The Last Green Valley Read online

  PRAISE FOR The Last Green Valley

  “Mark Sullivan has done it again! The Last Green Valley is a compelling and inspiring story of heroism and courage in the dark days at the end of World War II. Fans of Beneath a Scarlet Sky will savor this novel based on an extraordinary and little-known tale of the war and its aftermath.”

  —Kristin Hannah, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone

  “Mark Sullivan weaves together history and memory in an epic journey of love and resilience. One of the most riveting, page-turning books I’ve read in a long time.”

  —Heather Morris, author of the #1 international and New York Times bestseller The Tattooist of Auschwitz

  “Sullivan again demonstrates his gift for finding little-known embers of history and breathing life into them until they glow and shine in ways that are both moving and memorable.”

  —Pam Jenoff, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Paris

  ALSO BY MARK SULLIVAN

  Beneath a Scarlet Sky

  Thief

  Outlaw

  Rogue

  The Rogue Genesis Trilogy

  Triple Cross

  The Serpent’s Kiss/The Second Woman

  Labyrinth

  Ghost Dance

  The Purification Ceremony

  Hard News

  The Fall Line

  With James Patterson

  Private Games

  Private Berlin

  Private L.A.

  Private Paris

  The Games

  Though based on a true story and real characters, this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Suspense Inc

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503958760 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503958760 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503958746 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503958744 (paperback)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  Interior images courtesy of the Martel family.

  First edition

  For all the grateful refugees who renew this nation every day.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PREFACE

  PART ONE: THE LONG TREK

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  PART TWO: THE PURE BLOODS

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  PART THREE: THROWN TO THE WIND AND THE WOLVES

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  PART FOUR: A TALE OF TWO PRISONERS

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  PART FIVE: THE LAST GREEN VALLEY

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  AFTERWORD

  DISCUSSION GUIDE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  With love in our hearts, there is nothing we cannot overcome.

  —Chen Yeng

  PREFACE

  People told me I would never find another untold World War II story like that of Pino Lella, the hero and basis of my historical novel Beneath a Scarlet Sky. I honestly believed I would, however, and paid close attention to the dozens of letters and pitches I received from people telling me other stories from that time period.

  They were all wonderfully interesting in their way. But none of them matched my criteria, which were that the underlying tale had to be inherently moving, inspiring, and potentially transformative to me and so to readers.

  Then, in November 2017, I was asked to speak about Pino to the noontime Rotary Club in my hometown of Bozeman, Montana. A retired dentist came up to me afterward to outline a story a local man had told him. It caught my attention immediately.

  Two days later, I put the man’s address in my GPS and saw it was less than two miles from my own. The closer I got, I felt odd, and I had no idea why. It wasn’t until I pulled into his driveway and got out of my car that I realized I was no more than two hundred yards away from the home where I’d first heard Pino Lella’s story nearly eleven years before. That story changed my life.

  I went to the door, knocked, and my life changed again.

  Within fifteen minutes of listening to the particulars of the story of the Martel family, I was more than interested. By the end of two hours, I believed I had a tale to tell that would be a worthy successor to the tale that inspired Beneath. And I’d heard it in the same little neighborhood where I’d first heard Pino’s story. What were the odds of that?

  For the next fifteen months after that first meeting, I interviewed survivors and researched and traveled to critical locations in the story, including the ruins of an abandoned farmhouse in deeply rural, far-western Ukraine. From there, I retraced the dangerous and remarkable journey of a young family of refugees on the run westward in a wagon with two horses, often caught between the retreating German armies and the advancing Soviets in the final chaotic year of World War II.

  I trailed the Martels’ route through present-day Moldova, Romania, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Poland, where the way split: one continuing west and another doubling back east more than eleven hundred miles to the former site of a deadly Soviet POW camp set in the bleak postwar rubble near the Ukrainian border with Belarus.

  Along the way, I interviewed participants and eyewitnesses to the “Long Trek,” as well as Holocaust, military, and refugee historians, who helped me to understand the context in which the Martels’ story unfolded and why. I also listened to the recordings of people, long dead, describing the ordeal and felt in awe of the grit, humanity, and spirit they showed in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges and odds.

  Even though I had all that information and understanding when I sat down to write this book, there were holes in the tale not completely explained by the limited material I had to rely on.

  To bridge those gaps, I have been forced to draw on my own suspicions and imagination to bring the story more fully to life. What you are about to read, then, is not narrative nonfiction, but historical fiction based on an extraordinary tale of World War II and its aftermath.

