Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

by Studs Terkel

  What I’ve discovered is: All of the holy books are marvelous, absolutely so, including the Bible. The Bible has the most beautiful language of any book I have ever read. Not to mention the fact that there’s something there. God is there. But I really do believe He’s hidden. I believe the Jewish mystics who went into the kabala know that. I sometimes wish I spoke Hebrew because the words might not be the thing itself but they can lead to it. The Bhagavad Gita is the bible to three hundred million Indians and others who are not Indians. Thoreau and Emerson read it. Krishna says there never was a time when you and I did not exist, and there will never be a time when we cease to be. He said, “This body wears out, like garments, and when a garment wears out, you take it off and you lay it down, and you pick up another one and put it on.”

  One of the terrible things about executions is to jump people off into the universe like that. I think for a soul to be wrenched from the body is for that soul to be in anger and in pain and in hatred. I believe it impacts negatively on our world, that probably a lot of the calamities that happen are a result of that sort of thing. I mourn for the whole world because it’s such a horrible place so often.

  *The Chicago Defender has, for years, been the most widely read African-American newspaper in the country.

  *Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee.

  *Bessie Smith, the most celebrated of blues singers, was in an auto accident in Clarksdale in 1937. It is said that she was denied admission to the nearby white hospital and died on the way to another hospital.

  War

  Dr. Frank Raila

  A veteran of World War II, he benefited from the GI Bill of Rights. He attended college and medical school. For a time, he practiced as a GP in Illinois as well as in Brazil. He is now a neuroradiologist in the University of Mississippi Medical School. “I’ve saved lives, and it’s a great feeling.”

  MY FIRST MEMORY of death was when I was a child on Honore Street. There was ice, an accident, a horse cart and a vehicle. There was a piece of this man’s bone in the gutter with blood around it. I must have been just six, seven years old. I remember seeing that rib-like thing. That was the first time I ever saw something that belonged to a human being . . . The next time that I saw violent death was in the war. This one American was on his back. He was dead, but he coughed up a lot of real red blood, and it was all over his face, down both sides of his face. His skin was real white . . . that white and the redness out of his mouth.

  Another time, there was an American lying in the ditch near the road. I had seen other dead bodies, Germans and Americans. But I was real close to this one and the wind was blowing on his hair, and the hair was moving. Movement is life, isn’t it? This guy, his skin was kind of a light greenish color, but that moving hair—it just struck me. And the same day, we were going down this road into where there were 20mm cannon shells laying around. I was trying not to step on them because some of them are explosive. I was hopping around a little bit. I almost landed on top of this man’s upper jaw. It was laying on the road. I remember it was very pink and it had a complete set of beautiful white teeth. I almost broke my ankle trying to keep from stepping on this guy’s jaw. And there was red stuff stringing off of both sides. His head was exploded and his jaw flew out and fell on the road and I almost stepped on it . . .

  I was born in Chicago. My father left Lithuania when he was fifteen years of age, came to Chicago, joined the army, and went back to the trenches in World War I. His son ended up in World War II. [Laughs]

  I was trained in intelligence and reconnaissance and sent to the 106th Infantry Division. They put almost the whole division on the Queen Elizabeth, which was able to hold between ten and fourteen thousand troops. We were in a stateroom that was built for two people, and there were something like forty or fifty of us in it. They had bunks against every wall—they were only like eighteen inches apart. Most of us were seasick. We got off near Glasgow and got in trains that were all darkened. We ended up in the English Channel. We were all sick as dogs when we crossed it. This was 1944. I’d just turned nineteen. We got off in Le Havre. It was raining. We pitched our tents out in the field. It was muddy, rain. The next morning, we drove all the way into Luxembourg and it was snowing. We were on the trucks for days and nights, getting off and sleeping on the ground in between. We knew we’d be in combat, but we didn’t know which theater we’d be in.

  When we were in Belgium, we slept in the snow. We pulled down branches of evergreen trees and that was the floor of our pup tents.

