"Sidetracked" - A New Book by Billy Mays

Excerpt from:


SIDETRACKED - One Polish Town’s Unusual Secret to Success

     The Nazi’s, swinging their clubs and shooting anyone who resisted them had even taken a shot at Kazek as he tried to squeeze his way through the crowd to hug his father one last time. Kazek last saw his father waving his arms frantically with tears streaming from his face as he tried to find him and his wife in the crowd of women and children packed desperately close to the train to get last instructions from their men and say a final “I love you” to brothers, fathers, and husbands that would never be seen again.

…They had been caught hiding in the forest not long after the invasion in 1939 and had been branded as part of the underground resistance movement. Now they were gone. Kazek was the only boy left and last year his mother had died leaving him completely alone in Florynka.

* * * * *



     The railroad tracks where Kazek had last seen his father and brothers met the road about a mile out of town. At that point, there was a sidetrack about 500 meters long that paralleled the main track. Trains heading east would pull over to allow the westbound rail traffic by after having picked up speed on the curving decline coming into the Florynka Valley. The eastbound trains might arrive around 5 pm and hold their position on the sidetrack until 8 or 9 pm when the westbound freight trains or the occasionally re-routed passenger train from Kiev to Krakow would come through.

     Kazek knew the schedule well and had gotten used to seeing the freight trains sitting on the siding. Lately he had noticed a lot more Soviet locomotives and freight cars on the tracks. He could always tell the difference between the Polish and USSR trains by the elaborate Soviet red banners and hammer and sickle adorning the gleaming, shiny, black locomotives. They usually sat with steam drifting up from a dozen points on the undercarriage of the sinister-looking locomotive. The tall smoke stack in the front, also shiny black, would belch both smoke and soot in mushroom shaped clouds as the train would pull away from the sidetrack having waited for hours for the westbound train to pass.

     This train and locomotive were especially ornate. It reminded him of the newsreels he had seen of May Day in Moscow on Red Square as missiles and the mighty Soviet war machines, draped in red banners with all of the favorite socialist slogans, passed in front of the camera with waving crowds of people cheering and sometimes crying. There were no locks on the doors, and no conductors guarding whatever treasures were inside. Kazek could see that only a sleepy assistant engineer sat looking out of the rear of the crow’s nest high in the locomotive towards the back of the train.

     Tonight he sat in the dark watching the train and the assistant engineer nodding off in his perch.

     On this evening, though, he was not thinking about his father and brothers’ last goodbye, but about what he was about to do and how to do it without being seen.