The Secret Rescue: An Untold Story of American Nurses and Medics Behind Nazi Lines by Cate Lineberry

Author:Cate Lineberry [LINEBERRY, CATE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, War
ISBN: 9780316220231
Google: kp7mDiMJ0W0C
Goodreads: 17302337
Publisher: Little, Brown
Published: 2013-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

A partisan guided the enlisted men the half hour back to Tilman’s mission at Sheper on the clear morning of December 15 to meet the rest of the party before they started on their grueling twenty-five-mile walk to Gjirokastër. With no place in between to stop, Duffy set a brisk pace as two in the group rode mules.

For roughly the first half of the nine-hour trip, the trail followed a river and the party passed various bands of partisans coming and going. By late afternoon, the Americans were exhausted and stopped on a hillside to rest. The hillside overlooked a large, flat valley that Duffy said had previously been used by the Italians as an airfield. As they rested, someone in the party asked Duffy why they couldn’t be evacuated by air from the field rather than walk all the way to the coast. To the Americans’ frustration, he replied that the plans had already been made and would not be changed.

It was about six in the evening when the party crossed the field and a wooden bridge that took them into partisan-controlled Gjirokastër, a well-preserved Ottoman town, similar to Berat, of about twelve thousand people. Set on a steep hillside with narrow cobblestone streets, it was topped by a large Byzantine castle. The town, just miles from the Greek border, was the birthplace of partisan leader Enver Hoxha, Albania’s future dictator, and previously had been occupied by the Italians. It was now in partisan hands, but that would soon change.

Just seven months later, the Germans, who had gained control of the town, would hang two young partisan women in one of the town’s squares with the cooperation of the locals. Twenty-year-old Persefoni Kokëdhima had been sick and wounded and was hiding in her village to the west of Gjirokastër when she was caught. The Germans had demanded that the villagers shoot her for fighting against the Germans and betraying them, but they refused. She was eventually imprisoned in the castle in Gjirokastër while awaiting sentencing and there met fellow prisoner, twenty-two-year-old Bule Naipi, who had grown up in the town. The two were sentenced to death by a panel of local men and one German for their partisan work. On July 12, Kokëdhima was brought before the gallows in front of Naipi in an attempt to force Naipi to name other partisans and was hanged. Six days later, after Naipi refused to give up any of her fellow partisans, she too was executed.

The Americans walked through the empty streets in the dark until they reached the center of town, where they ran into a group of partisans who talked with Stefa and Duffy. The partisans then led the party to a meeting room, where they waited for several hours while partisan leaders decided where to put them for the night.

A guide led Hayes’s group of six enlisted men, which included Owen and Abbott, through twisting cobblestone streets in the chilly night air until they came to a stone wall with a massive wooden gate.

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