  We were put on a line. I was in the 423rd Regiment, Company E. We didn’t realize that the Germans had thirty to forty divisions out there. It was winter, and we thought it would be a quiet front. And so they pulled out a very experienced division and put us in their place. These guys said, “Oh, you’ve got an easy spot. We’ve got dugouts and everything’s perfect for you. You’re just going back to a nice warm spot, you’ve got nothing to worry about . . .” And then on December 16th, Germans attacked our lines with something like twenty divisions and had us almost surrounded. General Jones, our division chief, made the mistake of not pulling us back. He thought that the armored column that he had asked help from would come up and push the Germans back. But it snowed badly on the roads, the roads were packed. They never got to us. We were surrounded.

  While we were going up there, 88s were exploding around us and we had faulty ammunition. There was a mortar squad ahead of us. The sergeant in charge would drop the shell in the tube and it wouldn’t go off. And that shell in the tube is very dangerous, because you pull the pin out of it and all you have to do is hit that little nose and it’ll blow up. So he had to lift that tube off the base plate and then slide that shell and catch it with two fingers and put the pin back in the nose and lay it on the ground and put in another one. They had, I’d say, three or four duds out of five. And all the time, we’re all being shot at. The sergeant was standing up and acting as a point to show where to drop these shells and they were shooting around him. They had us zeroed in. The shells and mortars start dropping around us, and there were guys yelling for their mothers and screaming and being torn to pieces. I was right in the middle of it all. The ground was falling on my back in little chunks of earth.

  One poor chap was screaming for his mother and a sergeant told him to shut up. We were so green, we were just laying out there getting pounded. I was very, very frightened. The thing that I think frightens most soldiers is not being brave in front of the other men. The fear of being cowardly in front of your men, I think, was greater than anything else, and kept you going. It’s not the flag, it’s not the country, it’s not apple pie, it’s the kid next to you—you can’t let him down. I was really terrified. All of us were, but didn’t want to show it. I remember being behind the second gunner, and he was hit in the hip and he was laying down right in front of me. Our foxhole was only about ten inches deep and it was filled with water and there was snow around us and ice. I can remember a bullet about three, four inches away from my head, hitting the dirt, and a little bit of dirt being flicked up in the air, and a little bit of steam coming out where the bullet went into the ground. That made me dig a lot faster, I’ll tell you that. [Laughs] Six inches closer and it would have hit me right between the eyes. It’s just chance, yeah, it really is chance . . .

  Just before we pulled out, McBride told me to get some more ammunition and I went back down the road. McBride was my sergeant, the one that played for Notre Dame, a great big guy. I was the ammunition carrier. So I went back to the ammo place, a four-by-four truck. I told them I needed some rifle and machine-gun ammunition. Believe it or not, he asked me if I had a chit for it, a piece of paper for it. [Laughs] I said, “Well, I don’t have a paper, but there’s a German tank coming up the road, you guys aren’t going to be here very long.” So he gave me two boxes of ammunition and a bunch of boxes of thirty-caliber carbine ammunition. That was really funny, I never forgot that. We left all our belongings, all our packs in the woods. The Germans j
ust zeroed in on those woods. So we left the woods with no tents, nothing except the first-aid kits and the shovel, and our bandoleers and a rifle. The Battle of the Bulge started December 16th and ended in January, like the 20th.

  Every day there was something going on. I recall being in this field and there was a machine gun mass-firing at us. The officers told us to outflank the machine guns. There were actually two of them, they would fire in tandem. A German machine gun sounds almost like ripping cloth because it had a very high rate of fire. One machine would fire a short burst, and a machine gun on the other side would fire another short burst. It was hard to find out where it was coming from. But our guys came in and they attacked this machine gunner. They killed everyone there except a German sergeant.

