Emil left the pickax in the hallway and went through the doors out into the organized chaos of Kiev’s central train station. The crowd of voices babbling. The colors so brilliant after so many months of gray. The wondrous smells of fresh food cooking. The harried faces of people returning to their lives or boarding trains to start new ones. For a moment, it was all so overwhelming, Emil had to put his hand on a wall to keep from falling.

Hunger pangs brought him back to his senses. He followed the irresistible smells into the ticketing-and-waiting area where he knew vendors would be selling food. He found at least ten of them, mostly women, and forced himself to look at everything they had before ordering black tea, two small rolls of bread, and a chunk of dried sausage. There were many other, richer, and sweeter items he would have much rather had as his first meal out of captivity, but Emil was nervous his gut would revolt if he did. He found a bench and ate his food sparingly. A soldier walked by, never giving him a second glance.

Emil ended up spending three hours wandering around the train station, watching, listening until he knew when the next freight and passenger trains west were leaving. He had more than enough money left to buy his way to Poland but feared having to reveal his lack of documents to do so. In the end, he retrieved the pickax and went back out into the freight yard.

It was still bitterly cold and windy. He found the freight train he was looking for and tried the sliding doors on several boxcars before finding one unlocked. He acted as if he were digging a hole with the pickax outside the car until the train started to move.

Emil was climbing inside with the pickax, when he heard shouts. He got in, looked out, and saw workmen running at him. One was yelling, “Hey, that’s my coat!”

“I left you mine!” Emil cried, shut the door, and threw his weight against it as the train picked up speed.

Emil left that train at the very next stop. He could not chance that the workmen were calling ahead about a thief and stowaway. After dark, he caught the next freight train going west and got off at the next stop. It became a pattern and a way of survival for Emil over the next ten days.

Not only could he find food, water, and warmth in the train stations and depots, they offered him the chance to listen to the rumors and the propaganda swirling through Ukrainian society in the aftermath of the Soviet reoccupation. Everything he heard convinced him that the new life under Stalin and the Communists was the same as the old one: based on fear, tyranny, and the destruction of anyone who had an original thought or dream.

On the eleventh morning of his escape, March 20, 1946, the weather finally broke warm. On the eleventh evening of his escape, shortly after he’d crossed the Polish border and slipped out of a freight car in the town of Chelm, Emil was captured by local police.

He’d prepared for this possibility as part of his plan and began acting a little odd like Corporal Gheorghe, speaking Russian, telling them he was a survivor of Stalingrad who’d been blown up in the first wave of attacks and then walked through the battle unscathed. He was just trying to go home to find his wife and sons where he left them in Legnica. The soldiers didn’t believe him and put Emil in a jail with others awaiting deportation back to the East.

The rest of the men in the jail were miserable and angry. But Emil stayed remarkably calm, believing that this was just a detour on the road to his dream. He was going west. He was finding Adeline, Walt, and Will.

The very next day, he was saved from deportation when guards asked him if he had ever worked on a farm. Still acting like a man who’d taken shrapnel to the head, Emil nodded and was put on a truck with twenty other men who’d escaped various prison camps. They were all taken to a new camp and put to work with other men planting row crops.

Eight weeks later, in late May 1946, Emil heard that the baker in the camp kitchen needed help. Although he had chopped firewood for a bakery when he met Adeline, he had no experience at actually baking. Emil learned fast. For the next four weeks, he arose at three o’clock in the morning and went to the bakery to mix dough and heat the ovens. He ate fresh bread the entire time, gained weight, and made friends with the baker, who had worked for a time in Germany before the war.

In late June, a rumor and then a fact swept through the camp. The planting season was over and so was their usefulness. The work camp was about to close. The prisoners were to be put on trucks at dawn and then on trains headed east.

If Emil was ever to go west, ever to find his family, it had to be now. He thought like the mad Romanian and came up with a relatively simple plan that he reluctantly shared with the baker, along with a request: that the baker exchange his Russian rubles for Polish zlotys so he could buy a train ticket home to his family.

In the end, the baker agreed to his proposal with a shrug, a wink, and a nod. Emil broke his normal routine that night and did not return to his bunk after mixing and kneading the dough and then leaving it to rise. Instead, around five thirty the morning of June 29, 1946, he lay down on the warm floor of the bakery’s back room, behind the ovens, and “fell asleep.” He waited three full hours after the trucks and the other prisoners were gone before leaving the bakery with the baker yelling after him. A Polish guard came. The baker told him he’d found Emil sleeping in the back room when he was supposed to be on the truck with the others.

Emil was taken before the camp’s commanding officer, where he again acted shell-shocked and said only that he’d fallen asleep and didn’t mean to miss the train. The camp commander had wanted to leave the rural area as quickly as possible and was furious at this snag in plans.

When he was asked what to do with Emil, now that the camp was officially closed, the commander thought about it, and then said, “Take the brain-damaged idiot outside the gates; give him a swift kick in the ass; and let him go become someone else’s problem.”

Emil Martel goes west and finds his wife and sons, he thought, hearing Corporal Gheorghe’s voice in his head as he hurried away from the prison gates, massaging his sore rump, and giving thanks to Jesus, God, the Divine, the Universal Intelligence, the Almighty One, the stars, the moon, and the planets over and over again until he was long out of sight.

With the warmer weather and wanting to avoid all human contact, Emil slept in forests by day and walked mostly at night for almost three weeks, navigating by the stars to put as much distance as he could between himself and that last prison camp outside Chelm. He waited until the morning of July 19 to walk into the farming community of Pulawy, northwest of Lublin, Poland, and ask to buy a ticket to the last stop before the German border.

The clerk gave him a strange look, but said, “That would be Rzepin.”

“Rzepin, that’s the place,” Emil said. “My great-aunt lives there.”

The clerk was skeptical but sold him the ticket. After buying food for the ride, Emil took a window seat, put his hat over his eyes, and slept as the train took him across the country. He had to change trains twice, once in Warsaw. His plan was to leave the third train at Rzepin, then cross the German border in the dark on foot.

Twelve hours after he’d started, however, when the third train of his trip made an extended stop in the city of Poznan, Emil recognized possibility when he saw it. It was early evening, still a few hours from darkness, and he had grown hungry again. Emil left the train, entered the main station, and saw a large group of men, close to fifty of them, gaunt, shabbily dressed, and sitting cross-legged on the floor under the watch of three Soviet armed guards.

He bought the usual staples of his bland diet and asked a clerk at the ticket counter who the men were and was told they were German prisoners of war going home. There had been some sort of agreement just reached that allowed for a prisoner swap. These men, all originally from western Germany, were going to be swapped for eastern German prisoners of war.

Feeling breathless, and remembering again how the Romanian was always talking about the opportunities laid before you when you have a clear vision of where you want to go, Emil said, “You mean they are all going to west Germany?”

“To Braunschweig in the British Zone. I assume that’s west.”

Emil thanked her and moved to one side where he could eat and watch the German prisoners and the Soviet soldiers. The men sitting cross-legged on the floor all seemed relaxed, happy to be going home, even if it was as prisoners.

And why not? Emil thought. They might be in prison in the West for a while longer, but when they’re out, they’ll be free men. You can’t say that about the men coming the other way.

Then he remembered something else Corporal Gheorghe had told him about most people seeing the door of good fortune open, but then not acting, not walking through the door, not taking a chance, only to see the door slam in their face.