The Medic

by Leo Litwak

  I bent to the man and there was nothing I could do.

  Fisher shouted again, “He’s done for. Let’s go.”

  “You go,” I yelled. “I’ll catch up.”

  Fisher waited outside while I huddled by the man and let him finish dying. We trotted to catch up with the platoon. We’d always been cordial. He came from Michigan. He seemed even younger than me, had only begun to shave, and maybe had something to prove. I wouldn’t talk to him and he was no doubt relieved when we joined the others, who praised him for his nerve.

  The mood was savage as we searched the town. Two German soldiers were rousted from hiding. Roy chased them into the cellar of a house followed by Hamilton and Alfieri. The Germans had dumped their weapons, obviously intending to surrender. Perhaps they fled because they guessed Roy’s intent. Novak went into the cellar a few moments later. The Germans were folded on their sides, legs drawn toward their chests, blood on their throats and uniforms. Roy wiped his knife on one of the dead as if signing in as author of the scene. Hamilton and Alfieri did the same.

  “That’s how you treat hogs, not men,” the Wisconsin farmer said later.

  I had some baseless notion, grounded only in vanity, that if Roy considered me to be like a priest or judge or woman, someone above the fray, he might respect my moral authority and let himself be restrained. The fact is, he tolerated me only so long as I didn’t get in his way. I could no more affect his actions than I could change the course of a twister.

  I needled him but kept it light. “Hog butcher of the world,” I called him.

  “What?”

  I recited the opening line of Sandburg’s poem.

  “Think you know something about hog killing?”

  I said the poem wasn’t really about killing hogs.

  He described a hog killing, the snout wrenched back, the throat cut, the body hung and bled and slit, the guts pulled out. He mocked frail women who couldn’t bear the squealing. Poor animal, his mother said when she saw him butcher the no-longer-productive family sow. But her grief didn’t stop her from smoking the hams and rendering the fat. He turned my devious insult into another occasion to sneer at the hypocrisy of bleeding hearts. He placed me among the frail.

  “Frailty, thy name is woman,” I said.

  “You said it,” he said. “I didn’t.”

  GERMANY—AT FIRST frozen and intractable—warmed, ripened, yielded its fruit, exposing more than we were meant to see.

  In early April we came to a crossroads outside Kassel, an industrial city in the state of Hesse. One road led to the forest, the other to the center of town. The company officers met at the intersection to decide which road to take, and our platoon was detached, the rest of the company proceeding into Kassel without us.

  Maurice had looked forward to Kassel. He’d heard that optical and precision instruments were manufactured there. He hoped for steals in quality binoculars. The lieutenant told him to forget it, “Kassel’s not for you,” and we took the road into the woods.

  “What’s in the woods?”

  “Not binoculars.”

  The narrow road was hemmed in by cedars that strained the late afternoon light and dappled the asphalt. We couldn’t see into the deeply shadowed forest but it was obviously well tended. Underbrush had been cleared away. Downed trees had been sawed into cord lengths then split and stacked in neat piles along the roadside. The lieutenant warned us to stay out of the woods. The road had been swept for mines, but the forest paths were still dangerous.

  We arrived at a clearing, the forest cut back, three drab barracks tucked into the gash, the entire compound girdled with barbed wire. A master sergeant from headquarters was waiting in a jeep. Lieutenant Klamm went over to talk to him and returned with information about our post.

  We had come to a lager—a camp—and in this lager there were thirty-five Hungarian women. Whistles and yelps, which he cut off with a wave of annoyance.

  “These women have been through hell,” the lieutenant said, “some of them just kids. This morning is the first time they’ve seen American troops. They think we’re their liberators. That’s what they think now and that’s what they’re going to think when we pull out. So, no fraternizing. You can say, Guten Tag, but no screwing around.”

