We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance (15 page)

Jan with the King of Norway at an inspection after his return.

THE NEXT summer, sombody passed that way and found the broken
pieces of Jan's skis, among the massive blocks of melting snow which
were all that was left of the avalanche. They were at the foot of the
icefall of the unnamed glacier under the east face of Jaeggevarre. One
can guess what he had done. He had started his final climb up the
valley wall, but had traversed on to the icefall without knowing it.
When one can see a little distance, the snow on ice looks different
from the snow on rock; but if one can only see a yard or two one cannot tell what is underneath. The snow on the steep ice at that time of
year would have been very unstable, ready to fall by itself within a
week or two, and Jan's weight and the thrust of his skis were enough
to start it. The scar of the avalanche stretched from top to bottom of
the icefall. Jan himself must have fallen at least three hundred feet.

To start an avalanche is apt to be fatal, but it did not kill Jan. Luck
was extraordinarily kind to him again. Of course nobody knows how
long he lay there unconscious; but when he came to, his head was out
of the snow, so that he could breathe, and most of his body was
buried, which had possibly saved him from freezing to death; and
none of his bones were broken. To be alive was far more than he had
any right to expect, and so the other results of his fall can hardly be
counted as bad luck. One of his skis was lost and the other was broken in two places; and the small rucksack with all his food had disappeared; and he had hit his head and could not remember where
he was trying to go. He dug himself out of the snow and stood up,
and unfastened the broken bit of ski and dropped it there, and wandered away on foot, utterly lost, with no plan and no notion of where
he was going; in fact, without any coherent thoughts at all, because
he had concussion of the brain.

After the avalanche, Jan had no sense of time, and hardly any
awareness of the reality of what happened. He never stopped walking, but as his body froze slowly and ice formed in the veins of his
feet and hands and crept inch by inch up his legs and arms, his mind
became occupied more and more by dreams and hallucinations. But
the length of this ordeal is known: he was four days and four nights
in the mountains from the time when he passed through Lyngseidet.
The storm lasted for nearly three days, and then the snow stopped
and the clouds lifted and the mountains were clear; but Jan knew
nothing of that, because by then the glare of the snow had scorched
the retina of his eyes and he was blind.

One has to imagine him, both in the dark and the daylight, and
both in the mists of the storm and the clear air which followed it,
stumbling on unable to see at all. He never stopped because he was
obsessed with the idea that if he lay down he would go to sleep and
die; but all the time he was in snow between knee-deep and waistdeep, and towards the end of the time he fell down so often full
length on his face in the snow that he might be said to have crawled
and not to have walked.

His movements were totally aimless. This is known because his
tracks were found here and there, later on in the spring. For the most
part, he probably stayed in the valley of Lyngdalen, but at least once
he went over a thousand feet up the side of it, and down again in the
same place. He was deflected by the smallest of obstacles. There were
boulders sticking up out of the snow, and when he ran into them
head-on he turned and went away; not round the boulder and on in
the same direction, but away at an angle, on a totally different course. There were birch bushes also, in the bottom of the valley, and among
them he wandered hither and thither for days, crossing his own
tracks again and again and blundering into the bushes themselves so
that he got tangled in them and scratched his face and hands and tore
his clothes. Once he walked round and round a small bush for so
long that he trod a hard deep path in the snow, which was still to be
seen in the summer: one can only suppose that he thought he was
following somebody else's footsteps.

But he himself knew almost nothing of this. Because he was
blind, he believed that the mist and falling snow went on all the time,
and he could not reckon the nights and days which were passing. All
that he knew of reality was pain in his legs and arms and eyes, and
cold and hunger, and the endless, hampering, suffocating wall of
snow in front of him through which he must force his way.

On one of the mountains he came to, there were hundreds of
people, marching with bare feet which were frozen and they were
afraid of breaking them, because they were quite brittle.

He knew it was a dream, and he wrenched himself awake because
he was terrified of falling asleep, but when Per Blindheim began to talk
to him it was more real than reality, and he swung round joyfully and
called "Per, Per," into the darkness because he could not see where he
was. But Per did not answer him, he went on talking to Eskeland. They
were talking together somewhere, and a lot of the others were with
them too, but they were not listening to him. He shouted louder, "Per!
Eskeland!" and began to run after them, afraid that they would miss
him in the night. And then they were close, and he was thankful to be
with them all again. But they were talking together among themselves,
quite cheerfully as they always did, and they never spoke to him. He
called them again and again to tell them he could not see, but he could
not make them hear him. They did not know he was there. And it
came back to him that all of them were dead. Yet they had been talking together before he lost them, and he was the one who could not
make himself heard. He began to believe that the dream was reality, and that he was the one who was dead. Stories of death came back
into his mind. It seemed likely that he had died.

But in the same thought which made it seem so likely, he knew
it was fantasy and he was still determined not to die, and to this end
he must keep going, on and on, until something happened: something. He could not remember what it was that he had hoped would
happen.

As he was going through the woods, he came to a trapdoor in
the snow, and he tried to open it by the iron ring. But he was feeling very weak, and it was too heavy for him. It was a pity, because
of the warm fire inside it, but he had to give it up. But whenever he
turned his back on it to go away, somebody slipped out of the forest and opened it and got inside and shut it again before he had
time to stop him. It was unfair that they kept him shut out in the
cold and darkness while they all enjoyed the lights and gaiety
inside. They always waited till he turned away, and then they were
too quick for him. They must have been watching him and waiting
for their chance.

