Surviving the Reich

by Ivan L. Goldstein

  One of the new prisoners whispered to me, “Whatever you do, don’t stop; don’t say you can’t go on.” They had just experienced such an episode. One of the prisoners could not continue; he was summarily taken to the side of the road and shot on the spot. I passed this information on to our foursome.

  I have no idea how many hours passed, but my next recollection is of reaching the city of Prüm, Germany. We stopped at a building occupied by German soldiers, and we literally collapsed when we got inside. We were brought food—a slice of dark bread and a bowl of hot soup consisting of water, flour, and potato peelings. This delicacy—“potato peel soup”—was to be the staple food of our captivity, served once a day.

  The warmth of the room and the hot soup gave me a new feeling of life. While I was sitting on the floor, savoring my meal, a tall German soldier came and stood next to me. I stand six feet three inches, and he must have been about that height too. He placed his foot next to my tanker boot, and seeing that it was his size, he ordered me to remove my boots.

  “Can’t,” I said nonchalantly, “I need them.”

  In a split second, his gun was at my forehead. I set down my soup quickly and removed my beautiful boots as fast as I could. After he took the boots, he spotted my watch and pulled it off my wrist. I was left with only a double pair of socks covering my feet. I realized that I needed to put something around my feet or they would freeze. No one seemed to notice as I got up and walked into the next room, which turned out to be the kitchen. A soldier was busy washing dishes. I opened a door and found a closet with mops, brooms, and a large barrel of cleaning rags. I grabbed two armfuls of rags, stuck them under my jacket, and returned to the other room.

  Finding the rags almost immediately after losing my shoes seemed to me an incredible coincidence. Though not on the miraculous scale of the American offensive canceling my certain execution, it was still a bit of divine providence, I reassured myself. I pulled the blessed rags out of my jacket and layered my feet with them. I tied the extra rags together and wrapped them around my waist as my reserve supply of “shoes.”

  The POWs were taken outside to a barn where there were other American soldiers locked up for the night. The weather was still freezing, well below zero, and there was no heat in the barn. Many of the Americans were sick and suffering from exposure, and practically all of them had dysentery.

  I sat with Andy and the paratroopers, Kessler and Lozano, hunched in a small circle. Grimly assessing our chances of survival at nearly zero, we were morose, to say the least. In a desperate situation like this, most people develop an attitude of “every man for himself.” If I see a piece of bread, it’s mine, even if I have to fight for it. But it seemed to me that a mindset like that would mean certain death for all of us, so I proposed the absurd idea of sharing. “Look,” I said, “as individuals, we’ll never make it. We have to become pairs—Andy and I can be one pair, and you guys are the other pair. Each person in the pair should be responsible for the other. Your other half has to be an extension of you.” Then I waited.

  They looked at each other, then at me. Their expressions were of mixed fear, desperation, and hope. I think, deep inside, they wondered whether they really would be capable of sharing their only crust of bread, of helping a partner, even if it meant defying our captors. “Guys, it’s our only chance.” I urged. “Let’s make a pact.”

  I explained how the pairs would benefit each other: At night, we must hold each other close, using shared body heat to stay warm. For part of the night, one will hug the other person’s back, and then we’ll reverse, back and forth, during the night. Any food one of us gets, outside of given meals, must be shared with his partner. If one of the pair has trouble walking, the other will give his support. We need to think of ourselves as one person. If he’s hurt, I’m hurt. If there’s any chance for escape, we escape together.

  They agreed to the pact, and we all made the solemn pledge.

  The next morning was New Year’s Day, 1945. The prisoners were divided into two work groups of approximately fourteen men each, with two guards assigned to a group. I noticed that all the guards were considerably older or younger than the combat soldiers: apparently the German army had a shortage of men. That was encouraging. Maybe the war would end soon.

  We were given a series of jobs, helping on the nearby farms, repairing bombed railroad tracks, clearing debris from bombed-out buildings, and searching for victims of the air raids. Because of the unrelenting winter cold and sickness, prisoners died every night too, and burial detail was the grisliest job of all. We knew that using prisoners of war as slave laborers doing these kinds of tasks was against established international laws. But you don’t speak up about your legal rights when guns are aimed straight at you.

  One day, I was sent out with four other prisoners to work on a farm. There were no men there—all drafted into the German army, I suppose—and the person in charge was a woman between twenty and thirty years old. She was large in size, about two hundred pounds, and built like a football linebacker, with arms like a weight lifter. One of our jobs was filling sacks with potatoes and carrying and stacking the bags. It took two of us to lift and carry each sack, but our muscular fraiiülein would hoist a bag onto her shoulder and carry it by herself. It was clear she despised American weaklings.

  I spotted a large tub of turnips nearby. Unnoticed, I managed to fill my pockets with them. I knew Andy and the paratroopers would be glad to receive this present. Anything edible was the greatest gift of all.

  Working on labor details and tramping down the roads, we noticed that the supply trucks going toward the front revealed the great German war secret—that severe shortages were taking their toll on their war effort. The German military had cleverly circumvented their shortage of gasoline by developing an alternative-fuel engine. The first time we saw it, none of us could figure out what it was.

