BETWEEN THE DEVIL AND DEEP BLUE SEA
by
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By next evening we could see Przemysl and soon approached the river Bug. The bridge over the river was solid with people, horses and occasional truck or car. The river was also full of people in all types of watercraft. Locals were making good profit faring people in small boats and rafts.
It was daunting to note that the traffic moving exclusively east included entire military units. Josek remarked, “It looks as if the army is not thinking about stopping the Germans. Let’s find a way to cross the Bug and move on to Lwow”.
Here my uncle Leon was the master, he could talk anyone to do his bidding, and he was the epitome of a “fixer”. Sure enough in an hour or so we drove the carriage with the horse and all of us on a huge raft made of rough logs and nothing else.
It seemed as if the contraption had been build only in the last few days for the explicit purpose of making a quick buck from people streaming in great panic across the river to the east. Blocks were placed under the wheels to prevent the buggy from rolling off the raft.
Suddenly a whine in the air drowned out all other sounds. The horse reared. “Oh, oh, whoa,” my uncle Josek screamed, trying to quite down the horse, however the staccato of the machine-gun bullets fired by the diving bombers had drown out the whinnying of the horse. Before we realized the horse was struck dead by several bullets and so was the owner of the raft. After letting out a shriek he fell dead next to the fallen horse.
The raft was drifting rapidly down the stream. But in response to a few powerful strokes of an oar in
Mercifully the current kept pushing us both, down the stream and towards the eastern shore. My mother held on to my sister Stella and to me, “hold on kids” she intoned coolly, “Hold on.”
There was remarkably little panic. My grandfather, Leopold, didn’t utter a word throughout this episode. He just set there. Once we reached the opposite shore my uncle turned around to mother and said, “You know he changed his mind, he doubled the price and informed me that if we don’t pay, his friends will simply cut our throats as we go through the forest”.
Mother reached into her bottomless purse and handed the money. “Thank him”, she said, “don’t make him angry, we simply need to get going”. She didn’t realize that the peasant was dead!
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About the Book
Between the Devil and Deep Blue Sea is the first volume of a trilogy entitled The Journey. This volume deals with a boy’s perception of life and the drama evolving around him. Although born in
About the Author
Emil Steinberg was born in