Dangerous Territory

A Road Between Two Churches

Levi plodded onward, his feet hurting in his worn out shoes, his butt aching from hours in the saddle, but he felt a strange elation.

I'm free.

He could not even really grasp the idea. He was no longer a prisoner. Allies were liberating this country. They may have already passed through this area, chasing the Nazis back to Germany.

I'm free.

He had spent too many years on the run, hiding in basements and closets, just trying to survive to the next day. He had killed and seen too many get killed. The idea of being a free man, of walking the streets openly, was so strange to him.

I'm free.

He kept repeating that in his head, but it still did not feel real. Where would he even go? He had planned for months on simply running away from the Nazis, but he never sat down and actually planned a route. He knew he needed to reach the coast so he could catch a ship to America, but many ports had been bombed. Which ones still allowed passenger ships? How did he even board one going to America?

This was why he had gone to the French Resistance in the first place. They had promised to get him to a ship, cover his passage, and get him set up with charity groups in America who would provide legal assistance to him and the other Jews seeking to be allowed in as refugees.

It could take months to save up enough money for a ship ticket, but the urgency was less now that the war was in the Allies' favor. Now that France was liberated, could he still be considered a refugee? How did one get a visa? How did emigrating even work? Surely, his mother emigrated when she moved from Strasbourg to Paris, becoming a French citizen and getting Levi citizenship as well, but Levi had been only four, so he had no idea what was involved.

For four years, he had only thought about how to escape and survive. He realized he needed to focus on that now. He needed food and water, at the very least. If he could make his way back to Paris, he knew people there who could get him set up with a job, or if the place was a bombed-out hellscape, he knew the streets and had survived for years by thieving.

If things truly were a disaster, he had learned how to survive in the wilderness. He had a knife, and that was all he really needed to build a shelter, hunt, and survive.

An hour dragged on. He was in a forest again, after an afternoon of farmlands. The clouds overhead were getting darker, and he wished he had not left the blanket on the horse. Then he heard the plinking noise of raindrops in the leafy canopy, followed by a few drops hitting his face.

"Just what I need," he grumbled. Still, with his throat parched, he turned his head up, hoping for a little water. The few drops that reached his tongue were not enough, and he had to keep moving. The Germans were somewhere behind him.

He was trying to swallow his saliva just to moisten his throat when he heard a stream. Levi plunged into the trees, batting away branches, following the sound. It was a small creek, but he was thirsty. Levi knelt by the creek, cupped his hands, and looked at the water.

Not the cleanest, but at that point he did not care. He drank handful after handful, savoring the first thing he had to drink since the awful tea that morning. Refreshed, he continued onward.

He had been walking not even half an hour before his stomach churned.

"Shit," he grumbled. He had consumed tainted water before and knew the symptoms. He fled far enough into the woods so that if the Germans came right at that awful moment, they would not hear or smell anything. Then he hurried to get his trousers down as his intestines rebelled against him.