  “Hey, look at that!” Urda said, pointing to a vehicle that had just passed us on the road.

  “What?” I asked.

  “That contraption strapped to the truck.”

  “I don’t know. Smells like a fireplace.”

  “Will you look at that! They’ve got that truck running on a wood-burning engine!”

  Though the invention was ingenious, we knew that it meant that the Germans were at the end of their supplies. That, and the obvious shortage of men, uplifted us—we dared to hope for liberation.

  By this time, all the prisoners’ bodies and clothes were infested with lice. Body, beard, hair, and clothes became breeding grounds for the biting lice and their eggs. At night, before falling into an exhausted sleep, we spent much of the time picking lice from ourselves. It was almost instinctive, like scratching a rash, and became a constant and unending part of life.

  Like every other captive, I became an expert on lice, so here’s some information that I hope will never be relevant to you: You can’t kill lice by squeezing or crushing them with your fingers. You have to place them on your thumbnail and crush them with your other thumbnail. There are some things you never forget.

  Our nightly conversations almost always revolved around food cravings, our favorite family meals, and the foods we missed most. Number one on my list was my mother’s brisket, and I could picture it dripping with warm gravy. It’s amazing how hunger changes even basic human nature, and I noticed it almost right away. In normal army life, sex was always a major topic. But as POWs, when survival was all we could think about, sex was never mentioned. Food—luscious, hot, American food—filled our dreams.

  We held tenaciously to our plan of surviving in pairs. Nuzzled together at night, working side by side during the day, Andy and I shared our life stories. We talked incessantly about our families, about growing up, about our most personal memories, and above all, our plans for the future, “when this is over.” Barely out of childhood, I confided how much my mother meant to me; how she had raised my brothers and me alone; how she had supported us and trained us to be upstanding citizens;
how she imbued us with a love of reading and music, religion, and art. Andy would tell me, “The one person I must meet, more than anyone else after the war, is your mother!”

  In normal times, I doubt if Andy and I ever would have become friends. But now—wrought by our common jeopardy and subhuman treatment—an unbreakable bond was forming. We were developing a rare closeness, and this relationship became one that I would never share with another human. Our survival depended upon each other, and our lives were united. We counted ourselves as fortunate as we managed to live out one more day. For Andy especially, it was important to put up a good front, not to let our German captors know how much we were suffering, not to let them think that the Yanks were cowards or weaklings. And somehow, trying to make the Germans think we were tough helped us believe it too.

  One incident I will never forget. Our work group was marched out to railroad tracks near the edge of Prüm, to help repair a bombed-out section of track. This was not unusual, for one of General Eisenhower’s main strategies was to keep supplies and munitions from reaching the Germans’ western front. Our air force was blowing up every large German transport vehicle to keep it from getting to its destination, and this included blowing up trains and keeping the tracks unusable.

  As POWs, we would come to know this fact in the worst way. We had just started our labor, when American planes dove down on the work crew, strafing and bombing the project. They made two passes. I jumped behind a large boulder near the tracks, but I was hit by some flying shrapnel in my left shin. I judged the wound to be minor. Quickly, I searched out my partner, Urda. He was OK. Two of the German workers and six of the Americans were dead, and we were all pretty shaken by the attack. We were to find out in the months to come that one of the great dangers to the POW labor gangs were our own Allied air forces.

  For me, the Allied strafing was traumatic. At such a time, your powers of observation and your memory mechanisms are in high gear. The experience stays within you, even when your mind consciously snuffs it out. Even years later, the sound of planes would send me into a cold sweat. True fear—uncontrollable, irrational fear—would overtake me.

  After the incident at the track, we were taken back to Prüm. The next day, new prisoners arrived, and we were on the march again, this time headed for the prison camp in Gerolstein. Our hope was that the next destination would be an improvement. Little did we know what was in store for us.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Hellhole

  WELCOME TO THE HELLHOLE” was the greeting we got from the inmates at Gerolstein. (Ironically, today the town is a health resort.) Few events stand out as vividly in my mind as our arrival there. There must have been five hundred to seven hundred prisoners of war in the huge, barn-like building, similar in structure to an airplane hangar. It was an enormous, drafty, open space with steel walls and cement floors. There was no heat, of course, and freezing from the severe cold was still a threat. Pneumonia was rampant, and there were no medicines.

  Next to the hangar was another building; a single room with a large pit covered by wooden planks. Holes were cut in the planks for toilets. We were led there first, before joining the other inmates. The awful smell emanating from this outhouse sickened me instantly.

  The entire area was enclosed with barbed wire. We were led into the hangar just before dark and served the usual potato peel soup and dark bread. At night the building was locked up and the outhouse wasn’t available. Large forty-or fifty-gallon drums were spread out across the area’s floor. These were the toilets for the night, with large stacks of coarse, newsprint-quality paper next to the drums. I don’t know if the conscious objective was to dehumanize us, to make us feel that we were no more than animals penned up in this deplorable place, but these conditions quickly did the job.

  All of the prisoners had dysentery. By morning, the many latrine barrels were filled to the rim, and the worst detail you could get was being assigned to move the barrels to the outhouse. It took three or four men to slide or lift the drums to their destination, and it was the filthiest task you could imagine. Andy and I were very fortunate in never having to work on this detail.