  As I am finishing this novel, the world is engulfed in t
he crisis of a century, and the way forward seems as dangerous and unclear as it must have been for the Martels when they set out on their journey. It is my dream that their story will give comfort and courage to the afflicted and a better understanding of what ordinary people can endure and achieve even when all seems lost.

  PART ONE:

  THE LONG TREK

  Chapter One

  Late March 1944

  Romanian Governorate of Transnistria

  A cold wind blew in the dawn light. Bombs echoed from the north and east. The rumble of war was getting closer by the minute.

  Twenty-eight-year-old Adeline Martel struggled out the back door of her kitchen in heavy winter clothes, carrying a crate full of cooking utensils toward a covered wagon harnessed to two dray horses in front of her modest home in the remote, tiny farming village of Friedenstal.

  A damaged German Panzer tank clanked and rattled past her in the early-morning light, upsetting the horses. Trucks filled with wounded German soldiers streamed after the tank. Adeline could hear their cries and tortured sufferings long after they’d passed, and she could see more trucks and more horse- and mule-drawn wagons like hers coming from the east, silhouetted with the rising sun at their backs.

  “Mama!” cried her younger son, Wilhelm, who’d run out the back door behind her.

  “Not now, Will,” Adeline said, puffing as she reached the back of the large V-shaped wooden wagon with oiled canvases stretched over a wooden frame to form a bonnet for shelter.

  “But I need to know if I can bring this,” said the four-and-a-half-year-old, holding up a rock, one of his latest prized possessions.

  “Bring your wool hat instead,” she said as she found room for the crate along with a second one that held dishes, cups, and baking tins beside a third that contained crocks of flour, yeast, salt, pepper, lard, and other essentials for their survival.

  Emil hustled around the other side of the house, toting a keg-shaped barrel with a lid.

  “How much?” she asked.

  “Eight kilos dried pork. Ten kilos dried beef.”

  “I left space for it back here.”

  Another tank clanked by as her thirty-two-year-old husband grunted, hoisted the small barrel into the back, and began lashing it to the wall of the wagon.

  “I’ll get all the onions and potatoes from the cellar,” she said. “Bedding’s packed.”

  “I’ll get the big water sack filled,” he said before another bomb hit to the northeast.

  Their older son, six-and-a-half-year-old Waldemar, came out from behind the house, pulling a small replica of the larger wagon about a meter long with the same high sides and back and the same wooden axles and wheels with tin nailed around the rims.

  “Good boy, Walt,” Adeline said, pointing at the wagon. “I need that.” She took the handle from him and turned the little wagon around. “Follow me. Fast now. I need your help.”

  The boys followed her to the root cellar and helped her frantically dig up their stock of potatoes, onions, and beets. Then they moved them to the little wagon and hurried back to the larger one. There were more German trucks and crippled armored vehicles on the road now and dozens of covered wagons and horses, all heading west, all trying to outrun Joseph Stalin’s armies, which were on the attack again.

  The air stank of horse dung, engine exhaust, spilled petrol, and toiling humans. The din, the cold wind that spoke of a coming storm, the sickening mélange of smells, and the nervousness of the horses all conspired to put Adeline further on edge as they loaded the contents of the root cellar into burlap bags while Emil lashed a large rubber bladder of water to the side of the wagon along with the bucket from the well.

  Overhead and to the south several kilometers, a German fighter plane roared past them, belching smoke from its engines.

  “Mama,” Walt said, “I don’t like all the loud noises.”

  “That’s why we’re leaving,” Emil said as he loaded the burlap bags into the big wagon, then looked at Adeline in irritation. “We should have been up and gone with my parents.”

  “We weren’t ready to go with your parents at four a.m., and as usual, they weren’t waiting for us,” Adeline replied sharply. “And . . .”

  “And what?”

  She watched another tank go by, took a step closer to him, and said quietly, “You’re sure, Emil? Running with the Nazis like this?”

  Emil responded in a whisper. “We can stay and wait for the bear that we know will kill us, or rape you and kill me and the boys, or imprison us all in Siberia. Or we can run with the wolves that will protect us until we can make our escape west. Escape the war. Escape everything.”

  Three days before, a German SS officer had knocked on their door and offered them protection if they would gather their belongings and move west. After the visit, they had argued for several hours. Now, Adeline gazed at him, still in turmoil over the decision, but feeling what she always did about Emil: his moodiness and quietness aside, he was not only a good man, he was a tested man, a fighter, and a survivor.

  “Okay,” she said. “We run with the wolves.”

