Someday You Will Understand

by Nina Wolff Feld

  VE Day Headquarters 5th Army Regiment—Somewhere in Italy.

  May 7th 1945

  My Dears,

  . . . Many, in fact most, of the towns north of Florence are badly damaged. Entire villas completely razed. Sometimes the whole villa was destroyed except for one room left intact, other times it’s only half destroyed. The people: stoic, happy it’s over.

  Politically, the Communists are the best organized party, the most vociferous. On the roads, the partisans are returning home. Tired, weighted down with their equipment, on foot, on military trucks, by cart, by bicycle, and by car. We also see refugees returning—to what, I don’t know. We passed by recent battlefields where the land mines had scarcely been removed (but they have been, Chère Mamo). On the roads, there are hundreds of trucks filled with troops from the US, England, Sikhs, Canadians, Italians, Poles, and the Israelite legion, etc. . . . etc. . . . There are also trucks with prisoners repatriated from camps in Northern Italy and Austria. Again this morning, I took some really interesting photographs in Modena, of a column of trucks filled with Russians, Greeks, New Zealanders, Mongolians (Russians that the Boches forced into their army).

  I noticed a young girl by the side of the road seated next to one of the drivers. I wondered where she could be from. I approached and asked, “Russki? Popolski? Italiano? Deutsch? Française?” When I said, “Française?” she responded, “Moi, Belge!”

  You should have seen her face when I said to her, in French, that I had once lived in Brussels. She was from Gand [Ghent] and had been forced to work for the Boches. She told me I was the first to speak to her in her own language. Then I told her she was free—which she didn’t seem to know—and that from now on she had no reason to worry. If I were a war correspondent, I could really write some stories. Inflation is less noticeable here than in the South. Wine, for example, costs 100 lira ($1 in Naples, 70 lira (70 cents). In Florence and Modena, 1 liter costs 30–35 lira.

  Have just listened to the news from London via the 5th Army [Mobile Expeditionary] Radio, and also from Paris, from (Sottens) Switzerland, from Germany (that was funny!) on my little radio. Paris was reporting how New York was celebrating the victory—On the one hand, I would have loved to have been there, but I still like living these historic moments here, where I feel part of this victorious machine. The fight must have been hard here. You should see the hills, the winding roads, and the trenches.

  As far as my personal situation is concerned, I’m in the royal castle at Z. I’m getting used to this royal lifestyle. We find castles in all the cities here. This one is not as big as the last but is gigantic all the same. I sleep on the ground floor, with a band of Ritchissois. Our offices are in the room next door. I now have a sleeping bag and a folding cot. I’m telling you, it’s luxurious. We eat in a large room that has certainly seen better days—and we eat well. The Italians serve the food, and because I speak to them, I’m always well taken care of. But I don’t think we’ll remain here. We’ll move and go to another part of Italy, that I know for sure. More on Modena: The Boches left only two weeks ago. In the stores, we find everything. It’s not like during peacetime, but it’s okay. There are a fair number of houses that have been destroyed. All the military instillations have been razed, they tell me. Very picturesque little town. The people seem happy to see us. They’re nice, and basically we’re well regarded. They suffered, but they’re proud and civilized; that’s because their men contributed to their liberation. Not like in the South, where their morale and self-esteem are low. It’s a better race here. Those Neapolitans are not worth two cents. Already in Florence the people are very pleasant.

  Kisses,

  Walter

  That’s it for now. It’s midnight. (We get up at 8 o’clock here, no kidding, not like in the US.)

  P.S. My letters are for everyone, but keep them for me—it’s my war journal.

  * * * *

  Via Emilia at Portale Via Del Carmine in Modena, Italy, June 1945.

  Now that my father had returned to Europe, he added a rich visual dialogue of snapshots and postcards to illustrate his letters. I wish I could walk within their confines. There are so many of them. Some are faded, or blurry, but they reveal life as my father saw it and not necessarily as moviegoers saw it portrayed in newsreels. There are a few hundred photographs. The raw expression caught in the lens is what intrigues me. Perhaps it’s the expression in someone’s eyes or a dog roaming the background of a picture with a striking composition, or maybe it’s just that life goes on at the familiar pace of peacetime.