  Other details were horrific in other ways. In the morning, we always found that eight or ten POWs had died during the night. The morning burial detail was also a terrible assignment, but it was a job that we could not avoid. We lifted each corpse onto a large wagon, and the wagon was pulled to a nearby field. There, we dumped them into a large common grave. At times, we felt sure that one day we would be the ones dumped into that hole. It was only a matter of time.

  Somehow, the dead soldiers were always replaced by new POWs arriving in the camp. The new guys, though horrified and miserable in these dismal conditions, at least gave us hope. They brought news from the front, and the picture was heartening. Every incoming batch of prisoners told us of one victory after another. They assured us that the Krauts were fighting a losing battle and that the war would have to end soon. It couldn’t be soon enough.

  “Hang on, just hang on,” Andy and I told each other, “it won’t be long now.” But we were both losing weight rapidly, and we were weakened by starvation and the intense slave labor, the deplorable conditions, even the nightly torture of the lice. Every night, I fell asleep with the subtle sound of hundreds of men crushing lice between their fingernails.

  At the time, it seemed to me that nothing in my boyhood had prepared me for this experience, yet looking back, I realize that numerous things converged that helped me survive this critical challenge.

  A buoyant personality had a lot to do with it. Early in life, I discovered that people like to laugh, and the class clown is often the most popular kid in school. I learned this quite by accident, actually.

  While still in early grade school, my class was assigned to bring in a project about our hobbies. In fact, I did have an unusual collection. While working in Murph’s, I came across a variety of tie pins among other old jewelry that my mother had bought from customers. From the 1800s through the 1930s, men wore a tie or stick pin in their dress ties as an important piece of personal jewelry. As Mother always encouraged us to broaden our knowledge with hobbies, she suggested that tie pins would make an unusual collection. I loved the idea and would spend a good deal of time organizing and categorizing my collection. My teacher chose a few children from the class, including me, to explain our hobbies to the class and to the parents on Parent’s Day. This was more than I had bargained for. The whole thought of speaking in front of all those people filled me with dread.

  I was as nervous as I could be as she called me to the front of the room to show my collection. The night before, I had been working at our store and had used an old rag to wash the glass showcases. A customer came into the store, and I began waiting on him. Unthinkingly, I stuffed the large, filthy rag into my pants pocket and forgot about it before going home. The next day when the teacher called on me, I went to the front of the room and nervously perused the audience. Sweating profusely, I reached for my handkerchief, but I pulled out the huge, dirty rag instead and proceeded to wipe my face with it. Instantaneously, laughter broke out all over the room. I looked down at the rag and did a double take in mock horror. More laughter! Even the teacher was wiping tears of hilarity from her eyes. I smiled amiably. Suddenly relaxed, I gave the funniest presentation the school had ever seen.

  That night, as soon as Mom came home from work, she asked how my presentation turned out. I told her the story of the rag, acting out how I played up the comic scene. She exploded in shrieks of laughter, asking me to do it again. I don’t remember Mom ever laughing so long and hard.

  So I became the confirmed class clown—using humor to worm my way out of tight situations, seeing the funny side to every incident, and taking advantage of every opportunity to get a laugh. I admit that sometimes I went too far.

  There was, of course, the unfortunate incident of the pig. I was only eight years old at the time, happily modeling clay in Miss Oxley’s fourth-grade art class in Tell
er Elementary School. I decided to try my hand at creating an animal figure, and for some inexplicable reason I decided to form a pig. After some time and concentration, a beautiful pig emerged. I sat and stared at it, taking pride in the finished project. Then, a sly grin flashed across on my face. Was this a male or a female pig? In a wry quest for realism, I modeled the additional part, clearly determining its male gender. I had intended to remove the organ immediately after showing it to a couple of my friends. Predictably, they saw the pig and broke up with laughter. But I hadn’t counted on the little girl in front of me turning around. The little prude caught a glimpse of my project and emitted a loud disapproving moan. Before I could correct my joke, Miss Oxley was standing behind me, twisting my ear. She confiscated the pig just as I had completed it.

  I was sent home with a suspension letter stating that my mother and I were to appear the next morning in the principal’s office. That night when my mother came home from work, I handed her the letter and explained what had happened. Yes, she was “disappointed,” but there was no yelling or punishment. Instead, she took the opportunity to discuss why my joke was in bad taste. The next morning, when we entered the office of Mrs. Feltner, the principal, the pig was standing on her desk in all its anatomical glory. Mrs. Feltner swept into her office, trying to evoke a somber expression, but I detected a curled lip and a slight smile.

  “An excellent rendition of a pig,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Not nice, though. Do you know that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “I wanted to make my friends laugh.”

  “And they did?”

  “Um, yes. I was going to fix it afterwards, though. I wasn’t going to leave it that way, honest!”

  As a kind and wise educator, she accepted me back into the school and talked with me about the right way and the wrong way to use laughter. We all had a friendly, warm chat, and I developed a lasting admiration for Mrs. Feltner. I often wonder what ever happened to my pig.