Mathematician Gone Wild

Both of my parents grew up amid poverty and war.  Even though they spent more than half of their lives in America, and succeeded beyond their dreams, they lived modestly.  I was okay with that.  Left them more money to spend on me.  Dad was great at manipulating numbers.  I specialized in manipulating Mom and Dad.

 

I couldn’t believe it when they bought me the 1966 Shelby GT 350 I’d been pestering them about for my 16^th birthday.  The Shelby was a racing car that was fully street legal.  My favorite thing about the car was the roll bar.  I was the baddest dude in school.  I realized that there wasn’t a policeman or deputy in the county that could keep up with me. 

 

Most of the time, when I tried to outrun the law, I succeeded.  On those occasions when I didn’t, Dad always paid the fine to get the Shelby out of impound.  I could tell some stories about the times I got away.  But they would be nothing compared to what Dad did, when he ran away from the Nazis.

 

The mathematician made his way through the thick trees.  After a few minutes, he heard his name being shouted.  Artur was not much of an athlete.  If the soldiers followed him, he knew they would catch up.  But he was gambling they would not.  There were only two soldiers, and they were responsible for a bus full of scientists.  He realized, the shouts were getting farther away as he walked.

 

The first part of the plan, getting away, was a success.  Things went downhill from there.  Even though he had a flashlight, Artur fell often.  The ground was covered with thick leaves that hid rocks and fallen branches.  Several times he stepped in puddles and his shoes were soaking wet.  His face was covered with scratches from the thick vegetation.

 

He was determined to move forward.  But everything has limits.  After a few hours, Artur was freezing cold and worn out.  He realized his poorly thought out plan had no chance of succeeding.  He was a fool. 

 

Maybe it was karma.  Maybe it was God.  It could have been luck or coincidence.  Just as Artur knew he couldn’t go any farther, the trees opened to a clearing.  He could see the outline of a barn ahead of him.  He had stumbled onto a farm.

 

It was a few hours before sunrise.  Artur carefully slid open the barn door and went in.  He panned the flashlight across the floor and walls.  There was a heavy coat hanging on a nail.  He wrapped the coat around him and lay on the floor.  Artur fell into the sleep of a man who had taken himself to the brink of exhaustion.

 

Waking up is particularly unpleasant when you are in a deep sleep, and someone is hitting you in the chest with a shovel.

 

Artur was disoriented.  It took a moment process the fact that the two moving, noise making objects were people.  The man standing over him, poking him with the shovel and speaking loudly, terrified him.  So did the woman, just behind him, pointing the shotgun.

 

That was when his survival instincts kicked in.  It took a crisis to bring out the little bit of Piotr that was hidden in Artur.  He locked eyes with the man, and said, “My name is Artur Wlodarski, and I am cold and hungry.  I have money and I will pay you for dry clothes and food.”

 

Artur’s burst of raw honesty was disarming.  Both the man and the woman noticeably calmed down.  The couple looked at each other.  The man spoke.  “Why are you here?  Did you escape from prison?”

 

That would have been a logical assumption.  At that time, pretty much every able bodied young man in Germany was in the Army.  Hans and Bertina knew nothing about V-2 rockets or the men who designed them.  Artur spoke in a quiet voice, and told them his story. 

 

When he finished, he realized the woman had lowered the shotgun.  Bertina looked at her husband, and said, “He reminds me of Axel.”

 

Hans looked at Artur and said, “Axel was our son.  He is in a cemetery outside of Leningrad.  Someday when this God-forsaken war is over, I will bring his casket home.  He should be buried here.”

 

The man looked at his wife.  They had been married so long they knew what each other was thinking.  He said, “We don’t need your money.  Have you ever milked a cow?”

 

“No.”

 

“By the end of the day, you’ll wish you had stayed on that bus.  But first, you’ll need some food and some clothes.  Come with me.”

 

What Hans said had some merit, physically anyway.  The hardest Artur had ever worked the bakery wasn’t close to what he experienced that first day at Müller Dairy and Farm.  Yet, as he lay in Axel’s bed that night, he felt a tremendous sense of relief.  For the first time in years, there was a measurable distance between him and the war.

 

There are documented cases in nature when adult animals adopt and raise an orphaned infant.  It doesn’t even have to be from the same species.  So it wasn’t much of a stretch for Hans and Bertina to adopt Artur.  He even looked a little like their lost son.

 

Artur didn’t know it was possible for a man to work harder than his father, until he met Hans.  After a few weeks, he realized those strange knots in his arms and legs were his muscles getting bigger.

 

Among the things Artur learned about Hans was that he was brutally honest.  At supper the first day, Hans gave Artur a blistering critique of his escape attempt.  One a scale of one to ten, Hans gave Artur a one.  After pointing out and dissecting each mistake, Hans got down to business.  He was determined to help Artur meet his goal of returning to Poland.

 

Hans focused on one of the biggest oversights in Artur’s plan.  The war itself.  There were two fronts moving towards the Müller’s property outside the tiny village of Glashütten.  The Americans and the British were closing in from the west, and the Russians were approaching from the east.  Regardless of who got there first, Artur needed to lay low until the battle passed by. 

 

If they managed to survive beyond that, they would figure out the rest of the plan.

 

The couple already had a sturdy basement under the house.  Even though there were no targets worth bombing in their rural location, they understood the inevitability of war.  They had dug an even deeper shelter in one corner and heavily reinforced it.   

 

Hans realized it would be difficult to explain Artur’s presence to any soldiers that might show up, no matter which army it was.  Best to avoid that problem if possible.  Hans built a cabinet, with a hidden opening in the bottom, and mounted it on the wall, covering the shelter opening.

 

Artur bided his time.  During the day, he helped on the farm.  He stayed out of sight, in the barn or the milking shed.  In each building where Artur worked, they fashioned a hidey hole for him.  They could never be sure when someone might show up. 

 

On days when the electricity was on, they used milking machines.  Otherwise, they milked the cows by hand, the same way people had been doing for thousands of years.

 

The war came to Glashütten two months after Artur.  They began to hear the artillery fire when the front was twenty kilometers to the west.  The family stored food and other provisions in the basement. 

 

Hans and Bertina decided to leave the cows out in the fields.  If they crowded all of them into the buildings, they might panic and stampede when a bomb or shell exploded nearby.  Better to let them spread out and fend for themselves in the open.

 

The three had done their best to prepare.  When the battle reached them, they huddled in the shelter.  There wasn’t anything else to do.