The Next War

Aside from building rockets, my father didn’t want anything to do with war.  He wouldn’t watch war movies.  He never owned a gun.  A friend’s dad taught me how to shoot. 

 

The closest to war Dad would come in his personal life was a game.  Risk.  It is played on a map-like board.  Players control armies and attempt to take over the planet by attacking territories controlled by the other players.  Strategy is critical in winning at Risk.  As is luck, while rolling the dice.

 

Our Risk games were about the only time my father let his guard down and behaved like a non-mathematician.  When we played, he was almost as brutal as me and my brothers.  Mom refused to play with us.  She didn’t even want to be in the same house. 

 

I was the oldest of the family and was used to getting my way.  My middle brother, Anton, was often lost in the shuffle.  Since he was smaller, he had learned to use his wit.  He was skilled at verbally pushing my buttons and would always do so when we played Risk.

 

Anton was running his mouth, and I was pissed off.  Instead of trying to keep up with his banter, I focused on a plan to wipe him off the face of the Earth.  You can exclusively attack one player if you wish.  If you defeat all of his armies, you take over his territory, and he is out of the game.

 

My brother was too busy talking to notice I’d been slowly building up my forces near his strongholds.  When my turn came, I began a methodical attack.  His banter stopped when he realized I was capable of taking him out.  It came down to the dice.  He caught a lucky break and won the last roll.  He was able to hang on to his last territory.  But he was by far, the weakest player in the game.

 

 My father’s turn was next.  I expected him to immediately attack Anton.  In Risk, players are like sharks.  They instinctively swim towards blood.

 

But no one is required to follow the conventional strategy.  I was stunned when my father began by attacking me.  I realized, in my zeal to destroy my brother, I’d left a minimum of armies to defend my newly conquered territories.  Even though I controlled more of the board than anyone else, I had spread myself too thin.

 

Soon enough, I became the second player in the game down to his last territory.  My father still had plenty of armies left.  My goose was about to be cooked.  Dad leaned over, and put his hand on my shoulder.  That was his way of letting me know, he was putting on his Artur hat.  He was about to dispense wisdom in my direction.

 

“Serge, I don’t mind playing this game with you kids because sometimes it shows you how life works.  The lesson you just learned is this:  Even when you are in the middle of a fierce battle, you still have to make sure you are ready for the next one.  The big punches, the ones that knock you down, are the ones you didn’t see coming.”

 

Again, it was a waiting game for Artur, Hans, and Bertina.  A few weeks after Glashütten was captured, on May 7^th, 1945, Germany surrendered.  Hitler was dead.  In Europe, World War II was over.

 

The three guessed it would be a matter of weeks before the soldiers would begin returning home.  That would be when Artur could begin posing as Axel.  Everyone in Glashütten was talking about the end of the war, and what would happen next.  Nobody suspected Bertina of having an ulterior motive when she asked if anyone’s children had made it home.

 

Everyone in town knew that Axel was dead.  But the people making IDs would be American soldiers.  Bertina found out there was an Army office at the airport in nearby Oberems.  She made the trip and inquired about the cards.

 

She was told it would be a while before the crew would make it to small towns like Glashütten.  Anyone needing ID cards now would have to travel to Frankfurt.  That would work out much better for Artur.  Frankfurt was 25 kilometers to the east, and only a handful of people in the large city knew Hans or Bertina.

 

By mid-June, the homecoming began.  Whenever Hans or Bertina met a returning soldier, the emotions were bittersweet.  They were happy that the young man was alive and able to resume his life.  But they saw Axel in the eyes of each of them.  That cut their emotions like a sharp blade.  They pushed those feelings aside, and focused on helping Artur.

 

By the time a trip to Frankfurt was in order, the three had been able to repair the artillery damage.  Müller Dairy and Farm was back in business.  They were fortunate and had only lost two of the cattle.  Hans used the tractor to smooth out the holes made by the artillery.  They repaired the broken windows and the barn door.

 

Bertina drove the truck as she and Artur made the trip to Frankfurt.  It was mid-morning when they arrived.  The Americans had stations set up for processing IDs in a downtown park.  The lines were already long.

 

Signs were posted with instructions.  They would need Axel’s military ID and his birth certificate, which they had.  They could only hope no one would look too closely at the photograph.  And hope there was not a list of soldiers that had been killed.  They were gambling that the large number of people being processed would help their deception go unnoticed.

 

In the time it took them to read the instructions, Bertina realized the line had grown even longer.  At the bottom of the paper, in large print, it said the lines would be cordoned off at 3pm each day.  The two spoke briefly, and decided to come back at 2:30 to queue up.  They figured the workers would be tired, and distracted, at the end of the day.  Less likely to notice that Artur Wlodarski was not a dead German infantryman named Axel Müller.

 

Waiting in the long line felt like an eternity.  Bertina could see Artur fidgeting and put her arm around him.  He took a deep breath, and relaxed.  When they got to the table, the man barely looked at him.  He asked questions and wrote down the information as fast as he could.  Within a few minutes, Artur was blinking his eyes from the flash of a camera bulb.

 

It would take some time to develop the photograph.  The couple made the drive back to the farm, then returned two days later to pick up the freshly printed ID card.  Artur was ready to begin his second attempt to return home.

 

This time, he had a much better plan.  Hans made a copy of a map of the German-Czech border he found at the library.  He spent an hour carefully tracing the map onto a piece of paper. 

 

With the ID, Artur should have no trouble getting on the train in Glashütten.  They had come up with a cover story.  If anyone asked, Artur was looking for seasonal farm work.  He had an advertisement from the Frankfurt newspaper.  The train would be full of young men chasing after the few available jobs.  Wildenau is a tiny community surrounded by farms.  Just across the Czechoslovakian border is a much larger city, Aš. 

 

In the best case scenario, Artur would take the train to Wildenau, posing as Axel.  Then, he would figure out how to slip across the Czech border.  He had options.  He could continue to pose as Axel if that was convenient.  Or, at any time, he could revert back to being Artur Wlodarski.  He still had his Polish ID.

 

Hopefully Artur could simply show one of his IDs and walk through the border checkpoint with no problems.  If that was not feasible, Artur would make his way a few kilometers south.  The thick forest there would give him his best chance of slipping into the country undetected.

 

Hans had modified a suitcase in his workshop.  He had fashioned a rubber gasket that made a tight seal when the suitcase was closed.  That would keep Artur’s belongings dry if he had to swim across any rivers, and act as a flotation device.  Bertina knitted a sling that Artur could slip over his head that would hold the suitcase snugly to his chest.

 

The day came to leave.  There were hugs and tears at the train station.  Hans held Bertina as they watched the steam engine belch smoke, and carry Artur out of their lives.

 

With the frequent stops, it took a day and a half, but Artur made it to Wildenau without difficulty.  So far, this escape plan had worked much better than the first one.  But, he was about to hit a snag.  He got off the train, and made his way toward the border crossing.  He saw a lot more soldiers than he expected.  When he got there, he was shocked.  It looked like an entire American battalion was camped on one side.  Across the border in Aš, the scene repeated, this time with Soviet troops.  There was a heavy wooden gate separating the two armies.

 

It wasn’t that Hans, Bertina, and Artur had come up with a bad plan.  The problem was political.  A twist a mathematician or a pair of farmers would not have been able to predict.  Artur only saw the tip of the iceberg.  Up and down a new front line, two former World War II allies were faced off, now as enemies.  On one side, the Americans.  On the other, the Soviets. 

 

Halfway around the world, in the Pacific Ocean, the Allies were still dealing with the last remnants of the Japanese armed forces.  In Europe, the Cold War had already begun.