by Leo Litwak
He glanced at Frank but Frank didn’t say a word.
After much urging Lovell reluctantly gave his opinion. It wasn’t what I expected to hear. “Black and White are each right in their place. There’s only trouble when they mix.”
Roy nodded, “Okay!”
“What do you mean by ‘mix’?” Frank quietly asked.
Roy said, “It’s plain English if you know plain English.”
Frank asked Lovell to tell him what he meant by “mix” in plain English or any other language.
Lovell gave an example. He was at a burlesque show in New York City. We were eager for a laugh to break the tension and the idea of a solemn, prissy Lovell looking up at a naked stripper was laughable and we guffawed. Roy told him to keep going and Lovell, more reluctantly, pressed on. “A Nigra was sitting in the front row. The stripper came out, and started to work and the Nigra stood up and yelled, ‘Take it off!’” Lovell saw Frank’s ferocious glare and stopped. “I think I said enough. Maybe too much.”
Frank asked mildly, “What exactly did you say? Check me if I heard you straight. You and a colored guy are sitting in a strip joint watching a naked white girl and he’d like to have sex with her just like you do. Is that what you said?”
A mournful Lovell said, “I don’t make the rules, Frank. I live by them like everybody else. I’m not here to change the world.”
“That’s exactly what you’re here for, to change the world.”
Lovell repeated, “I just live by the rules like everybody else.”
Frank bellowed, “You are changing the world, you damn fool. What do you think this fucking war’s about?”
Lovell had remained standing and now turned to leave. Frank yelled after him, “You go to a burlesque show to jerk off and don’t want some black guy to have the same pleasure!”
George told him to knock it off.
Roy said, “I thought I could get used to the son of a bitch but he won’t keep his big mouth shut.”
The dinner was broken up. Everyone left the table, except me and Novak and Frank. Novak wasn’t part of the quarrel.
I walked out with Frank. “You lost a friend,” I told him. “If you ever get mail now it won’t be delivered.”
Smartass, he called me. A worse case than the others. They, after all, didn’t know any better. “Why don’t you show some guts and take a stand for what you believe?”
FRANK WAS MISTAKEN if he imagined most GIs were out to change the world. If the world changed that’s not what they meant to happen. They wanted the world to stay put. It was Germans and Russians who wanted to change the world. GIs wanted their service to pay off with gorgeous women, good jobs, more money, secure families, with nothing else changed. I say “they” but I mean me as well. I was part of “them” even when I didn’t choose to be part of them. We all wanted to go home, everybody except Frank.
Like my father, he was another headstrong believer in the brotherhood of man, intolerant of any digression from what he considered to be the true path.
The trips to Battalion paid off for Frank. A couple of weeks after Kassel, he was transferred to Battalion Headquarters with the help of Sergeant Solomon. Frank meant Battalion to be the first stop on the trail of Leona. I don’t know if he ever got closer.
I WROTE HOME about the seder at Kassel. I wanted to tell my folks that many of my buddies were good-hearted and generous. Some were bigots. A few were ignorant and cruel. But who, seeing the congregation forged by Solomon outside Kassel, wouldn’t have hope?
Letters were censored at the company level and I was careful not to show myself in my letters. I wrote,
Dear Folks, We liberated thirty-five Hungarian Jewish women outside a German city. The Germans used them as whores. Our arrival saved their lives. My buddies helped arrange a seder. It was led by an older man from headquarters named Solomon. I asked the Four Questions. I felt awkward and stupid but what we did was wonderful.
I received a letter from my dad some weeks later.
Dear Son, I gave up my faith when I was a boy because the pious Jews would not take arms in defense of our community. Now more than anything in this world it would have pleased me to be there with you to share that seder service with your comrades. For those poor girls I would again speak the old prayers and sing the old songs.
