I was stunned and couldn’t speak, so he tried to say something comforting. “You can be reassured,” he said encouragingly, “I saw it with my own eyes. Buck lay there very peacefully.”
I still remember my reply. “I didn’t want to hear that!” I said. “Buck didn’t want to die. And I didn’t want to hear about his death being peaceful—not someone like him. I’d rather hear how he struggled to tie up his leg to his very last breath.” Until we were moved on, if I found myself anywhere near that prisoner, I avoided him as best I could.
1 The Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD) was a compulsory six-month public service required of all Germans, male and female, between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five.
2 The Nazis revived this old term for a local militia, which had not been used in centuries, to designate their final defense “force”; scraping the very bottom of their manpower barrel, it swept up all males between the ages of sixteen (sometimes even younger) and eighty (including older) to make a last stand against the Allied forces, who commanded vastly superior firepower.
3 Seich is literally “piss,” meaning rubbish, nonsense when applied to speech.
4 This is an example of an important distinction still in existence, even in the officer corps; those with a broad liberal education or Bildung set themselves apart from the others, the less educated. They also have more in common with those who have and show Bildung than with other members of their own social class.
5 Georg Trakl (1887–1914), a major lyrical talent, was drafted as a military pharmacist in the First World War. He is presumed to have committed suicide after seeing the effects of the war on the battlefield and in a military hospital.
6 Since all civilian means of communication had ceased to exist, these search messages were the only way to find out whether someone was still alive after the bombing raids and evacuations.
7 This is the famous bridge at Remagen which was the only major structure across the Rhine still standing at this point and thus hotly contested by the warring parties; it had the highest strategic value, especially for the Allies.
NINE
•
The Escape
At midnight, after a three-hour drive, the convoy of trucks came to a halt with a squealing of brakes. Glancing out, we saw sheds and warehouses on one side, on the other a large field picked out by gleaming searchlights. About two hundred soldiers, their guns at the ready, were running around in front of the convoy and shouting the already familiar “Come on!,” “Let’s go!,” or “Hurry up!”
We had hardly jumped down when we saw, about thirty yards away, a two-winged gate, the entrance to a broad field surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. Working under searchlights, a unit of pioneers was engaged in erecting watchtowers at intervals of 150 yards. Then the highest-ranking prisoner, a lieutenant colonel, was summoned to a group of American officers who had arrived shortly before and ordered to lead the almost ten thousand prisoners into the camp. “Where are the barracks?” asked the staff officer. “Or do you at least have tarpaulins and blankets?” At that a young, wiry American officer pushed to the front and called out in a caustic voice, “This isn’t a hotel!” He waved his submachine gun in the air as he spoke. “But we have the key to lock the gate. Warn your people against trying to escape! Our soldiers have orders to shoot without warning! Do you understand?” The lieutenant colonel raised his hand to his cap and ordered us to march to the barbed-wire gate. The helmeted American soldiers cocked their guns as loudly as they could and stood shoulder to shoulder on both sides.
We stood on the fenced-in piece of land for about six hours until it began to grow light. Thick banks of fog surrounded us and, when they cleared, a flat-topped hill became visible to the west, dominated by a cathedral with three towers. Hardly had the picture taken shape, however, when it disappeared again in the sleet that set in. As far as I remember, it fell on us for almost three days. During this time, hungry and freezing, we measured out the course of the camp streets and dug ditches for the future pipes. We were also divided into companies. Anyone who was recognized as a member of the SS was taken away to a quickly laid-out special camp; there, as if at a command, the arrivals squatted down and stared straight ahead with an expression of defiant sacrifice. Sleet and snow kept falling and at the morning wake-up call the field was strewn with many humped white mounds, which began to move in the dawn light and gradually began to take on human shape.
On the third day a column of trucks drove through the camp gates and at regular intervals bedsteads, blankets, washbowls, and other necessaries were thrown off their backs. Already, by the following day, the shelters for the prisoners had largely been put up and the watchtowers around the camp erected. At the same time we were divided into work parties of varying sizes, each of which had its sphere of activities within the depot. I was assigned to the hall for office supplies, with its tall scaffolds of shelves that carried all kinds of blackboards, typewriters, adding machines, writing implements—more than three thousand different items. In other halls were stored uniforms, vehicle parts, leather gear, and everything needed by an army, with the exception of arms.
On the afternoon of the first day under canvas there was a camp assembly. On the broad middle street between the rows of tents stood the commandant, Captain John F. Donaldson, escorted by the wiry officer with the cutting voice, who introduced himself as Lieutenant Bernard P. Dillon, and a second lieutenant, Charles W. Powers. At a little distance from them First Sergeant Don D. Driffel, First Sergeant John S. Walker, and Sergeant Paul F. Geary, as well as other NCOs and privates, had taken up position. After a short address broadcast over the camp loudspeakers—in which he spoke mainly about work, discipline, and obeying orders—Captain Donaldson inspected some of the ranks. Every twenty yards or so he stopped and addressed a prisoner, with a corporal in his entourage taking notes. As chance had it, the captain also stopped in front of my group and asked me my age, rank, and where I had been taken prisoner. Before he went on, he instructed his clerk to note everything down.