  He waved over Sergeant Solomon, perhaps in his midforties, tall, gaunt, wiry hair, slightly stooped, eyes bottomed with white, a swarthy, wrinkled face, something of a basset-hound look. He told us that the women were the only Jews from their Hungarian village still alive. They had been used as prostitutes for German troops garrisoned around Kassel. Our coming was to them a miracle. We had arrived just before the start of Passover, the holiday commemorating the liberation of Jews from slavery in Egypt. Food was being sent from the battalion, and the platoon was invited to observe the improvised seder meal. There would be a hot meal for us afterward.

  He asked if there were any Jews in the platoon. Maurice said, “The aid man is a Jew.”

  “What’s your name, Corporal?”

  “Leo.”

  “Leo, you’ll sit with me and the girls.”

  I told him I had never taken part in a traditional ceremony.

  “No problem. Nothing’s even kosher about this. We don’t have the makings. The important thing is we’re here with these girls to celebrate their liberation.”

  He called them girls as if what they’d suffered hadn’t stripped them of girlhood.

  I followed my platoon into the first barracks, a long room filled with cots strung with rope webbing, a wood stove at the far end. We dumped our gear and sprawled on the bunks.

  Frank Jones asked why I seemed reluctant to participate.

  I told him I didn’t know the ritual and felt awkward about participating.

  “You heard what those girls been through. Shit, man, if you can take care of the dead and dying, you can sure take care of your own.”

  A truck arrived with sawhorses and planks and folding chairs, and we set up tables in a column almost the length of the middle barracks. A jeep brought hot food in metal urns and pots. We set the table with tin plates and canteen cups and mess-kit gear. We arranged stubby GI candles down the center of the tables. There were bottles of unlabeled German wine, white and red.

  The women entered, shepherded by Solomon. They were dressed in gray shifts with three-quarter-length sleeves; their throats were bare, their hair cropped in rough spiky cuts. He led them to their seats. The men lined up around the table, against the walls. Solomon motioned me to sit next to him at the head of the table.

  He spoke to the women in German. We were their liberators, soldiers of the American army, here to ensure their freedom and safety. He asked their names and they whispered, each in turn, hunched over, eyes downcast. The woman next to me was named Leona. She was prison pale, her black hair brutally cut. She had large eyes and full lips and a nice figure, and you could see why she had been saved for the use of the German soldiers.

  I apologized to her for seeming awkward but I wasn’t an observant Jew and was unfamiliar with the ceremony.

  She said in English, “You speak German well.”

  “Nur ein bischen.” Only a little. “Not as good as you speak English.”

  “I speak terrible. Forgive me, please.”

  “Nothing to forgive.”

  “We are very nervous. We cannot believe this is happening. We are almost dead.”

  She told me that in the morning the camp commandant had assembled the women and told them to say farewell to the lager, they were going to Kassel. First, he ordered them to strip. They were seated naked, their hair cut close to the scalp with big shears. They didn’t have to worry about catching cold, the commandant told them. They were going to Kassel to be publicly executed. They were marched naked into Kassel, the first time they had entered the city. They came like sheep being led to market, but unlike sheep they knew that at the end of the journey they faced humiliation as well as death.

  They were alive because their captors heard o
ur guns and feared retribution. They were marched back to the lager, the doors locked, and it was our soldiers who next opened the doors.

  Frank, standing behind me, heard it all, and passed on the information to the rest of the troops. He leaned over and assured her in his fluent German that we were their guardians. She was completely safe. He personally would see to it that she had nothing to fear. He said to Leona, “If a tiger breaks into this room he will have to eat me first. He will have no appetite left for you.”

  She smiled. “There are some men here in Kassel who are so terrible, better the tigers.”

  “You have a beautiful smile,” he said, and that broke her up. Her weeping started the others weeping. Solomon calmed them. Their troubles were over. They would suffer no more. They would see doctors and nurses and soon they would be on their way home.

  “There is no one left,” Leona said.

  They would have new homes. If not in Hungary then in Palestine or the United States. He promised he would see that they reached safe haven. He had been given authority by the battalion commander to take care of our sisters.

