by Leo Litwak
He stressed that no one was to leave quarters. Security was paramount. The evacuation was beginning across Saxony. He said, “If the civilians find out we’re leaving, we’ll face one helluva refugee problem.”
We didn’t belong here, it wasn’t our homeland, but it was a shock to leave so fast, and Lieutenant Klamm exploded. “We’re abandoning them to the Reds! It’s betrayal!”
The first lieutenant said, “It’s decided at the top. We do what we’re told, Charley.”
As soon as the messenger was out of sight, Klamm bellowed at us to shape up and start packing. He went to the door, looked out, slammed the door. He moved from squad to squad, telling us what could be loaded in barrack bags. He didn’t want to see any forbidden loot. We took his advice and didn’t show him our loot. He paced the room, flushed, teeth clenched. “Hell,” he said, “hell,” and went to his room to pack. He came storming out. “No one leaves without my permission, understand!” then rushed back to his room. “Hell!” he said. “Hell!”
“What he really wants,” Novak said, “is for someone to sneak out and tell the fräulein.”
I asked Novak whether he was going to tell Carla.
“It’s against orders, isn’t it?”
We were all busy packing; we only had a couple of hours to fit everything into our packs and barrack bags. Most of us were leaving Grossdorf more burdened than when we first arrived. We didn’t intend leaving anything of ourselves at the Schloss. We ate whatever was in the kitchen. I didn’t see the lieutenant until it was almost time to assemble. He checked us out before the trucks arrived early in the morning, a two-and-a-half-ton for our transport, a three-quarter-ton for our baggage, both trucks domed with camouflage canvas. At four in the morning we received word by radio and assembled out front with our packs and duffel bags.
There was a quarter moon, low in the sky. It was otherwise so dark that at first we didn’t see the crowd gathered in front of the Schloss. We heard whispers, children whimpering, panicked demands for silence. News of our move was out. The informant could have been someone in the platoon or a citizen of Grossdorf who had heard about withdrawals elsewhere in Saxony. Behind one of our trucks, Carla sat in a jammed wagon that was hitched to an ancient tractor. She sat on what appeared to be a stuffed GI duffel bag. In the space of a few hours, the townsfolk had loaded carts and wagons.
They intended leaving with us. They wanted to be safe in our shadow. They hoped we would shield them from the Russians.
Captain Dillon drove up, honking a path through the villagers. He said the situation was the same at the other company stations. Security had been compromised all up and down the line and we faced a mass exodus.
“Nothing we can do about it. You’ll be okay once you get out of town. These folks won’t get far with the transport they got.”
He told Klamm to make sure the road was clear when the order came to start rolling.
When would that be?
He expected within the next half hour.
We mounted the truck and waited for orders. Hours passed, the day lightened, the crowd of refugees increased. Most of us quickly adjusted to leaving. This was after all only one more town we’d passed through. And grief was coming to Grossdorf. Why stay for it? Katrina and the other women from the lager would finally have their justice. The slave laborers who had been tracking their tormentors would now have their revenge. Grossdorf would suffer a small part of the misery Germany had inflicted on the Slavs.
When the word finally came by radio to move out, Klamm, who’d been standing in the jeep searching the crowd, held back as long as he could before giving the order to start up.
Gretchen Hartmann didn’t show herself until we were about to roll. She emerged from the crowd wearing her usual outfit—white blouse, black skirt and shoes. Klamm, in the lead jeep, halted the convoy.
“Gretchen!”
She never looked at him. She stood in the driveway of her factory and shouted something in German. It was intense. I could only make out parts of it. “Grossdorf is your home! Do not abandon it! We survived the Americans! We will survive the Russians! Everything is lost if we leave! They will not harm us! They need our work and I will protect you!”