  Yet people appear to be in a hurry: they have to rebuild. The war is over. They have to replace the fallen stones. Architecture that stood for centuries now lies crumbled, in ruined piles in every hamlet, village, and city. In the foreground, people continue on their way.

  One photo fascinates me. I’m completely captivated by a man riding his bike down Via Emilia past the Portale Via Del Carmine in Modena. He’s wearing a beret, passing crumbled buildings. Business is as usual. Just like in the movie The Bicycle Thief, the man’s clothing reveals that he’s a laborer. His livelihood surely depends on his bike. Only days into what would become a devastating postwar depression in Italy, he stands out from the rest because he’s not dressed in a suit. He moves across the landscape of the photograph. In my mind, he has already moved off, leaving me to search beyond him to reconstruct time and place, the way the city was.

  In another photo, displaced people wait in neat rows. A soldier appears to be walking the line. People reach as far back as the eye can see. A man stands tall, shouldering his life on his back: he carries a duffel bag so large it threatens to topple him. He’s wearing a hat—all the men are—and he’s holding what appears to be a newspaper. The people all look middle-aged. War did that. They wait patiently; they need to be repatriated. Where are the children? One man is looking straight at my father while he takes the photograph. He appears to be asking himself what the American soldier is doing. The women in the foreground stand uncomplaining, heads tilted down, their faces stern. Theirs is a veneer of passivity from years of accumulated stress while they ran for their lives. They seem to evince a hopelessness about their fate, a numbness, in contrast to the furtive ambulation of the people in the photo with the cyclist.

  It had been my father’s good fortune to arrive after the battles ended, to witness for himself a metamorphosis of the people as they made their transition from the roles they played during the war. He saw from every vantage point what his life would have been like had he not escaped, and had he managed to survive the war. Return had its advantages, destruction and all. Truth be told, his life was far more interesting in Europe than the one he led back in New York. My father’s letters tell in rich detail what he did and where he went. There is no need to tailor his words, dressed as they were with the excitement of just being present in the moment. It had been exactly five years since their nightmare began on May 10, 1940, when the Germans invaded Holland and Belgium and their destiny unfolded as they dodged bombs falling from the springtime sky. Now the invaders were prisoners.

  Displaced Persons—refugees returning home.

  The week after VE Day he left Southern Italy behind for good. From Caserta he made his way north up the boot to Verona and Ghedi Air Base, southeast and southwest of Lake Garda, respectively. He would shuttle between the two locations until July. His unit was attached to, but not part of, the 5th Army. Once he reached Verona, he took in the breadth of destruction from the spring offensive along the river Po, which had occurred during his last weeks of training at Camp Ritchie in April. The aftermath of battle was visible everywhere. In the ditches at the roadsides lay the carcasses of overturned vehicles. As they approached the Po, he and his comrades came upon an uninterrupted chain of vehicles of every sort: burned, mangled, intact but overturned. There were carts, cars, buses, motorcycles, and tanks that reminded my father of the ones he had seen in 1940 before their escape. Where vehicles had been concealed behind a house, the en
tire house had been set on fire and destroyed. Mantova, situated on the river’s edge, was terribly damaged, with hundreds, possibly thousands of burned-out vehicles lining the roads. Every bridge and the approaches to them were completely destroyed. It had been two weeks since the German army pulled out, but he could still see the enormous contribution the US Air Force made to defeat the Boches.

  In Verona he and his men occupied what was then considered an ultramodern apartment house. He casually mentions that the 5th Army’s predecessors had been the SS. They led a luxurious life. My father not only took their place without any hesitation but put to good use anything they’d left behind. In fact, in a nearby garage he found a stock of enemy blankets covered in DDT, a poisonous insecticide. He shook the DDT powder off the blankets and used them as mattress covers.