  He had improvised a seder plate in a makeshift service. He pointed to lettuce leaves meant to signify the bitter taste of exile and a bowl of crushed raisins and peanuts and honey representing the clay used in the labor of bondage. He uncovered a plate of matzos, sent by special messenger from division. The bread of our affliction, he said. A lamb shank bone stood for the paschal sacrifice. He said these materials were the best that could be managed. There was no horseradish, no hard-boiled egg, no parsley, but on this joyful night of the liberation of our sisters he declared the makeshift to be enough. He read from a mimeographed text, describing the order of service. He intoned a Hebrew prayer. He invited us all to drink wine. Wine was passed to the girls and to the GIs standing behind them. He gave me the mimeographed sheet and asked me to read the questions, and I asked why this night of reclining and unleavened bread and twice-dipped bitter herbs differed from all other nights, and that led Solomon into a brief telling of the story of Exodus. He had a relaxed baritone voice, was a good storyteller, and it was a story everyone in the platoon knew. He spoke first in German for the girls, then in English. A few of the women timidly joined him in a Hebrew prayer. He asked us to fill our cups again from the wine on the table.

  He managed somehow to forge a congregation. The forty GIs served the thirty-five women, lent their cups and mess kits, helped serve the food, stood against the wall, heads bowed while Solomon repeated the Hebrew prayer in English.

  Afterward the singing began.

  We sang “Go Down, Moses,” not all the GIs joining in, but I could see a reverent Roy mouthing the words.

  Maurice, with few biblical tunes in his repertoire, sang his King Solomon song. “King Solomon once, in his wisdom said, there’s nothing quite like a good feather bed. . . .”

  FRANK COULDN’T STOP talking about Leona in the days after we left Kassel. He felt the justice of our war was confirmed. We had uncovered pure evil and saved its victims. He said of Leona, What a beautiful woman. Think what she’s been through, and still a sense of humor. That smile could break your heart. A truly beautiful woman, he said.

  It wasn’t a one-night fantasy. He was obsessed by Leona. He approached me as if she were a member of my family and he could plead his case to me. She had suffered and survived. He couldn’t forget her smile and her tears. He didn’t want to let go of the experience of Kassel. He meant to keep track of her and find her. She was the woman for him.

  “You’re crazy,” I said. He had a good heart but he was crazy. He’d been with her only a few hours, spoken to her only a few minutes, and now wanted to commit himself to her. That was pure fantasy.

  “How about you and the girl in Paris?”

  “That happened a hundred years ago.”

  WE PASSED THROUGH villages without getting off the trucks. We waved at villagers and drove on. We were three or four days out of Kassel and already beyond Hesse into Thuringia.

  Frank pursued Leona with the same persistence that got him into the army. He cadged rides with the clerk Lovell to Battalion Headquarters. He met Solomon, who told him the women had been moved to a refugee camp near Kassel.

  Lovell drove him to Battalion a few times. Frank told me he’d hit it off with Solomon. I think Frank could charm anyone if he put his mind to it. His enthusiasm could either light up a room or blow it up. He and Solomon were on the same wavelength, especially where Leona was concerned.

  I was surprised that Frank got along with Lovell. Lovell was a conservative Southerner, reserved and cautious, a private man with no intimate connections in the company. He was a good clerk, stubborn but reasonable, who could be cajoled into doing favors. On cold winter mornings we’d see Lovell at the assembly area before morning assaults. He brought mail and an urn of hot coffee. He wrapped his long, skinny frame in a wool greatcoat. He draped an olive drab scarf around head and face, the scarf secured by his steel helmet. As soon as we moved out he scooted back to headquarters, red-nosed and shivering.

  Lovell and Frank weren’t a natural fit. Lovell had a clerical temperament. His Southern roots were deep. Frank was rootless. He blew with the wind and the wind carried him sharp left.