CHAPTER 8
< DISPLACED IN GROSSDORF >
In mid-April we entered Grossdorf, a village that the war appeared to have passed over. At its center was a market square, and around the square a small bank, a post office, a camera shop, a two-story hotel, a blacksmith, a hardware store, a butcher, a shoemaker, two or three cafés. The railroad station was a few blocks from the center. A seed warehouse was nearby. There was a textile factory alongside the mansion where we were quartered, not far from the town center.
The town was still in business. The bank had shut down but the post office still functioned. The shoemaker was still at work. There was an elderly barber still giving haircuts. The textile factory had operated until a few days before we arrived and was still intact and ready to start up. The camera shop was open. The railroad, of course, wasn’t operating, but the depot restaurant still offered meals.
Agriculture was the main business of Grossdorf. Farmsteads were set right in town but market stalls were empty. The Wehrmacht had taken everything when it withdrew.
The village celebrated our coming. The citizens lined the main street and cheered as our truck convoy passed by. We had reached them before the Russians and they were now safe behind our lines.
I almost immediately discovered that Grossdorf had reason to fear the Russians, who were beyond Berlin and coming fast. Among the cheering citizens, there were some who didn’t cheer. Shawled women with broad, Slavic faces stood off from the others. They seemed grim and forlorn. I asked one of the women where she was from. “Wo ist dein heimat?”
“Smolensk, in Russia.”
She had fat, red cheeks, blue eyes. She looked solid and strong. She said that she and fifty other Russian women were penned up on the edge of town. There were Russian men at other camps. They had been brought here to replace Germans gone to war. She called herself, with bitter emphasis, a Sklavenarbeiter, a slave laborer.
After the Germans occupied Poland and much of Russia and the Ukraine, they abducted the Slav citizens by the tens of thousands and herded them into boxcars for transport to Germany. It was the Nazi intention to degrade the Slavs, reduce them to menials serving the Teutonic Übermensch.
Each dawn the women were released from the lager to do hard labor. They plowed, planted, hoed, raked, piled manure, drained cesspools into huge barrel wagons, swept the floors of the textile factory, cleaned the streets, were fed minimum rations.
They were now free but with no place to go. They needed food and transport home. She begged me to help. “Wir sind hungrig.” We are hungry.
I went to Lieutenant Klamm, who was busy setting up headquarters. We assumed our control of Grossdorf would last only until the arrival of Military Government with teams skilled in occupation duty. Till then our platoon ran Grossdorf.
I told the lieutenant about the camp of Russian women. He said to go ahead and check it out, he didn’t need me around, but he warned me against any close contact with the women before they had been deloused. No touching or hugging or whatever else I had in mind. Typhus was epidemic among displaced persons, DPs, we called them.
The woman from Smolensk led me to her camp.
The town was flat save for a rise near its northern boundary. At the top of the rise I saw the drab barracks. I could smell the condition of the lager before I entered, a sharp odor, something foul countered by a strong disinfectant. Bunks were stacked to the ceiling. There was a latrine at one end and not much light.
I’m not sure how many women were inside—at least a couple dozen were in the shadows. More came in after me. They pressed around, touched my face and hair, murmured, Chorny, dark, as though darkness was a rare, treasured quality, their ow
n fairness commonplace. They were all fair, some ash blond. Even dressed in bulky, cheap clothes, they seemed robust and handsome.
We communicated in a bare-bones German. Their mistakes with the language didn’t coincide with mine and when I tried to speak of large notions such as slavery and liberation they were confused. “Was sagt er?” What’s he saying?
I said we had come to liberate them. They were no longer bound to their prison.
“Wir können heraus gehen? Wo sollen wir gehen?” We can leave? Where should we go? They wanted to know our plans for them. They had hardly eaten in two days and were desperate for food.
I explained that we hadn’t known about the camp and so had no plans.
A blond woman with intense blue eyes pushed up front. Her dress was made from rough sacking material, but she was voluptuous with a regal bearing, obviously confident of how she would seem despite the poor dress and the dismal barracks. She put her hands on my shoulders, eye to eye, and commanded me to listen. “My name is Katrina. I, too, come from Smolensk.”
