By mid-February, hundreds of soldiers and wounded men remain crowded into a small eastern-bank pocket after the last city bridge is lost and the railway bridge is destroyed. A column of roughly eight hundred to twelve hundred people receives permission to break out and moves silently through the snowy night near Fort Haake. The Soviet outposts do not discover the abandoned positions until the following day. Yet passing through the encirclement is only the first stage: the escapees divide into smaller groups and try to reach German lines in Pomerania, with only a few hundred succeeding. The passage distinguishes a successful local infiltration from the much harder operational problem of returning to friendly forces.
Chapter · 7:32-8:54
The eastern bridgehead breakout
The memoir follows a silent night breakout from Poznań's eastern bridgehead and explains why escaping the Soviet cordon did not guarantee survival.