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Sometime during the first morning, we crossed the Elbe River on a bridge choked with traffic: army trucks and fighting vehicles, refugee carts, and overloaded cars powered by wood gas, all headed west. At the eastern end of the span, panic erupted when military policemen announced that it was about to be closed. Somehow our truck was allowed to pass, but even as we inched across the bridge, Wehrmacht sappers were attaching charges to its stone arches, and moments after we reached the other side, we heard the dull explosive thump that indicated the span had been blown. A few minutes later and we would have been blocked on the other shore.
Allied fighter-bombers were everywhere, prowling for targets, flying so low that it was impossible to spot them until the very last moment. On the back of the truck, we piled mattresses against the canvas sides-as if that could have stopped cannon or machine-gun fire. Whenever our escort troopers sighted planes, the truck rumbled to cover -- a copse of trees, a clutch of houses. The threat from the air was not new to us: during the December evacuation, when the refugee train had come under repeated air attack, Mother had covered the baby with her body and the rest of us had flattened out on the floor of the carriage, shielded only by its thin metal siding. At one point, an old man became so frightened that he jumped off the moving train. Our carriage was not hit, but the sense of helplessness had been overpowering-as it was now on the truck.
We covered perhaps 80 km the first day. The adults whispered their worries to one another: Were the Russians catching up? The children slept much of the time, or perhaps pretended to. Once in a while, one of us was allowed up front in the cab. When my turn came, I sat between the driver and another soldier and on top of a bright yellow leather case, the kind German kids used to carry schoolbooks; this one was filled with grenades. A rack under the windshield held two rifles with the troopers' helmets hung over the muzzles. Every time the truck hit a rut, the weaponry rang like a bell.
The driver was a big, red-faced staff sergeant who spoke rarely and was nearly deaf. His name was Peise. Mother eventually told me that Peise was in Father's outfit and that Father had asked him to pick us up after the truck was ordered westward. What Peise's real mission was -- if any -- no one knew. It seemed strange that he had orders to go west when the Wehrmacht needed every man in the east. The sergeant shed no light on the question. He drove the truck with singular determination, fatigue cap pushed into his neck, submachine gun slung across his chest, eyes on the road.
The truck hit a man that first day, a brown-uniformed trooper from the Arbeitsdienst, or labor service, who suddenly stepped into the road out of a long column of marching men. The impact spun him into the marchers, spilling them like bowling pins. Peise gripped the wheel more tightly and stepped on the gas. No one said a word. Nor did the sergeant stop a few hours later when one of the soldiers riding the front fender slipped off and fell beneath the treads of a tank. My brother, now 56, says that once in a while, in a dream, he still hears the dying man's screams.