She had a firm, strong voice. She spoke in a simple, less-than-basic German, the universal language of our war. She told me she was pregnant when taken from Russia. She was immediately assigned to a Grossdorf farm and set to work with hoe and rake and shovel. A daughter was born while she worked in the fields. The farmer wouldn’t give her any time off. No work, no food. She became ill, her breasts dried up. The farmer refused to let her have milk for her baby and the baby died. A year had passed and she still waited for justice. Now the time had come. She wanted the slave master punished. Jetzt. Right now. No need for a trial. She wanted him hanged or shot.
What she told me deserved sympathy and I wanted to sympathize but when she gripped my shoulders and pulled me close, I looked into her loose dress and saw her breasts and they didn’t seem dry and empty. She smelled ripe and the smell gave me clues as to her strength and vigor. Perhaps she had no idea how she affected me being so close, and I tried not to look but I looked and she didn’t pull away.
I said we would see to it that the farmer who employed her was punished.
“When?”
“I will take you to our officer.”
Captain Dillon was at platoon headquarters and I introduced him to Katrina. “Katrina is a Russian, brought here to work in the fields. “
Captain Dillon was not an easy man. He’d been in action from Normandy on. He had a knack for sizing up a situation and taking strong action. He was an enormous improvement over our first company commander, the erratic Captain Roth, who gave up command after a slight wound. Dillon couldn’t be conned or seduced. He studied Katrina, asked what language we used.
“German like everyone else.”
“What’s her problem?”
I asked Katrina to tell him about the farmer and her baby and you didn’t need to know German to experience the intensity of her telling. I put her fervor into my translation and the captain said he wanted to see the camp.
The three of us entered his jeep and drove to the lager on the hill. Katrina preceded us into the barracks and announced in a loud voice, “Ein Offizier kommt.”
The women swarmed around the captain. When would they be fed? When would they be returned home? When would justice be done?
He held up his hands to hold them off. “Tell them our Military Government will be here soon to answer all their questions.”
Military Government consisted of teams of German-speaking GIs trained in the adminstration of conquered territories. They usually followed in our wake but hadn’t kept up with the speed of our advance.
The first woman from Smolensk introduced herself as Anya and asked me to explain to the captain that they were starving right now. “We cannot wait. We must have something to eat.”
“They’re hungry,” I told him. “They had nothing to eat today.”
“They’ll get something to eat. I’ll personally see to it. Tell them that. Now let’s go to where Katrina worked.”
She sat up front in the jeep and directed us to a farm on the outskirts of town. Farmland encircled Grossdorf, spreading up the hillsides to the forests above. The farmhouses and barns were in town, set off the main street.
We drove into the enclosed farmyard through a wood slat gate. House and barn were side by side, manure heaped near the barn almost to the height of the barn doors.
The farmwife, a gaunt woman, gray hair pulled back in a knot, flinched at the sight of Katrina. Her husband was not here, she said. He was in the field working by himself. She would go find him. It would take only a minute.
“Tell her to stay put. We’ll find the guy.”
The farmer was in his field, hoeing furrows. A pungent, weedy fragrance was released from the newly turned soil. He broke up clots of earth, hacked weeds; he was a burly peasant, perhaps in his mid-fifties, somehow excused from war, unshaven, with a thick, dark mustache. He wore striped overalls, a shabby dirt-brown sweater, a cap with a bill. He looked up as we approached, then resumed working.
Yes, he remembered the woman. She had been in his employ. He didn’t know about her baby. He denied having anything to do with the death of her child. He kept on hoeing, his manner curt and surly.
The captain said, “Tell him he has been chosen to feed the women of the lager.”
The farmer glared at me when I translated the captain’s order. “Unmöglich!” Impossible. He had no food to give. “Gar nichts. Alles kaput.” And resumed hoeing.
