized me. I did not know initially why I was afraid, but it occurred to me suddenly that I did not know where Ruth was. She had to have gone underground at the time I was taken captive. It would be madness, therefore, to send the letter to one of the addresses where I had last known her to be staying. It was possible she had already taken flight to Sweden and was perhaps staying now with Kjeld and Bitten in Sweden talking about me. She might be poring over a newspaper looking for my name, hoping for the best. No, I could not write to her right now.

Steinz was waiting at the door holding an envelope and waiting for me to give him the letter. He was terribly jittery, I could see. He was fidgeting about and pacing back and forth. Periodically, he would clear his throat, as if to say he could not stand at my cell the whole day waiting for my letter. I really wanted to be out of the predicament without having to explain. I did not want to distress Steinz any further, but in the end I found no way out.

Corporal, my voice dropping as I continued, I can’t give you the letter, I’m going to rip it to shreds, because it makes no difference now. Sorry for the trouble I caused you.

He shrunk down, his head dipping forward with a quizzical look.

I don’t understand. Why aren’t you sending the letter to your wife? He attempted to speak with a Danish accent, but he still sounded thoroughly German to me. You long for her, I would think. I have not seen Ilse or my little girl for three years. Every time I obtain permission for leave, something comes stumbling along getting in the way. Why don’t you go ahead and send the letter? He assumed more of a rhetorical tone than a questioning one.

I don’t know where she lives, I admitted.

Where she lives? said Steinz with incredulity, his eyes popping wide. You don’t? As it is, I’d rather not know where Ilse lives right now, for she was bombed out.

We two are just a couple of fine husbands, I said. I tried to smile. Steinz, in kind, also tried to smile.

So you won’t send the letter? Steinz questioned one last time.

No thanks, Corporal, but perhaps another time. May I now be permitted to rip it to shreds?

Then Steinz left. I sat holding the letter, but I did not know what to do with it.

Later that same evening, I had a difficult time falling asleep. I lay thinking about Ruth. It was confounding that I would not receive the letter and be able to ruminate over it.

Then I had an unbearable need to scratch myself. I discovered I had a bullet under my skin, just above my pelvis. My impulse to keep scratching and digging at the projectile persisted. I kept working at it, and in an hour I managed to move it completely out of the inner skin layer. That very bullet I could then take between my fingers, roll it around, and drop it down into the hold again. I then pushed it into the hole. I became so preoccupied, even delighted at this—a new source of entertainment—that I let pass all thoughts of asking Steinz for a knife so I could cut it out. So I pushed it back and forth, back and forth, with a bizarre sense of amusement. Still, I could not sleep. Having lain so many days in the same position, and on a pallet with no mattress, I was sore over my entire body. I just simply could not fall asleep.

If Steinz could have had his way, I would have a mattress. But that was at a minimum of what he wanted for me.

In the morning, I showed Steinz the bullet. I engaged him in a guessing game—letting him probe the object between his fingers just as I had done. He knew it was a bullet the instant he observed it and forthrightly advised me to ask the doctor to take it out. I shrugged my shoulders and told him I would rather keep it so that I could play with it at night. I needed it as a diversion, I explained, because I could not sleep at night anyway.

I did not see that there was any good anyway in asking the doctor to remove the bullet, because he might not remove it. The young attending doctor was compact in stature but also stocky. He had a blockhead and a coarse face. Small, beady eyes swam around in his deep eye sockets set off by scrubby eyebrows. He reminded me of an ape, particularly when I teased him over the question of when the war would end. He had stared at me churlishly, scratched his squared-off head with his forefinger, and then stared at the finger. He did not answer my question. I would ask him