She watched Bill and his sons build Martel Construction into a vibrant enterprise with residential and commercial projects in the United States and abroad. She also saw Bill and her grandsons give back for their good fortune, partially paying for and building, among other things, an addition to Montana State’s Bobcat Stadium. In gratitude, the school named the stadium’s football gridiron “Martel Field” after Bill.

In her later years, Adeline became more and more homebound, though she would continue to entertain her friends and family in her kitchen, where she would feed them her famous apple cake. If they were lucky, they’d hear snippets of her harrowing adventures on the way to the last green valley or one of her frequent observations about life.

“You know, I used to think life was something that happened to me,” she told one old friend as she was beginning to fail. “But now, I know life happened for me.”

They were out in her garden, and she was smiling at how it teemed with life.

Looking back, Adeline said she could see the entire incredible arc of her journey, how everything that happened to her and Emil had indeed seemed to prepare them for the next, more difficult challenge, both of them learning and adapting the entire way.

More than fifty years had passed since she and the boys escaped the Soviet Occupation Zone and reunited with Emil, but she still marveled at the events of that day.

“If that old woman had given us water from her well, we never would have been warned by the man driving the milk wagon to hide in that shed, and we probably would have walked right into that Soviet patrol,” she said. “And if we hadn’t gone for the border when we did, so close to the patrol passing with the prisoners, the Soviet soldiers in the guardhouse would not have thought we had the correct documents to cross the border and would not have sent that muddy angel of a man to help us get the wagon to the train station. The border guards would have stopped us, and who knows what would have happened?”

After marveling over that story, her friend asked Adeline to describe the most important things she’d learned over the course of her long and remarkable life.

Adeline thought about that for a little while before saying, “Don’t chew on the bad things that happen to you, dear. Try to see the beauty in every cruelty. It sets you free. Forgive hurt if you want to heal a broken heart. Try to be grateful for every setback or tragedy, because by living through them, you become stronger. I see the hand of God in that.

“I also see his hand in every right step and every wrong one we took in our lives, all somehow moving us forward, but sometimes around and around and around like a leaf I’ve always remembered seeing blowing in the wind the first day of the Long Trek. We were blown along like that leaf, dancing, spinning, and rolling toward this life we were dreaming of. And here I am so many years later, still living that dream. It really is a miracle, isn’t it? And now the only miracle left for me is to die and be taken in the arms of God.”

Nine months later, on April 5, 2006, some two weeks shy of her ninety-first birthday, with Bill and Walter and their families gathered around her, Adeline Martel passed on as all great and wise heroines eventually do, her soul leaving her body on her final breath, thrown to the cosmic wind only to be guided by grace, a refugee spirit soaring toward salvation, her Lord, and her beloved Emil, waiting for her in a new and permanent Eden.

AFTERWORD

I hope you were as moved, inspired, and transformed by the Martels’ story as I was hearing it for the first time. Working on their tale over the past two years has been one of the great honors of my career, and I will remain forever grateful to the entire Martel clan for trusting me to bring Emil and Adeline to life.

A question I hear a lot is how much of my historical fiction novels are based on fact.

Without dissecting every twist and plot turn, in the case of The Last Green Valley, I can tell you that Joseph Stalin did indeed starve more than four million Ukrainians to death during the Holodomor of 1932–33. Stalin also imprisoned and enslaved millions of people in the aftermath of World War II. Under the Soviet dictator’s orders, many of the ethnic Germans who went on the Long Trek ended up being shipped to Siberian work camps. Untold numbers of those prisoners never returned.

Historians believe that between twenty and twenty-five thousand ethnic Germans perished on the Long Trek from Ukraine to Hungary, and on the trains that took the refugees north from Budapest to Lodz, Poland, which became known as the Ellis Island of the Third Reich.

The SS processed more than three hundred and fifty thousand ethnic Germans in Lodz under purity and immigration laws crafted by Heinrich Himmler and enforced by his “Reich Commission for the Strengthening of Germandom.” The majority of these refugees were given clothes and homes that once belonged to Jews.

According to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial, some eighteen thousand Jews were massacred by the SS’s Einsatzkommando 12 of Einsatzgruppen D in fields and ravines outside the town of Dubossary in early to mid-September 1941. Ethnic Germans who were members of the Selbstschutz, like the character Nikolas, were said to have participated in that atrocity and dozens of others across Ukraine after the German invasion.

Later in her life and after Emil’s death, Adeline told one of her granddaughters that several weeks after they returned to Friedenstal in mid-August 1941, Emil took a trip with the horses and wagon to buy roofing supplies for the house he was building. She said Emil returned two days late and was as shaken as she had ever seen her husband, who told her he’d been forced by the SS to bury Jews and refused to talk about it ever again. Adeline never said where Emil went for his supplies, but Dubossary was and is the closest large town to their village.

Emil Haussmann was a captain in Einsatzkommando 12 of Einsatzgruppen D at the time of the Dubossary massacre and served under Lieutenant Colonel Gustav Nosske, who was later tried at Nuremberg and imprisoned for his war crimes. Haussmann was promoted to major in the SS for his efforts in the early days of the “Final Solution” and the so-called “Holocaust by Bullets” that unfolded in Ukraine and Transnistria after the German invasion in June 1941. Three years later, Haussmann was part of an SS team that traveled with and protected the pure bloods of the Long Trek. He did kill himself before his trial at Nuremberg.

In the months prior to the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Heinrich Himmler did watch political prisoners being shot as a test for implementation of the Final Solution. Himmler was reportedly so shocked, he vomited, and later issued an order that no one be killed or sent to a concentration camp for refusing to murder Jews. He wanted true believers behind the guns.

During the Nuremberg trials, multiple Nazi war criminals tried to claim they were forced to participate in the Holocaust, that they had no choice at all. As part of that defense, their own attorneys searched repeatedly for evidence of anyone who had refused to kill Jews and was subsequently murdered or imprisoned under Hitler’s reign. They were unsuccessful.

Historians believe that western Allied soldiers may have raped as many as eighty thousand German and ethnic German women during the last part of the war and its immediate aftermath. They believe Soviet soldiers may have raped more than one million German women in that same time period.

Beginning in 1952, as the Iron Curtain lowered and as part of an effort to stop people in East Germany from fleeing west, the border at Oebisfelde where Adeline ran for freedom was hardened to include watch towers, fences, walls, anti-tank ditches, and minefields. After the fall of the Soviet Union and Germany’s reunification, the fortifications were torn down, and the fields she and her sons crossed were restored enough that I was able to walk much of Adeline and the boys’ escape route, though the terrain and vegetation had no doubt changed.

In mid-May, Southwest Montana’s Gallatin Valley is indeed a landscape painted in greens and one of the most beautiful places in the world. At the east end of the valley, where I live, double and triple rainbows often form after thunder-and-hail storms at that time of year.

Bill Martel is eighty now, retired, a widower, and still lives part-time in Bozeman, where I met him for the first time in November 2017. Walter Martel is eighty-two, retired, and still married. He and his wife moved farther west to be near their children and grandkids. They live in Hamilton, Montana.

In August 2018, after I retraced most of the Long Trek’s route through Moldova, Romania, Hungary, and Poland, the aging brothers and I went to Ukraine, where we drove ten hours up a terrible road to Friedenstal/Tryhrady to visit the ruins of their childhood home. Seeing the exact place where their run to freedom had begun, both men were cast back in time and overwhelmed with emotion at the incredible distance they had traveled in their lives.