The next day I was called to the headquarters hut outside the camp gate. On my arrival I found three prisoners who had likewise been summoned by Captain Donaldson. He asked me basically the same questions as during the assembly, only he took much more time and also inquired about my family, my education, and my father’s profession. In the middle of the conversation he interrupted himself and called over an interpreter, because after only one and a half years of school lessons my English was not sufficient for more complicated conversations. When he dismissed me, he advised me to improve my English, because he would like to have me as an assistant at his headquarters. He added something like “Don’t worry, it will all turn out for the best.”
The captain was a tall, elegant man. He was bald and his face was dominated by a twirled mustache to which cream was evidently applied and whose ends came to needle points, giving his appearance an eccentric touch. He clearly attached great importance to measured movements, and his speech, too, sounded altogether refined. At the same time his deep bass testified to a great—almost civilian—warmth. Never, at any rate, did he take advantage of his rank by using a peremptory tone, and there was nothing strained about his authority. He soon displayed a noticeable liking for me and once, after I got into a quite nonsensical argument with him about the admiration of both the Germans and many foreigners for Hitler, the always anxiously muttering First Sergeant Driffel admonished me not to forget the “paternal affection” that Captain Donaldson felt for me: otherwise, my privileges could come to a rapid end.
As far as personal matters were concerned, Donaldson was altogether discreet, so that in the almost two years in which he was my superior I never found out where he lived or anything about his family or what he did in civilian life or how he would have answered those questions which he put to me. He seemed to prefer topics of culture and politics in the wide sense over all other subjects. Once he discovered my love of music, he quizzed me about it in long evening conversations. It w
as the same with my literary preferences and how I had come to the history of ancient Rome or the Florence of the Renaissance, although it was evident that he found incomprehensible a mind that developed such abstruse tastes. He was surprised that I knew nothing about Dreiser, Faulkner, or Hemingway—names I heard from him for the first time—and concluded from that how shockingly removed from the civilized nations Germany had become under the Nazis. When we knew each other better, he wanted to know details about my family, about my brother who had died in the war, my other siblings and friends. I remained silent, however, about my parents’ difficulties, because I felt that to describe them would be to make myself appear self-important. Instead, I told him about friends who had fled Germany, about harassment in our neighborhood at home, and about the pressures of living in a dictatorship.
I enjoyed my duties with Captain Donaldson and—taking to heart his advice about learning English—got hold of a volume of the Army Pocket Books series called The Loom of Language. At first, because a reasonable probationary period had been agreed at headquarters, I had enough time, particularly during night duty, to work my way through it, page by page. Sometimes the captain looked over my shoulder and explained unusual expressions with a few words on the origin of an idiom or metaphor.
On May 11, 1945, when I went to the camp gate, I saw agitated prisoners crowding around the noticeboard where the orders of the commander and occasionally important news items were posted. The reports that aroused such an unusual degree of interest were taken from various newspapers and stated that, after capitulation to the Western powers in nearby Rheims, the Wehrmacht had now laid down its arms to all the victorious powers in Karlshorst.1 Already from a distance one could see there was a fierce debate taking place; as I came up one of the prisoners was just saying to a group standing there: “Well, it’s over at last! It was high time!” The majority of them looked at him without saying a word.
A few yards away stood a German sergeant, who had repeatedly behaved in such an overbearing way that it was clear he thought the time for ordering people around was not yet over. He shouted at the soldier, “What does ‘at last’ mean? That we’ve lost the war? Is that what you wanted?” He glanced around, looking for approval. The man he had addressed, who was already walking away, turned around, went right up to the sergeant, and replied, straight to his face in a soft but unintimidated voice, “No! But that the damned war is over!” A corporal joined in and bellowed over the heads of the others, “It was an idiotic war anyway! From the start! Who believed in victory?” Another shouted into the growing confusion, “The Führer’s genius! Dear Lord!” And soon everyone was shouting at everyone else, some men even came to blows, and again and again the words “idiotic war” and “the Führer’s greatness” were repeated. It showed how sensitive the subject still was.
At any rate, one could read from the men’s faces that in many cases the acquired reflexes continued to work. In not a few there was reflected a disbelieving shock at the openness with which some expressed themselves about the Hitler years. Then the corporal who had first used the phrase “idiotic war” walked off, shaking with laughter. The overbearing sergeant shouted after him: “Traitor! Crook!” As neither word had any effect, there followed “Deserter!” But the corporal, a man of about fifty, didn’t turn around. He simply raised his arms in the air and waved them from side to side, and repeated, laughing contemptuously, “Yeah, yeah! The Führer’s genius!’
