Free We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance by Stephen E. Ambrose, David Howarth

eddied in the squalls and stung
his face and hands and soaked him through, and blotted out the sea
and sky so that the world which he could see contracted to a few feet
of whirling whiteness in which his own body and his own tracks were
the only things of substance.
    In the daytime, he kept going in these storms, not so much for the
sake of making progress as to keep himself warm; but when they
struck him at night, there was no question of keeping a sense of
direction, and one night he turned back to take shelter in a cowshed
which he had passed four hours before.
    He stopped at two houses along the north shore of the island, and
was taken in and allowed to sleep; and oddly enough it was the
wounded toe that served him as a passport to people's help and trust.
Rumours had gone before him all the way. It was being said that the
Germans had started a new search of every house, looking for radio
sets, which nobody was allowed to own. Everyone had already
guessed that this search had something to do with what they had
heard about Toftefjord, and as soon as they learned that Jan was a
fugitive, they jumped to the conclusion that the Germans were searching for him. And indeed, if the search was a fact and not only
a rumour, they were probably right. This made some of them nervous at first. Like the shopkeeper, they were frightened of agents
provocateurs, and Jan's uniform did not reassure them; it was only to
be expected that a German agent would be dressed for his part. But
the toe was different. The Germans were thorough, but their agents
would not go so far as to shoot off their toes. When he took off his
boot and his sock and showed them his toe, it convinced them; and
he slept soundly between his marches, protected by men who set
faithful watches to warn him if Germans were coming.

    Always they asked who had sent him to them, and some of them
were suspicious when he would not tell them. But he insisted,
because he was haunted by the thought of leaving a traceable series
of links which the Germans might "roll up" if they found even one of
the people who helped him. Such things had happened before, and
men on the run had left trails of disaster behind them. To prevent
that was only a matter of care. He never told anyone where he had
come from, and when he asked people to recommend others for later
stages of his journey, he made sure that they gave him a number of
names, and did not tell them which one he had chosen. Thus
nobody could ever tell, because nobody knew, where he had come
from or where he was going.
    The last stretch of the journey was the longest. Everyone he had
met had mentioned the name of Einar Sorensen, who ran the telephone exchange at a place called Bjorneskar on the south side of the
island. All of them knew him, as everybody knows the telephone
operator in a country district, and they all spoke of him with respect.
Bjorneskar is opposite the mainland, and if anyone could get Jan out
of the island, Einar Sorensen seemed the most likely man. But if he
refused, on the other hand, or if he was not at home, it would be
more than awkward, because the south end of the island was infested
with Germans, in coastal batteries and searchlight positions and
patrol boat bases, defending the entrance to Tromso, Bjorneskar was a kind of cul-de-sac. The shore on each side of it was well populated
and defended, and Jan could only reach it by striking inland and
going over the mountains. It would be a long walk, and there was no
house or shelter of any kind that way; if there was no help when he
got to the other end, it was very unlikely that he could get back again.
But some risks are attractive, and he like the idea of descending from
desolate mountains into the heart of the enemy's defences.

    It was this stretch of the march which cost him twenty-eight hours
of continuous struggle against the wind and snow. Up till then, he had
never been far from the coast, and he had