David Downing - Silesian Station

The sky was overcast on the following morning, and a long hospital train rumbled through the station as he waited for the Glatz local. He imagined Thomas's son Joachim laid out on a pallet in one of the rattling boxcars, and wondered how Thomas and all the other parents – German and Polish – were getting through each day.

His own train finally departed, steaming south under a steadily-darkening sky. There was no transport for hire in Wartha's station yard, and again he set out on foot. The countryside seemed emptier than before, and as he turned up the dirt lane which led to the Rosenfeld farm a thin rain began to fall, blurring the line of the distant mountains.

There was smoke drifting up from the chimney of the neighbouring Resch farm, but no other sign of life. He walked on, rehearsing what he meant to say about Miriam, and was nearing the final bend in the lane when he realized that the field on his left was a sea of rotting crops. And that no column of smoke was rising above the screen of trees.

He quickened his pace, hoping against hope.

The stone walls and chimney were still standing, but that was all. The glass was gone from the windows, and a few blackened stumps were all that remained of the roof. The barn beyond had been burnt to the ground.

He walked to the open doorway and looked in. Scorched tiles lay half-buried in a slough of cinders and ashes. Everything was black.

It had happened a while ago, several weeks by the look of it.

There were no bodies in the house. He walked across to where the barn had stood and examined the blackened ground. He circled the ruins, and found no signs of digging in the overgrown kitchen garden or the copse of trees. He suddenly remembered the horse and cow – stolen, no doubt. But where were Leon and Esther Rosenfeld?

Perhaps they had been arrested. Dragged away to some unknown destination while the local thugs looted and burnt their home.

Or perhaps their blacksmith friend had warned them, and they had headed up into the mountains that Leon's grandfather had provided for such an eventuality. Russell stood in the lightly falling rain, gazing at the faint line of crests which marked the old border with Czechoslovakia. There were Nazis on both sides now.

Wherever they were, they wouldn't be back.

Ruins and more ruins, he thought. Of a farm and a family. Of the country he had known and once loved.