When the sounds of the heavy feet were gone, he crept back to the others. No one spoke. The look on Jakob’s face said clearly enough that danger might still be lurking nearby and that, though this was supposed to be their last day, caution was called for.

Wherever the booted feet were going, or whatever was their business in this wood, they were not heard from again that day.

Midway through the afternoon, a tremendous rainstorm drenched all eight. No blankets or coats could keep away heaven’s downpour. Such misery had not prevailed since the day of their setting out.

Waiting was harder in some ways than danger. One had too much unwelcome time to think. Sometimes the imagination conjured up worse unrealities than what actually happened.

What had happened, Jakob found himself wondering as he sat in the wood, shivering. How could he have almost given them away! Jakob thought he could not stand yet another hour of the wet and cold, hearing rather than feeling the heavy drops of rain pounding upon the top of his head, as he tried his best to shield Dieder from the worst of it.

In the midst of all the waiting and walking and uncertainty, there had yet been a haste to these weeks, an intensity such that already events and days and faces and places had hopelessly blurred in his brain. It would be years before his mind would be capable of focusing again on the individual men and women to whom they owed their lives, and unraveling the multitude of places they had been hidden.

When night finally fell, there was hardly rejoicing in the tiny Hebrew camp. It seemed too much to hope that this wandering in the wilderness of the Polish desert would not last to the duration of the same forty years as the pilgrimage of their ancient predecessors in the wilderness of Sinai.

Jakob led them safely to the edge of the wood, though by the time they reached it the darkness was extreme.

They stopped.

The moon was just rising, casting but hints of light over the landscape. It was a good thing this winter was not so severe as the last or they would all have long since been dead. As it was, they’d had only rain, not bitter cold, to overcome.

Jakob could make out forms and images, but they had not been told what the place would look like, only where to go and what to say.

He told the others to remain under cover of the trees. He would reconnoiter. He left them and moved across the open field.

He was gone twenty or thirty minutes.

Suddenly he appeared again, with the stealthy step of a cat, and motioned them to follow.