  “What about our little wagon?” Walt demanded.

  “We’ll find room for it,” Emil told him.

  The raw wind gusted. A curled brown leaf from the previous autumn lifted from the dead grass to Adeline’s left, spun, looped, and danced across the stubble and around her and the boys in a curious, stuttering pattern before the gust sighed and the leaf tumbled softly to earth. It reminded her of a night long before when she’d seen money appear on the wind, a single crumpled bill that had danced before her in the same curious manner as this leaf, as if in response to some desperate and primal prayer.

  Adeline went back to the kitchen one last time, finding the leaf and that memory all oddly upsetting, as bittersweet as it was mysterious, as awe-inspiring as it was frightful.

  Like every big change in my life, blown by the wind.

  Around the house, Emil finished tying the little wagon to the rear of the big one.

  “No one steps on it, right?” he said to his young sons. “You want to come out the back, you wait until I’ve taken it down.”

  Walt nodded. Will said, “When are we leaving, Papa?”

  “As soon as Mama returns,” he said, “and your grandmother and aunt get here. Go use the outhouse if you need to.”

  Both boys ran out behind the house while the two geldings, Oden and Thor, danced in place, again spooked at tanks passing so close. Emil had to soothe and coax them until they finally calmed. The horses were fit and well cared for. They were used to pulling plows and weight. If he slowed them down to handle the heavier loads on the steeper hills, and barring lameness or, worse, a wreck, Emil believed the pair would take his family a long way.

  He paused to study the house he’d built single-handedly, fighting all thoughts of pity or remorse. A house was a house. There would be others. Emil had learned the hard way to detach from the idea of possessing anything for long in his life. But he stared at the roof for a moment, seeing himself two and a half years before, loading tin roofing sheets and trusses into his wagon in a town called Dubossary, some thirty kilometers to the west.

  He shook off the memory and turned away from the house and that roof.

  “If God giveth, Stalin taketh away,” Emil mumbled, and refused to give the home he’d built any more attention. In his mind and in his heart, the house had already crumbled to dust or been burned to ash.

  Whoomph, whoomph. Artillery fire began to the north. Whoomph, whoomph. The explosions were not close enough yet to make the ground shake, but he soon saw plumes of dark smoke in the northeastern skies, no more than nine or ten kilometers away. For the first time, the true stakes of the journey that lay before him and his family became clear, sending him staggering, dizzied, against the side of the wagon. He was thrown back to a day in mid-September 1941, when he’d gripped the side of this same wagon, feeling relentless nausea and the noon heat and hearing the grasshoppers
whirring as he gagged out the poison that had welled in his gut. He’d glared up in rage and shook his fist at the sky with such bitterness, he’d gotten ill all over again.

  Remembering that day and still clinging to the side of the wagon, Emil gasped at the way his heart ached. I remember this. How it felt to have my soul torn from my chest.

  Adeline ran from the house with a few more things. The boys were exiting the outhouse.

  “Are we leaving now?” Will asked.

  “Yes,” she said. She rounded the house and saw Emil hunched over, holding on to the wagon with one hand, gasping, his eyes closed, his features twisted with pain as his free hand clawed at his chest.

  “Emil!” she yelled, and rushed toward him. “What’s wrong?”

  Her husband startled and stared at Adeline as if she were part of a nightmare and then a desperately welcome dream. “Nothing.”

  “You looked like something was wrong with your heart.”

  “It hurt for a second there,” he said, standing up and wiping the sweat gushing from his forehead. “But I’m all right.”

  “You’re not all right,” she said. “You’re as white as snow, Emil.”

  “It’s passing. I’m fine, Adella.”

  “Mama, here come Oma and Malia!” Will cried.

  Adeline’s concern left her husband and lifted when she spotted her mother at the reins of two old ponies pulling her wagon at a steady clip through the loose and shifting caravan of refugees and defeated soldiers all heading west.

  Lydia Losing’s face was harder and more pinched than usual, but the fifty-four-year-old was still dressed as she’d been dressed for the last fifteen years—in dark grays and widow black. As she was wont to do, Lydia was jawing at Adeline’s sister, who was thirty-five and leaning slightly away from their mother, nodding and smiling without comment, a common-enough posture between the two of them. Malia had been kicked by a mule as a fifteen-year-old, which had left her childlike in some ways and wiser than most in others. She looked at Adeline and winked.

  Another cannon barrage began, this one close enough to shake the ground beneath their feet. Four German fighters ripped across the sky, followed by six Soviet planes on their tails. Machine guns opened fire above them.