It was the same when he found the mountain with windows in
it, except that that time he never saw them go in. But they all
climbed up to the door at the top so easily. Nobody would help
him, and he tried and tried but always slipped down again to the
bottom so that he was the only one left who could not do it. But
perhaps it was nobody's fault; perhaps the explanation was that
they could not see him. That would be logical if he was dead. But
he shouted I am still alive and alone out here in the snow, it's all a
mistake. The windows went away and the mountain turned into a
little mound of snow, and he was scrabbling feebly at its sides.

It was the same too when he came to the log cabin. Stupidly, he
was not looking where he was going, and he hurt himself again
when he blundered into it. But as soon as he put out his hands and
felt the rough logs he knew what it was although they never told
him, and he started to feel his way along the wall, round the corner, hoping they would not see him before he found the door. It seemed
a long way to the door, but he found it, and felt for the latch. But
that time it opened, and he fell inside.

HANNA PEDERSEN was having dinner with her two boys, Ottar and
Johan, when the door burst open and the dreadful thing stumbled
into the room and groped blindly towards the table. They jumped to
their feet and backed away in horror. She nearly screamed, but she
put her hand to her mouth and stifled the impulse because of the
children. She managed to whisper "Ottar, go and fetch your uncle,"
and the elder boy slipped out of the room.

"What do you want?" she said. "Who are you?" But Jan's answer
was incoherent, and he collapsed on the floor. She overcame her terror and revulsion enough then to creep near him and look at him
closely to see if he was somebody she knew.

It would have been hard to tell. When he lay still like that on the
floor, one would have thought he was a corpse dug out of the snow.
He was caked with ice and frozen dirt and dried blood. His hair and
his beard were solidly frozen and his face and hands were bloated and
discoloured. His feet were great balls of compacted snow and ice. His
eyes were tight shut, screwed up with the pain of snowblindness. He
tried to speak again as he lay there, but she could not understand
anything he said. Distracted with fright she took the smaller boy and
ran to the door to meet her brother.

Her brother's name was Marius Gronvold. He lived in the next
house, and when he heard the boy's anxious frightened story he ran across to see what had really happened. He pushed past his sister and took a single look at Jan. It was enough to show him that
they would have to take measure quickly, whoever this man was, if
they were to save his life. He had two other sisters who lived
nearby, Gudrun and Ingeborg, and he sent the children to fetch
them. They both hurried in, and between them all they set to work
to bring Jan back to life. They built up the fire, and fed him with
hot milk from a spoon, and got off the worst of his clothes and
wrapped him in blankets, and lifted him on to a bed. Marius took
a sharp knife and carefully cut his boots to pieces and peeled them
off. His socks also had to be cut up and taken off in strips, revealing horrible feet and legs in an advanced stage of frostbite, with the
toes frozen stiffly together in a solid block of ice. Everyone there
knew the first-aid treatment for frostbite: to rub it with snow. The
three sisters started then and there to try to save his feet, taking the
ice-cold limbs between their hands and kneading the brittle flesh.
Jan paid no attention to what they did, because he could not feel
anything in his legs at all. He seemed to be slipping off into sleep
or unconsciousness.

When the ice began to thaw on the jacket, Marius saw, to his
amazement, that it was some kind of uniform, and he had also seen
that Jan was armed with a pistol. That meant he was either a
German or some sort of Norwegian Nazi, or else someone so
actively anti-German that his presence in the house was like dynamite. Whether Jan was going to live or die, Marius simply had to
know who he was: everything he did to try to save him, or even to
dispose of his body if he failed, would depend on that answer. He
asked him where he came from, and when he bent down to hear
what Jan was trying to say, he heard the name Overgaard, which is a
place at the head of the fjord. He knew that was a lie, because he had
seen Jan's tracks and they came from the opposite direction: and the
fact that he tried to tell a lie was reassuring, because a Nazi would be
too powerful to have any need to do so.

Marius had heard about Toftefjord and suspected the truth
already. He sent the women out of the room, and when they had shut
the door he said: "Listen to me. If you're a good man, you've come
among good people. Now, speak out" Jan told him then, in a halting
whisper. Marius heard him out, and took his resolve at once. "Don't
worry," he said, "we'll look after you. Go to sleep." Jan asked him what
his name was, and he told him Hans Jensen, which is the same as to
say John Jones. He asked where he was, and this Marius told him
truthfully: in the hamlet of Furuflaten, where the valley of Lyngdalen
reaches Lyngenfjord. In the three days since the avalanche, all Jan's
wanderings had carried him seven miles. Marius also told him that it
was the 8th of April, late in the afternoon.

When he was satisfied that he had got the truth, Marius called his
sisters in again and told it to them in whispers. They went to work
again, looking at Jan with new pity at what they had heard, but with
a desperate anxiety for themselves and the children. Nobody whatever must hear of it, Marius had said; and they could hear him saying the same thing, again and again, to the boys.

He came back to the bed when he had made sure that the children
understood him, and looked down at the ghastly face on the pillow.
He was trying to think ahead. He was also beginning to see the explanation of some strange events which had happened since the storm.
The Germans had suddenly searched every house in Furuflaten. They
had been through his own house and his sister's from top to bottom.
They were looking for radio sets, they had said; but everyone had
thought at the time there was something more behind it, because the
place had been searched thoroughly enough for radio sets before. And
for the first time, in the last few days, there had been motor-boats
patrolling on the fjord, which did not fit in with the radio story. Now,
Marius knew what they were searching for. There was the object of all
the activity, lying at his mercy on his sister's children's bed.