  But where were the dead? My father makes no reference to them, and there are no signs of them in his photographs until much later when he visits a liberated concentration camp in Germany. I remember the lingering smell after 9/11. It took five months to dissipate before the air smelled fresh again. I wonder how long it took to bury the bodies, shoulder to shoulder in mass graves. I wonder about the rest of the people, the mourners who marched behind the coffins of their loved ones, accompanied by the sounds of footsteps, ringing bells, and their echoing cries of “Jesu Christo, Madonna” lingering in the fragrant fog of incense.

  At Ghedi and at the POW camp in Verona, as well as the nearby POW camp at Modena, his job was to carry out the provisions of the unconditional surrender by administering, supervising, and initiating the registration and screening of almost 100,000 German POWs with a team of six men. They weren’t responsible for the complete administration of all of these men—the remnant of the German army’s Heeresgruppe 14 [14th Army Group] and the many other units attached to it were doing a lot of the work under his watchful eyes.

  My father noted that he was becoming an expert on concentration camps, but his team’s mission was made more difficult by the chief of the Allied military staff who commanded the camp and with whom he was in constant tug of war. The camp commander insisted on maintaining the organization and the discipline of the Wehrmacht and leaving the administration of orders in the hands of the Germans themselves, or as my father so eloquently put it, “those bastards.” Of course, it wasn’t in my father’s nature to oppose any approach that would lessen his workload or that of the Allied soldiers, but the commander’s policy was making matters more complicated in some ways. No matter this difference of opinion, the goal my father and his men pursued was to cut off the arms and legs of Heeresgruppe 14, with the support of the Supreme High Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  German generals at the Ghedi POW camp, Italy, June 1945.

  My father’s job entailed giving direct orders to the Boches and ensuring they were followed—a powerful position for such a young man. He had no regard whatsoever for rank, no matter whether the prisoner was a colonel or a commander. He wasn’t afraid. His routine was as follows: every morning, he went to the German major general and told him what he wanted from him and his men. The Germans were very cooperative and happy to follow his directives, but they insisted on saluting. He described in his letters how he never returned the courtesy, no matter what—unless a superior Allied officer saluted at the same time, and then it was inevitable. This was the only way to treat them; and it was fun to terrorize the Boches, to the extent permitted by law.

  His goal was to find the recalcitrants: those who should spend a lengthy amount of time in prison. He and his team required the prisoners to fill out bogus registration forms in order to ferret out the real criminals—the Nazis—and in this the forms were helpful but not completely effective. Skillful questioning was sometimes required as well. Since my father was responsible for the “well-being” of several hundred of those murderers, regretfully, he had to be selective. His preference was that they all be incarcerated and never have a moment of freedom ever again. Whether he sat across a desk from a prisoner during an interrogation or watched the interned soldiers divested of their former selves and vying for shade under the hot, dusty summer sun, he took pride in his task. He was getting even. One of his favorite games was to conceal his identity and call himself Robert Anderson, so that, at least to begin with, the POW wouldn’t surmise he was Jewish. This disguise sometimes carried over into later life, when a customer asked who the furniture designer was at Bon Marché. If my father was on the sales floor, he would reply that Robert Anderson was the designer, even though it was actually he himself.

  My father’s alter ego, the notorious Mr. Anderson.

  POW interrogation at Ghedi POW camp.

  At nine o’clock one morning he was still in bed under his cool rayon sheets when the phone rang. He dressed quickly in a uniform that he had sent to be pressed the day before—crisper clothes were more comfortable in the heat. He arrived at headquarters not ten minutes later, sporting his new eight-shot pistol in a leather holster at his hip. He liked to hide his expressive eyes behind his aviator sunglasses so he could mask any emotion that might escape. With his starched uniform and shoes polished to a sheen so bright they reflected the sun, he always felt like a director manipulating his cast—among whom were some of World War II’s most notorious criminals. He arrived at headquarters too late to translate the order of the day, which was for the colonel to stand in for the general, whom he thought a first class idiot anyway. Unfortunately, my father doesn’t always disclose the name of every military figure he encountered, but in this letter he does describe how he arrived just in time to see the infamous General von Senger Etterlin standing in formation at the head of the line.

