The Baker's Daughter

Chapter Thirty

THE ROAD BETWEEN

TEGERNSEE AND GARMISCH, GERMANY

APRIL 29, 1945

Josef Hub was a shadow of the officer he’d been. The march from Dachau to Tegernsee had not gone well for the prisoners or the SS. He saw things in the daylight that shook his soul, and his migraines worsened. Sometime during the three—day journey, he’d stopped sleeping and eating; instead, he injected himself with methamphetamines as often as possible. Near Percha, he took a wool coat off the back of an elderly German sheepherder. It hung over his bones like a great bearskin, and he felt as beastly as he looked. He hadn’t shaved or bathed in weeks. His reddish-blond beard concealed his features. Swollen eyes and tremors made most turn away, and he found an anonymous freedom in his degradation.

The handful of travelers he encountered moved to the opposite side of the road on his approach. As well they should, he thought to himself, if they knew what I’ve done. Most of the pilgrims were Aryan families, women carrying babies, children in wool socks with cheesecloth sacks on the end of sticks, fathers armed with rakes and scythes for protection. Was this what Germany had come to: a land of wanderers?

No matter where these people ventured, they would always be German. He would always be German. So where did you go when your home was no longer safe—when the world stopped making sense? At what point was the decision made to go or to stay?

For Josef, it came when he watched a young Jewish prisoner drag her dead mother for over a mile. The old woman’s legs, blue and frozen stiff, left a trail like ski tracks in the mud. When a guard commanded the daughter to drop the body, she refused, and he shot her where she stood; her blood splattered thick against her mother’s rimy cheeks.

Then, Josef had turned his horse around, abandoning the Jews and his post, and dared anyone to shoot him in the back as he went. Galloping away, he prayed someone actually would. His horse succumbed to exhaustion halfway to Garmisch. He left it spent and dying on the side of the road and began to walk, still hearing the trailing footsteps of Jewish prisoners behind him. When he walked faster, the cadence increased. He broke into a run but they caught up. “Murderer, traitor!” They beat against his back. He fell then, tripping over the picked carcass of a vulture; its skinny head screwed sideways in the mud. Pulling his gun from beneath the bearskin, he fired a shot straight up.

“Go away!” he shouted.

But when he looked, there was no one. The long road stretched empty to the horizon. The only sound was the bitter wind whistling past his ears. A finch flittered against it, then caught the current up into the brindled sky. The pain of his head anchored him to the ground. He lay beside the dead animal, watching the maggots gorge themselves on its innards, smelling the rot of flesh, and seeing again the mass graves at KZ Dachau.

In all his years as an SS officer, he’d never personally taken the life of anyone after Peter Abend, but he’d been there. He’d seen death all around and ordered it into action under the guise of duty. He was steeped in their blood, more guilty than the simple soldier with a bullet. He closed his eyes, but the assembly of corpses only sharpened in his mind.

He was convinced the vengeful ghosts would stay on German ground. If only he could leave, he could be free of them and all the horrors of this war. Günther Kremer and his Garmisch comrades had an escape route. A ship bound for Venezuela awaited them in Brunsbüttel. He had to get there. But he needed payment—gold and jewels stockpiled and hidden in his Garmisch apartment. He’d collect those and Elsie. They could start anew in South America. She would help him find happiness. Faithful and true, she would help absolve him.

With that in mind, he gritted his teeth and peeled himself up from the dirt. In the distance, the chimney stacks of Garmisch plumed gray ash. He knew one of them was the Schmidt Bäckerei.