  He believed in a day, sure to come, when there would be no White, no Black, no Jew, no Gentile, no American, no German—all nations joined together in universal brotherhood, no longer divided by rank and privilege. That’s what our war was really about, he said.

  Most of the platoon thought Frank was all wet but after a few weeks they were used to him. They enjoyed his stories and ignored his politics.

  Roy said, “He’s a kook but there’s a kook in every family.”

  ON EASTER SUNDAY, a couple of weeks after Kassel, we stopped at a village in Thuringia. We were on the road to Saxony. I was billeted with Novak’s squad. An Easter feast was still warming in the kitchen of the house we took over. Eleven of us sat down to a meal of ham and wine and Easter pastries. Sergeant George and two other noncoms joined us.

  Frank and Roy almost immediately started quarreling.

  Frank had learned from Solomon that Leona was once again inside a barbed-wire enclosure, penned up with thousands of other refugees. It was no better than a prison camp with guard towers and armed MPs. He blamed General Patton. The refugee camps were in Patton’s command, He treated the refugees like riffraff. Frank called him a two-gun asshole, a silk-scarf cowboy.

  Patton was one of Roy’s heroes. “How do you expect him to fuck around with housing when he’s got a war to think about?”

  Patton was one of Frank’s villains. “What he thinks about is himself. He carries silver six-guns in twin holsters. He’s a protofascist jerk-off with cowboy dreams of glory.”

  Roy said, “This Red fuck is spoiling my ham dinner.”

  “I hear the hog butcher talking,” Frank said.

  Roy was on his feet and Sergeant George ordered Frank to shut up and calm down. He was spoiling dinner for everyone.

  Frank was jittery, almost manic, fueled by plundered German wine. Between his trips to Battalion and his platoon duty he wasn’t getting much sleep. He went outside to smoke and calm down.

  The Easter pastries were brought out. They were made of sweet pastry dough, covered with chocolate, crossed with white frosting. Private Alfieri, probably trying to lighten the mood, said, “I don’t mind if white and dark mix in my Danish, just nowhere else.”

  I didn’t want Alfieri to get away with what he’d just said. I usually kept my mouth shut but I had something to get off my chest. I was influenced by Frank’s outspokenness. These were my buddies, my platoon, and I felt isolated if I had to shut up about what I deeply felt.

  “Speak up,” Novak said.

  “Does it matter to anyone if the guy next to you in your slit trench is white or black?”

  They all agreed, even Roy, that in the heat of battle the ordinary rules didn’t apply and you didn’t see color.

  “If Negro
and White can get along in the worst of times, why not in the best of times?”

  That was a minefield and no one wanted to go there. Race was woven into the fabric of American life. Pull on it and everything would come apart.

  Frank, returning, heard what we were saying. He sat down and for a moment didn’t speak. Then he started out calmly, trying to keep control, but he picked up steam and, of course, pissed off everyone.

  He had once marched in a May Day parade. He carried a sign demanding freedom for the Scottsboro Boys. These were nine young black men falsely accused of raping a white woman in Alabama. They served life sentences. They had been sentenced, said Frank, by asshole bigots for a crime they never committed.

  Alfieri asked, “What’s a May Day parade?”

  “A day celebrating the workers’ revolution.”

  Roy said, “Then you are a Red.”

  “Better a Red than a fucking hog butcher.”

  Roy was out of his chair, smoldering, his face even more flushed.

  Sergeant George told Roy to sit down, but he remained standing, considering bloody murder.

  It was then that Lovell walked in, expecting a party. He’d come to visit his new buddy Frank. I was glad he’d come. He was Frank’s pal and a Southerner. He’d never shown prejudice. No one had ever heard him say “nigger” or even “kraut.” I hoped he would use calm reason to silence the bigots. I asked him as a Southerner and a reasonable, decent man, to answer a question. What did he think of Whites and Negroes being together?

  “How do you mean together?”

  “Serving together, eating together, living together.”

  Lovell said, “Pardon me. I don’t want to get into this.”

  “Help us out. Everyone respects you.”