The following day when I encountered this corporal on the camp street, we talked about the incident. He proved to be altogether entertaining and ended up inviting me to his one-man tent. As a painter and sketcher, he said, he was by profession, so to speak, always “a couple of steps” out of the world. But the madness of this war was something he could never have thought up. It was sometimes said of the Germans that they had no relation to reality: he thought it was a fairly stupid cliché, but Hitler had made it true. And the stupidity, as well. Against the whole world: he would never understand what had got into the Germans. And the Germans themselves hadn’t understood it either, as the previous day’s row had made clear.
His views were food for a good many more conversations. Since he was incessantly painting or drawing our American guards—or their wives, children, and sweethearts from photographs—he benefited from numerous privileges. In between, he painted camp views, landscapes, or flowers on small plywood panels. He came from the Bergisch Land, the hilly region south of the Ruhr, and his name was Alfred Sternmann. Among his privileges, apart from his own tent, were a proper cupboard instead of a metal military locker, two easy chairs, and a kettle and a water container to make tea. He also had a divided-off studio. So whenever my duties permitted I spent the afternoons with him, drinking tea.
To improve my linguistic skills I got a GI at headquarters to procure more books from the Pocket Library for me.2 I read the adventures of Tom and Huck for the second time and, apart from that, got some other titles from Lieutenant Dillon—who had some knowledge of literature, but only came out with it reluctantly—among them Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. A little later a corporal on the headquarters staff introduced me to the author whose works then accompanied me for the longest time during my imprisonment: W. Somerset Maugham. Perhaps influenced by my father’s prejudice against novels, I was rather skeptical when I began to read The Razor’s Edge, the tale of a restlessly driven man. But as soon as I finished it I immediately began Of Human Bondage, the story of an inexorable decline; and was finally able, with some difficulty, to get hold of The Moon and Sixpence. It was impossible to obtain more works by the writer, except for a volume of novellas, which mostly contained sharply observed love stories coming to a dramatic crisis. Astonishingly, no one recommended Steinbeck to me or Dos Passos, who had already been famous for a long time by then.
The city of Laon, seen from the POW camp in which the author spent almost two years (oil painting on wood by Alfred Sternmann)
In the course of the months in which I was studying Somerset Maugham, I never came across a single awkward or even boring line. My reading, together with that first conversation with Captain Donaldson, also brought home to me that my knowledge of literature had so far been too much dominated by classic German works, that I knew neither Musil nor Heinrich Mann nor Thomas Mann, nor Balzac, Flaubert, Dickens, or the great Russians: all of them names that frequently came up, but which meant very little to me. Beyond that, I got to know, through the periodical Die Brücke (The Bridge), which was produced especially for the American POW camps, the names of contemporary German authors like Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, Reinhold Schneider, and Romano Guardini; I was particularly impressed by the poems of Erich Fried.3
The relaxed behavior of the American soldiers toward each other continued to surprise me. Between the higher and lower ranks there was no “Attention!”; only when orders were being issued was there any standing at attention with the arm stiffly angled to the edge of the cap. Even senior officers were friendly to privates in an unaffected way and during discussions one often saw both squatting down together. The security measures were quite relaxed as well. The work parties leaving and entering the camp were merely counted; as a result, it became customary that on some evenings four or five prisoners stayed in Laon and in their place the same number of prostitutes came into the camp disguised in work clothes. Then in the morning the two groups changed places. First Sergeant Driffel once told me that he had long ago seen through our trick: “You Germans think you’re damned smart. But we’ve known for a long time that you’re hanging around in the brothels in town.” He would, nevertheless, take no action. Because in the same situation they would have done exactly the same. As long as no one goes missing.
As my relationship with Captain Donaldson became closer I was able—with the support of some fellow prisoners—to earn a few privileges. So we expanded the handball and soccer tournaments, which had been at first only camp championships, to other nearby camps in Rheims, Soissons, and Saint-Quentin. We a
lso proposed that a group of those interested be given classes in politics, in particular on the rudiments of democracy. Captain Donaldson was indeed able to get hold of a kind of educational officer, whose possibly all-too-high-flown expositions the majority of the participants met with their own hard-boiled irony. Nevertheless, the classes of the “Commanding Professor,” as Captain Grey was mockingly called, were not without their effect. The biggest surprise was that he not only put up with objections from his listeners, but encouraged them, and a first lieutenant from Hamburg, with whom I soon had quite a few conversations, said after one of these debating sessions, “The good man is very convincing. But the Americans are just guileless people. A man like that doesn’t know that freedom always goes wrong in the end.”
But above all, working with some other prisoners it was possible to get surplus food supplies into the French camp in the fortress of Laon. The Americans regularly drove all foodstuffs that had not been used to a nearby rubbish dump and left them in a moldy heap to be fed on by rats, mice, and other creatures. In the French camp, however, about four thousand German prisoners were incarcerated in wretched conditions. One of them whispered to me during a visit that they would dearly love to have the stacks of loaves, the sacks of milk powder, the dried eggs, and the corned beef that were left over every day in our camp. It didn’t take many words to convince Captain Donaldson of the absurdity of this situation. Nevertheless, military bureaucracy took a couple of weeks to comply with the request.
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