The captain unholstered his sidearm, placed the muzzle against the man’s head, straightened him up.
“He will feed all the women every day. Beginning today. Tell him.”
The farmer begged for understanding. Bitte. Please. War was terrible. It was a hard life for everyone. He lived no better than those who had worked for him. Whatever the woman had told us was not true. Everything was gone. His two sons had vanished at the Russian front. Horses had been taken away after the field was plowed. Now he labored with hoe and rake and shovel and scythe as it was done in ancient times. He worked alone with only his wife to help. Life was awful, not worth living. Alles kaput.
“Tell him I hold him responsible for bringing food to the lager. If he fails I will shoot him.”
Where would he get food? The Wehrmacht had taken all stores in their retreat. There was nothing in Grossdorf. The officer might as well shoot him.
“Starting today and then every day, he will be responsible for feeding the women.”
The farmer said all he could do was try.
I said to him, “Today and every day. Otherwise you will be shot.”
Katrina said, “Shoot him now. He killed my baby.”
The farmer said he would have to go to other farmers. It was their problem as much as his. He wasn’t the only one to use foreign laborers.
“It must be done,” I said.
“If the others give, I will give.”
The captain said to tell the man he would check on what progress had been made. “I want the women fed by tonight. I hold him responsible. Tell him.”
Katrina said again, “Shoot him now.”
The captain dropped us off at platoon headquarters. He said to Katrina, “I will personally see to it you don’t go hungry. You will get something to eat tonight even if we have to use company rations.”
She wasn’t appeased when I relayed the captain’s assurance. Food wasn’t her priority. She wanted the man shot.
I walked her toward the lager and stupidly put my arm around her waist and asked if she wanted to walk in the woods.
“What is in the woods?”
“You are beautiful. I would like to walk with you.”
She shoved me away. She wasn’t happy with the outcome. For months she had dreamed of justice and we had failed her. The farmer still lived. She was in no mood for a walk in the woods. “When you shoot the man, when you kill the murderer of my baby, then maybe I will walk with you in the woods.”
“I am a medical person,” I said, exaggerating my
role so that she would understand it. “I do not kill men. I do not even carry a weapon.”
“I need a soldier with a weapon,” she said, “not a doctor. When our soldiers come—our Russian soldiers”—unsere Kavaliere, she called them—“then you will see justice.”
I was disgusted with myself. More than once horniness had made a fool of me. My good intentions weakened when I looked down Katrina’s blouse. I imagined how she had had to listen to her baby wailing day after day. She begged for food. There was no milk to spare for a slave-worker’s baby. She wanted the man killed and she was right to want him killed. A peek down her blouse and I lost focus. I was young, brimming with appetite. In that candy shop of Grossdorf all goodies seemed available to the occupiers.
I returned to the lager the next day. The farmer had somehow found rations for the women and they were fed until the camp emptied a few days later. I met Anya in the town center once and asked where she was staying. “With my people,” she said.
“And Katrina?”
She looked at me as if she could read my mind. “She is with us. We are waiting.”
I understood her to mean they were waiting for Russian soldiers.
WE WERE HOUSED in the Schloss Hartmann, a massive three-story mansion with bared timbers and leaded windows and a mansard roof, a high-peaked tower above the porch. The outside timbers were painted black, the plastered walls a pale beige. It had been the residence of the owner of the textile factory next door.
All forty of us were billeted at the Schloss, two to a room. In my room there was a huge bed with a walnut headboard, capped with a crown finial, that was bent around like a ship’s stern. The original linens were still in place, deep feather quilts inside floral slips. Dressers and bedside tables were marble topped.
The Schloss Hartmann deteriorated within days of our arrival. The quilts were messed, the marble stained, the floors scratched and scuffed. The burgomaster—the mayor—responding to the concerns of the owner, showed up with a crew of German women who restored order, though not to the original elegance.