Gretchen Hartmann used slave labor. Gretchen Hartmann served a regime that slaughtered my people. The arrogance of her imperial manner erased anyone beneath her, and I didn’t wish her well. Yet, I could understand being inspired by this woman. I could understand why many in the crowd came over to her. If Klamm’s commitment to the army hadn’t been stronger than his passion for Gretchen Hartmann he might have joined her band of Grossdorfers. As it was, he stayed glued to her until Sergeant George walked over to the jeep.
“We gotta go, Lieutenant, or we’ll be stuck in traffic.”
Klamm gave the word and we began to move.
I kept my eyes on her as long as she was in sight. The last I saw of her she had left her flock and entered her garden, watering can in hand, ready to compel the new day to behave as she wished.
CHAPTER 13
< DISSOLUTION >
Zwickau on the Mulde River was an ancient industrial city with a population, before the war, of more than a hundred thousand. Some of its churches dated from the fourteenth century, and there was a rich history unavailable to us since we were confined to the city center. The residential and industrial sections were off-limits.
The center of Zwickau swarmed with GIs. Our regiment was there as well as units of other divisions. I saw soldiers wearing patches of the Fourth Armored and Eighty-second Airborne and Third Army Headquarters. We were jammed into a small hotel with the rest of the company. A common mess served much of the battalion. There were few German men to be seen, but DPs were everywhere. They served as barbers and maids and kitchen help.
Army business at the company level was suspended and we idled in Zwickau. There were no guard details, no KP, no drill, no morning assembly or calisthenics, no retreat. There was no need for morning sick call at the company level. The Battalion Aid Station was only a block away and a field hospital was set up on the edge of the city. The division post office was nearby and we received our back mail and back pay.
We hoped for an extended leave in the States before crossing to the Asian Theater of Operations and a new, perhaps more ferocious, war. There was no announced policy for getting us home. Our past was finished, our future vague.
At night we went to the USO, a smoky, beery place, the dance floor jammed from early evening until midnight. A German band—a drum, a piano, a saxophone, a trumpet, a very large horn—played bouncy thirties music and slow maudlin tunes. Dancers bumped and jostled through sweaty two-steps. Fräuleins were everywhere, not only on the dance floor, but at the tables and outside in the spill of light.
ONE NIGHT THE music and dancing stopped. An amplified radio voice announced that the president of the United States was about to deliver an important message. Truman came on to tell us in his flat, stumbling, Midwestern accent that a new kind of weapon, an atomic bomb with a force greater than twenty thousand tons of TNT, had exploded over a Japanese city, the city wiped out in a single blow. The Japanese government had been advised to surrender unconditionally or suffer other attacks of this magnitude.
Nagy asked, “How much is twenty thousand tons of TNT?”
I figured it out in terms we could understand. You can carve out a slit trench with a quarter-pound stick of dynamite. You can do four slit trenches with a pound. With 20,000 tons of TNT you could make 160,000 slit trenches. With two men to a trench, you’d have slit trenches for about twenty divisions, every officer and enlisted man. You could put most of the Third and Eighth Armies underground with 20,000 tons of TNT.
Novak said, “This is it, then.”
“What?”
“We’re not going to the Pacific.”
Three days later a second bomb exploded, and within a week, the Japanese sued for surrender, and we were entirely done with war. Later we learned that the number of dead and injure
d in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was almost equal to the total number of men in the Third Army.
A SUBDUED KLAMM briefed us after VJ Day. The platoon was to be disbanded, the battalion erased, the division reduced to its skeleton cadre. We were to be reassigned on the basis of a system of points that rewarded us for length of service and combat experience. Those with the lowest point total would remain in Germany. The rest of us would be sent to units going home.
We figured this would happen in weeks, maybe months. But the next day, I was ordered to return to my medical detachment. There was no need for an aid man because there was no need for a platoon; in fact, no need for a medical detachment since the battalion itself was going out of business.
I found as many of my platoon as I could before we parted, and the parting was a stripping away. I took no addresses and didn’t offer mine.