  Frido von Senger und Etterlin was a corps commander known as one of “Hitler’s Generals.” He was the famous defender at Monte Cassino who nevertheless opposed Nazism in principle; as well, he was the chief negotiator who engineered the surrender of German forces to General Mark Clark on behalf of General Vietinghoff. He had been ordered to act as Vietinghoff’s representative when Vietinghoff wouldn’t give a definitive answer as to whether he would accept the terms of surrender. Appointed by telephone by generals Joachim Lemelsen and Traugott Herr, von Senger Etterlin flew to Florence where, on May 4, during a ceremony at the 15th Army Group headquarters, his surrender of the remaining Axis forces in Italy ended World War II in the Mediterranean. Afterward, von Senger Etterlin was held at several POW camps in Italy and later in Great Britain. After his release and repatriation in 1948, he wrote his now famous memoir, Neither Fear Nor Hope: The Wartime Memoirs of the German Defender of Cassino.

  As my father approached the formation, he could hear the Allied colonel say to von Senger Etterlin in German with the aid of his interpreter: “Hundert Prozent Kooperation oder anderes! Genug mit der Nazi-Propaganda und dem passiven Widerstand, nun sind es FOLGEN ohne Ausnahme und ohne Unterschied zwischen den Reihen!” (One hundred percent cooperation or else! Enough with the Nazi propaganda and the passive resistance. Henceforth it’s OBEY without exception, and without any distinction between the ranks!)

  My father observed the scene before him and thought, “There is a new wind blowing. Those arrogant brutes, look at them: dirty, tired, miserable—beaten. There are thousands upon thousands of them, almost completely docile . . . Swine!!”

  A little later he watched as a bunch of SS carried out his orders to clean latrines for two hours, and then during a free moment he wrote:

  May 13th, 1945

  My Dears,

  My job right now is to oversee the . . . German prisoners—today is the last day. When that’s finished, we will have completed it in three days. We work 6 hours a day with 2 breaks . . . The camp is in an open field ringed by barbed wire, outside the city. . . .

  Our system is the following: We take a hundred or so from Kompanie Schreiber, we sit them down, we explain what we want, and then they do the work under our supervision. Ah, what a pleasure it is to scream at those officers—colonels, Kommandant
s, captains, lieutenants who were once so full of arrogance! You should have seen them jump at my command. I say something once, and the second time I scream! I caught one of the bastards giving the Nazi salute, so I told him if I saw that one more time he would stand at attention for an hour in the hot sun and go for two days without eating. I can do that if I wish.

  We take their name, rank, serial number, address, and civilian and military occupation. We tell them it’s so we can notify their families, but it’s because we’re looking for criminals of war. After the officers, there were the rest of the Germans, and after that, there were the foreigners.

  The camp is organized as follows: it is divided in three sections, I, II, III, etc., etc. Each one is divided into thirty companies, at 100 men in each Lager [section]. Each Lager has one “Lager Führer” [section commander], and each company has a “Kompanie Führer” [company captain] that we selected. Our idea is to let the Boches work for themselves (and take advantage of their love of discipline), under our strict surveillance. For the most part, my time is taken up with our “INT” [International] section, which contains; 10–1,500 Russians, Poles, Yugoslavs, Bulgarians, Greeks, Dutch, French, Fascists, Alsatians and Lorrains, German Armed Forces, French civilians contracted to work for the Germans, Indochinese, and Belgians—all the nations of the globe, Turks included. These people all come here for some reason or another and have to be cleared or locked up. I have a hell of a time talking to these people—but usually find some direct or indirect means of communication with them. We separate them by nationality. Suddenly, they all want to be Czechs, Austrian, or French; others proudly tell us they’re 1/4 Jewish, a feat they should have kept hidden for another month. We found one 100% Jew (caught by mistake with the partisans). His name is Wolff; he left Germany in ’35, found refuge in Italy, and was in hiding until his capture. The poor guy was imprisoned with all these Boches. We immediately liberated him, and this evening he’s a free man.