  They had this German in front of them and he was shot in the arm. He could only hold up one arm. The other arm was down because it was injured. The American behind him, one of the guys from our company, put a comb under his nose, like Hitler, and did the Nazi salute behind this guy. And this is when bullets were going! [Laughs] And we all were laughing at him like idiots. This is typically goofy American. A little bit afterwards, when that German came across and they put him in a first-aid station, all the guys all of a sudden turned around and pointed their rifles at him. I thought they were going to kill him right there. In my eighteen-, nineteen-year-old fervor, I got up and I said, “Don’t shoot him, we’re Americans—we don’t kill people like that.” Can you imagine? I was just a young greenhorn. It was almost embarrassing when I got through saying it. But it just seemed un-American to shoot a guy with his hands up in the air.

  They stopped, and I took this guy and I came up to a barbed-wire fence and I told him to come with me. I don’t know how I did it. The post that held up the fence, I just backed off and lunged into it like I was lunging into a football line. And I knocked that post down so he could walk over the barbed wire, because there was no other way he could get over it. I got to the road and told some people to take him back to the aid station. Then I went back to my machine gun squad. I don’t think there were more than thirty, forty men making up our front line, and we had all these thousands of Germans in front of us. I remember an American coming towards us, about a hundred and fifty yards away—he was limping, and McBride told me to go out and get him. Bullets were kicking up and stuff was flying around. And so I gritted my teeth and I ran out and I got up to the guy and he said he didn’t want any help. [Laughs] “Put your arm around me, I’m going to help you anyway whether you like it or not.”

  McBride said that apparently the firing pin on the machine gun was broken. It wouldn’t fire anymore. So he said, “Let’s go back and get the firing pin fixed, and then we’ll go back to the front line.” When we got on the road and we were going through the village, here was our aid station. There was an American in there, he was crying, it was full of wounded men. There was a lieutenant on a table in front of a window who was shot through the testicles twice. You could see the fat and stuff sticking out of the holes in his testicles. And the German was lying on the floor on a stretcher. And the second gunner, who was shot and hit, was lying next to him.

  There was one room that was darkened, the door was closed. I opened up that room and it was filled with very seriously wounded, dying. This one lieutenant was on the stretcher—I’ll never forget—half his jaw was gone and he was gurgling something. And I got a water can and poured a little water in his throat. It kind of gurgled and I thought, well, that’s enough. The bottom of the stretcher, there must have been about an inch of blood in it. He’d also been shot in the leg and had a splint on it. And there was an American sitting on a stool in one corner, sobbing. His hands and fingers were off. He had just gone crazy. He was just uncontrollably sobbing. There were other men that apparently were dead on the floor. I said to Mac [McBride], “If we don’t hurry about and get out of here, we’re going to be trapped.” He says, “Yeah, but let’s help these people for just a few minutes.” And it was the few minutes that we lost that got us trapped. Because I was uncurling bandages on this man’s groin, on his genitals, and I heard these hobbled boots outside. And all of a sudden this young German, nice thin mustache, kind of handsome—he was short, with a skull and crossbones on his hat. The window was open, and he stuck his rifle right through the window and had it pointed right at my chest. I thought he was going to blow me away. I dropped the bandages, I put my hands up and I said, “Comrade is kaput.” And he said, “Raus!” They had us covered from the doorway. We got out and he motioned to us—I didn’t speak German, just a few words—to take the wounded Germans out first. They had a captured American truck. Mac and I, with the German on the stretcher, were walking down this little street to the truck, and a German pops out in front of me, throws his rifle up to his shoulder, and takes a bead right at me. I stopped, ’cause I thought, This guy’s gonna kill me. When I stopped, all of a sudden, the German in the stretcher wondered why. He put his hand out and started yelling German to the guy aiming the rifle at us. And he put the rifle down slowly and let us go by.