Klamm was stiff and formal, unable to figure out what our future connection should be. “It was an honor serving with you, Corporal.” He had no intention of resuming his work as assistant manager at a Kroger’s market. “I’m not going back.”
He had applied for continued service in the German occupation.
Roy Jones planned to use his severance pay to buy acreage adjoining the family farm. His hair-trigger temper no longer had the same threat; the peacetime Roy sounding no more dangerous than any truculent farmer.
Novak had his Wisconsin farm.
Nagy was promised his old job at Hudson’s department store in Detroit, driving a delivery truck. He meant to keep in touch with Maurice Sully. Maurice was still touring with the GI musical, Alles Kaput, somewhere near Paris.
Some didn’t have a clear agenda and considered idling at government expense.
“And how about you, Leo?”
It was enough to have survived the war. That’s what I thought then.
We had slept together, eaten together, killed together, died and survived together. We were joined together as we’d never been with any others, and yet when the platoon that defined us and held us in place—the source of our pride and loyalty—was discarded, we were unglued. It happened overnight in Zwickau.
• • •
I WAS TRANSFERRED to the headquarters unit of another medical detachment and made a clerk. In my few weeks as a clerk I learned the GI way of writing reports. There was a common set of abbreviations—for instance, w for “with,” w/o for “without,” fr for “from,” and so on. Letters were folded three times with the letterhead exposed. I hunted and pecked for a month until the headquarters unit dissolved. A second lieutenant reported for duty just before I was again transferred. He was newly arrived, newly commissioned, saluted the CO sharply. His voice was familiar, and when he turned from the CO, overseas cap in hand, we stared at each other. It was Joe Witty, my nemesis from basic training, a fine-looking second lieutenant, tall and fair and clean-cut. He was delighted to see someone from Michigan, a buddy from basic training. Our conflict hardly dented his memory. He remembered me as the really bright guy who had made a name for himself by handling an amputation on the rifle range.
He had graduated from OCS a few months before. A ninety-day wonder, he admitted, laughing. He was new to Europe, confessed to being homesick. He’d left our original outfit for advanced medical training and then OCS.
We were both in luck, he said.
The division we had both once belonged to was stationed in the Ardennes just before the Battle of the Bulge and was overrun in the initial assault. The division was captured almost intact, including our old medical detachment. Witty had kept in touch with some of the men and heard of the horrors of the PW camp after their release.
I asked about Sergeant Johnson, whose anti-Semitic venom still pained me.
Witty told me everyone despised Johnson. One of the old outfit who’d been captured after the others still had cigarettes when he rejoined the unit in the PW camp. He passed out cigarettes generously, but when Johnson, the craven bully, came begging, he said, “Johnson, I wouldn’t give you the sweat off my balls.”
I saw Witty several times in the next few days. We never spoke of our fight or the shower room incident. He told me about his training as a surgical technician. After OCS he administered the surgical unit of a post hospital in New Jersey. He was now slated for occupation duty. Afterward he would return to the University of Michigan, attend medical school, join his father’s practice.
He envied my combat experience. Mine was the war he had imagined for himself. He’d never been at the front, never even heard artillery fire.
We agreed to meet back in Ann Arbor. It seemed like a good idea then, but we were on different paths, our common history concluded.
I was transferred to a postal unit and made the supply sergeant. It was fall, the nights were cold. The post office was located across from a railroad station. Each night several of us would cross to the railroad station and I’d call out, “Warm Zimmer,” warm room, and we’d return with fräuleins in need of warmth. I set up cots in the supply room so we could all be warmed together. That’s as much of my supply duties as I remember.
In late fall I applied for a Paris leave.
MARISHKA WAS PART memory and part dream, and when I considered the facts, it didn’t make sense to summon up the flesh-and-blood version. More than seven months had passed since our two nights together. She was a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old French girl available to a person of her choosing for twenty dollars a night. Even if I wanted to bring her home to Mom there was no reason for her to come. It wasn’t wise to go looking for her with the expectations I had, but I was hardly wise.
