Free Underground by Antanas Sileika Page A

coming to free them.
    This lack of troops would have been perplexing. The French and English had gone to war over Poland, so why did the Westerners let their young men die if not to save that country? Surely the next to be liberated after Poland should be Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which thought of themselves as part of the European family.
    No one else did. The English had decided to give the three Baltic countries to the Soviets if they ever asked, but the Reds never bothered. They believed they didn’t need to. Had the partisans been birds, one of them might have perched on a branch in Yalta, where Roosevelt told Stalin he could keep the Baltics as long as he was discreet. As for Ukraine, where the partisan movement was much bigger and fiercer, Roosevelt did not even think it was worth mentioning.
    And if the partisans could have looked into the future as well as into the distance, they would have seen a fog descending over Eastern Europe, a haze of ignorance in which much of what the Reds said was believed in the West. Anyone who had run away from the place, the Reds claimed, must have been a Nazi, and anyone who stayed behind to fight must have been one too. As the old archives were locked up, no respectable historian would write about the place because no respectable historian would work from secondary sources. As for what the partisans and émigrés wrote or said, their words could not be taken seriously. They were at best just pawns in a game they could not see properly, and at worst an entire race of criminals who hid out in the forests because they had nowhere to flee with their crimes.
    But the partisans, of whom Lukas was now a member, were confined to the time they lived in, to the earth they walked upon, often living beneath it in bunkers, where the papered walls grew mould in the corners, the ceilings leaked drops in every thaw, and the air was thin during the day because it was dangerous to put in too many air vents, which gave off steam in the cold. The bunker was a home and a trap, safe if secret, but deadly if found out.
    Now that the spring thaws had begun, the partisans could come out of their burrows from time to time, and the shoemaker could visit them. The shoemaker did not mind staying with the partisans as long as there was enough to eat and the men appreciated him, admiring his work and thanking him extravagantly, far more than customers who paid for their repairs with money. It was almost like being with a hunting party. The shoemaker spent his time more happily among these men than he had anywhere in years, even though his wife would scold him for being away so long and coming home with no money.
    At his house in Merkine, his wife kept the vegetable garden, a cow and a goat, and he returned every week or two, depending on the season and his business. She was the only person who made him hesitate about retiring in town once the other cobbler died. Sometimes there were moments of tenderness when he returned from a long walk among the farms and hamlets, especially if he brought home a little money. What would happen to those moments of tenderness if they lived together all the time?
    After finding the prayer book in the river, the shoemaker took half a day of circuitous forest travel to reach Flint’s camp. He told Flint his story and gave him the prayer book, and then set himself up by the fire, opening the wooden box he carried on a leather strap over his shoulder. Soon he was working on a pair of boots that needed new heels, and three men waited their turn, having no other shoes but the ones they wore on their feet.
    Flint sent a pair of scouts to find out how a prayer book had ended up in the river, and they came back with news soon enough. Three partisan couriers had stumbled upon a Cheka ambush and there was a firefight. The partisans withdrew as far as the river, and when their ammunition ran out, they opened their packages and flung their documents, letters and belongings into