Then he watched as one of the killers raised his gun and aimed it at Morgen.

“I’ll never forget what I saw next,” Yost told Seth. “It was a miracle, nothing but a miracle.”

Before the killer could pull the trigger, he had been shot dead. From a knoll by the lake, there was gunfire, and finally a huge explosion that blew great slabs of the lake’s ice up into the air. When it all settled down, Morgen was alive and his pursuers, to a man, were dead or dying.

“Your friend is lucky,” the SS Oberleutnant had said to Yost. “But he won’t escape this.” He pulled out his 9mm Luger and brandished it before Yost’s face. Then, without commenting further, he walked from the bedroom. Yost heard his boots as he crossed the living room, then the slam of the door as the Nazi walked out onto the cottage’s tiny porch.

“I screamed at Morgen to go back,” Yost said, “but he couldn’t hear me.” As Ridgeway listened to Yost’s story of what followed, the sandwich he had eaten grew into a greasy knot in his gut.

“I could see Morgen coming closer and closer,” Yost said. “He was staggering through the snow toward the cottage with no idea that the Oberleutnant was waiting for him.

“I suppose the Oberleutnant had originally come with the intention of interrogating the two of us, but with the approach of the Allied troops just over the hill I think he changed his mind and decided to kill us to save time.”

Yost grimaced as he shifted his legs on the ottoman. “There was an insanity in those last days. It gripped all of us, caused us to do things that… well, I suppose it would be impossible to make you fully understand.”

Yost knew that after the SS officer killed Morgen, he would probably come back into the cottage and kill him. So it was as much for his own survival as Morgen’s that Yost stretched as far as his handcuffed arms would allow, and managed to smash the mirror fastened to the wall over a small wooden bureau.

“I took the largest shard of the broken mirror,” Yost said now as he lifted his mutilated left hand for Ridgeway to see, “and cut away at the flesh and the tendons and the muscles of the thumb on my left hand.”

Like a desperate animal chewing off a paw or limb caught in a jaw trap, Yost hacked at his left thumb until it came free and allowed his hand to slip free of the handcuffs. Then, without bothering to bind the wound, Yost charged out of the cottage after the Oberleutnant

“I don’t remember feeling any pain,” Yost recalled as he looked at his scarred and twisted hand with fresh wonder in his eyes. “But I remember the frustration I felt as I ran out the front door, I still held the bloody shard of the mirror in my right hand.”