I found a room on the fifth floor of a shabby hotel near the rue du Bac. There was a WC midcorridor of each floor, a bath available by payment to the concierge. The trees were bare, the days sunny; chill winds blew off the river. I wore my winter ODs and Eisenhower jacket and wool overseas cap.
I asked the concierge at the Hotel de l’Avenir if she knew a girl named Marishka. The elderly woman couldn’t make out what I wanted until I offered her a few francs, and then she didn’t recognize the name. She knew few of the women who passed through the hotel. I described Marishka as best I could—very young, very pretty, a student at the Sorbonne.
She roared with laughter. “Un étudiant ici? Rien à étudier ici que des verges, des tetons, des cons, et des culs.” Nothing to study here but cocks and tits and cunts and asses.
I didn’t find her at the Moulin Rouge. I couldn’t find her apartment on the rue du Bac. I patrolled the street, hoping either she or Bernard or Annie would show up. The boulangerie was closed. The baker had gone south.
A clerk at a bookstore near the Seine said she was familiar with an Annie and Bernard who lived in the neighborhood. They wrote for a Communist journal and hung out at the Deux Magots.
I sat outside the Deux Magots on the boulevard St. Germain, drinking coffee and brandy, writing letters home.
I did this for three days. I came in the afternoon and sat till dark, positioning myself near the café façade, where I was sheltered from the wind and could see who was entering.
It turned out that Bernard and Annie had passed by several times. It was his voice I finally recognized. They were leaving the café. He spoke in English, the tone bitter and derisive. “A fine mess,” he said.
“It was not intentional,” she said soothingly. “Sois sage.” Behave.
“Bernard?”
He wore black cords, a black leather jacket, and a black beret. Annie’s brown suede jacket may have been the one Marishka was wearing when we first met at the Moulin Rouge. They were as I remembered them, much alike in appearance—slender, olive-skinned, large Gallic noses, wide mouths.
“You perhaps remember me. I was a friend of Marishka’s. Leo, her American.”
“Quel Américain?”
“We met in your apartment in early March.”
Annie spoke low to him in French and he laughed. “That American.”
Annie lightened up at the mention of Marishka. “We
told her to go, she said, ‘Non!’ and now she has gone and we miss her. It was grim in the war. She had courage for everything.”
I invited them to sit with me for a cognac.
“For a moment,” he said. “No cognac.”
Annie said, “It should please you to know that among her vast entourage you were someone special.”
It greatly pleased me. I asked where she was.
She had left a month before, headed south to what had been the free zone, accompanied by a French soldier in a jeep.
“I thought she might be back in school.”
“What school?”
“Wasn’t she a student at the Sorbonne?”
They laughed at the idea. Bernard said, “You have to first graduate from kindergarten.” Not that she wasn’t bright enough to give the impression she could follow difficult arguments. The fact is, when it came to any serious matter, she had the attention span of a child. He called her a disaster as a tenant. She cleaned up only under protest, ate whatever was around, wore anything she wanted, no respect for others, sweetly apologized when scolded, but didn’t alter her behavior. Even in a Communist household there had to be a sense of propriety. “We did not know who would be there when we came home from work. A Norwegian? a Pole? an Englishman? an American? She organized her own League of Nations.”
I told them she was great with me.
“Everyone loved Marishka,” Annie said. “I was not so angry as Bernard, but even he adored her. Une belle fille, but very young.”
I said in this war I had many comrades. I would perhaps never again live so intimately with men. We had been necessary to each other, but the war was over and there was no longer any need for us to be together, so we were again strangers. With Marishka I had felt unguarded and joyful. The silly, immature, young woman—their irresponsible tenant—had eased my heart.
Bernard said, “Good for Marishka. She did her work well.”
“You are fortunate to be so romantic,” Annie said, meaning, I think, that she considered me inexperienced and without judgment.