  Now we were prisoners of war, and we went to a little churchyard and this was Christmas Eve. And McBride and myself and the first gunner Ray Russell and Delheim, the sergeant, we started to sing Christmas carols. And a bunch of guys got around us and were singing Christmas carols. And I guess this must have bugged the Germans because they told us to shut up or they were going to shoot us. [Laughs] We shut up. It was very poignant, this group of guys. We were covered with hoarfrost and it was late, twelve or one o’clock in the morning. And all these GIs in there sitting or standing around, decided to sing “Silent Night.” And they told us to keep quiet—so we were silent. [Laughs]

  We walked almost about a hundred miles with no food, no water, no place to stay. We laid down near the road, on the road, next to the road. Frozen. We were afraid that if we left anybody, they would be shot. So we helped everybody we could that couldn’t make it. And then we were put in a building in Koblenz, Germany. Later on I found out it was for Hitler Youth. It was the only building standing. They put us in this building, and then the Americans bombed us during the day and the British bombed us at night. The German guards went into the air-raid shelters and left us up top in the buildings. We were in this one large room, I would say about twenty men. We put a mattress up against the windows because we thought that would keep flying glass from being blown in. And sure enough, these five-hundred- or eight-hundred-thousand-pound bombs were going off. Missed the building but blew the glass, the airframes, and the mattress into the room. We were laying down on the floor. I was the only guy sitting in a chair. When that thing went off it blew the frame, the glass, the mattress, and blew the door out into the hallway, and I went out with the door.

  I was a prisoner for about four, five months near the end of the war. I didn’t know when the war was going to be over, but I knew that the time to escape is when you’re just first captured or when you’re being moved. They decided to move us. They put us in a soccer field. There were English, Welsh, New Zealanders, Australian prisoners with us. And they counted us about a million times, like the Germans always do. They make one miscount, they count the whole thing over again. I had tried to escape once before. I didn’t make it. There were about twenty of us living in a small jail. We had a toilet outside. They became more lax because we’d always come back. So I figured, I’d go this time. I had made contact with a British lad. I was to meet him on a bridge near Sandisdorf, and then we were going to take off together. Well, I go out there and I look for the food I had dug into the ground—there’s nothing there. I go to the toilet and there’s a guard there who escorts me back, and I knew that I was foiled.

  I’d had it all planned. I’d gone this route before. At night, I’d go out to the toilet, jump on the side of the fence, and, with a leap, grab ahold of the eave, pull myself up, climb over the roof, jump to another lower roof, and then jump to the ground. Go to the place that had the carrots and stuff, put my socks around my pants, put
the carrots in the pants and in my pockets, and then walk back, jump up this low roof, climb up to the low roof, climb up to the high roof, and then jump down, bring the carrots to the guys, and we would eat this stuff. So I did that about four or five times. One time I did it and I was trapped on a roof by air-raid sirens. The guard had come out the front door and he was crunching around on the gravel. I swear I thought he was going to shoot me right in my rear end. I had a watch on, and I put it in my mouth so he wouldn’t hear the ticking. I don’t know if he saw me.

  Walking to Stalag Forbein was really terrible. We were put in boxcars and we had a short trip to Limburg. We got there just a few hours after Limburg prison camp was accidentally bombed by the Americans. There were about two hundred American POWs killed. We were being transferred to another place. I knew that I would like to escape again, so I walked very slowly. I was walking, say, two steps back for every one step everyone else was taking, so I could get back to the Brits. I met this same guy I was supposed to escape with, and he says there’s something like ten guys are going to try to take off and if I wanted to go with them, I could go. So they herded us into this field; there was barbed wire around it.

  The Brits had chocolate and cigarettes. When the fog came in, we were talking to the guards at one end, keeping them busy. And two Brits would go out under the barbed wire. I went with two Welsh guys. We were supposed to meet at a hayfield that we could see during the day. There was nobody there. We probably walked to the wrong hayfield. And so we walked all that night trying to find a place big enough for us to hide in. It was terrible because we had diarrhea. We finally found a place that looked like a big forest and slept overnight. The next day, we met up with a bunch of Russian slave laborers who had escaped. They had some vodka. I’d never tasted vodka before. They all got stinking drunk and I got a headache. Then that day they went and raided a German farmyard and got a rabbit. We split the rabbit up. It was three Americans and maybe eight, ten Russian slave laborers. And I remember they’d cooked the rabbit, and I got the head. It was delicious, I ate everything: the tongue, the brains, the eyeballs . . . protein tasted delicious.