At least we were free to wander within the perimeter of the camp and we left our crater homes to do so. One day, on the way to the gate, I came across stiff, emaciated bodies stacked up like logs. Moments later, two American soldiers brought another dying prisoner on a stretcher to add to the stack. The prisoner, dressed in a torn, ragged German uniform, had a rosary in his hand as he prayed and cried to God for salvation. Though I said nothing, not wanting to anger the American soldiers, I didn’t like seeing the German soldier in agony and uttering prayers that seemed so hopeless, though I was not religious. As a child I had imagined God as an old man with a beard who watched every step and prevented me from doing stupid things. In all my prayers to Him, I had included members of my family and my dog, and I had great confidence in God’s powers to help us. But after my experiences during the war, my days in this camp, and seeing the soldier’s useless prayers, my confidence in God was gone. Instead, I now thought of myself as an existentialist, responsible for my own life, and I remembered an old saying:
One ship sails east and another west
With the self-same winds that blow.
Tis the set of the sail and not the gale
Which determines the way they go.
Worst of all was the boredom in camp, since there was nothing to do, aside from telling stories and singing. We couldn’t play games, since we didn’t even have a ball or a pack of playing cards. And we had no way out with the guards watching us carefully, so the other prisoners and I didn’t attempt an escape.
Normally, out of a sense of camaraderie, the other prisoners and I shared with each other and tried to help those going through a more difficult time, often by trying to cheer them up. Then one day I participated in a theft that has continued to bother me all my life. This happened after I spotted two of the boys from my Harz Mountain group in a crater. I climbed into the crater, because I heard one of the boys, Georg, complaining of severe stomach pains, while the other boy, Helmut, was so hungry he was crying. I led Georg to a hospital tent, which had been roughly constructed by some German prisoners from materials they found around the camp while other prisoners who were doctors tried to treat the sick.
After delivering Georg to the tent, I returned to the crater where Helmut was still crying from hunger. He held up Georg’s ration—one slice of bread, one teaspoon of dried egg, and one teaspoon of dried milk—and said to me, “I took the food from Georg because he was too sick to eat.”
“That makes perfect sense,” I agreed. “After all, he can’t eat anything.” In this way, Helmut and I justified splitting and eating Georg’s ration. But after we had eaten his food, I felt guilty knowing this was a theft. As meager as it was, the food belonged to Georg.
Making matters worse, Georg came back several hours later, having been released by the doctors, happily looking forward to his ration, which Helmut had presumably saved for him. Now the ration was gone. Realizing he had no food, Georg began crying, and Helmut and I felt a deep sense of shame and guilt.
Then Georg walked back to the hospital tent and came back with one of the doctors. The doctor looked at us sternly, like an angry parent, and said to us, “Today you must give your portions to Georg, since you took his rations yesterday.”
We nodded, shamefaced, and we each gave Georg half our ration. “Thank you,” he said, and his “thank you” hurt. It felt so undeserved, and I felt even more shame and guilt. The experience stayed with me as a powerful lesson in the need to be honest and share. Now, seventy years later, I still sometimes wake in the night, castigating myself for having stolen Georg’s ration.
Chapter 9
Home at Last
After a couple of hellish months the camp closed, and the American soldiers told us that everyone could go. They directed us to get into lines, where American female army personnel handed us our discharge papers. Now we were free and could walk safely in the streets and obtain our ration tickets. As we left the camp, the Americans gave us old, discarded army uniforms, mainly coats, from different armies, since the war was officially over, and most soldiers no longer needed their uniforms. I got a Belgian uniform.
Outside the camp, several large open army trucks were waiting. At the direction of several American army soldiers, we piled into the backs of these trucks, about a dozen men to each one. Since the truck backs had no seats, we crammed together on the bare floors. Once we were all loaded, one of the German prisoners assigned to these trucks drove us to the station, where we were supposed to meet the trains to take us to our home cities. Going home at last! It sounded like a dream to all of us.
But when we arrived at the station, we learned our train had left! We were so disappointed, some of the men charged angrily at the German stationmaster who gave us the bad news, prepared to beat him up. They shouted at him and grabbed his arms, ready to tear them off, when several German officers yelled at them, “Stop! Another train will come. It’s not his fault, nothing is on schedule anymore. Calm down.”
Placated, the mob let him go, and the frightened stationmaster scurried back to the station. A few minutes later, he emerged from the station, telling us, “We have found some trains that can take you home. Just go to the tracks, and you will find them there.”
Eagerly, we lined up by the tracks to board, only to discover that these were cattle cars. That meant we would be traveling in cars with no seats or any amenities—just large empty cars for packing in cattle for their trip to the slaughterhouse.
We soon felt like cattle ourselves, since the railroad cars were packed with dozens of men and women who had spent time in other camps. Worse, since there were no seats, we were crammed together body to body standing up, and the musky odor of cattle and unwashed bodies was overwhelming.
The conditions made it hard to feel much exhilaration at being free. I, like other recently released prisoners, felt very sorry for myself, and we complained to each other about our terrible experiences at the camp, and now having to ride in a cattle car. Months later, though, when I heard of all the atrocities in the concentration camps, I stopped feeling sorry for myself and bemoaning my time in the POW camp. I was alive. I survived. I wasn’t gassed. The camp was horrible, but it could have been worse.
Once we were all on board, the car began to move. Several miles from the station the train picked up speed, going faster and faster, until it was racing along at about thirty miles per hour. Now, despite the crowding, it was exhilarating to think how each mile was closer and closer to home.
Then, through a crack in the door of our car, I noticed that the door of the car in front of us was wide open and a half dozen people were suddenly thrown out. They fell onto the strips of land beside the train and rolled down into fields or shrubs by the side of the tracks. Some staggered up and ran off into the fields, though others lay where they fell, perhaps stunned by being cast out of the train, and some possibly dead.
Later, I discovered that the men who had been tossed out were German soldiers who had worked for the Americans in the prison camps. The other German prisoners tossed them out, since the Americans had chosen these soldiers to act as camp policemen and keep the other prisoners in line in return for being rewarded with a triple portion of our meager daily ration. Within the camps, these Polizei, or police, had treated us far more harshly than the few Americans with whom we had contact, and the other prisoners despised them. Once we were released, the other prisoners got their revenge by pushing them out of the car.
For the most part, we stood silently in the car, except for a group of young German women wearing old coats that were discarded by soldiers. These women had probably worked in various support positions, because during the war women operated radios and telegraph machines and manned the lights that helped the pilots land. Or sometimes the women directed these lights at Allied planes so the German gunners could more easily target them. Once the Americans captured the German towns and cities, many of these women ended up in prison camps for women. Now they were on the train with us, and they talked
and laughed happily, in spite of the discomfort of the car, giddy with glee at the thought of going home.
Suddenly, two of the women pushed over to me through the densely packed passengers and pointed to my Belgian coat. “Where is this from?” they asked.
“I don’t know,” I told them. “I just know it’s a Belgian uniform, but I’m not Belgian.” They laughed heartily at my revelation; then blended back in with the rest of the bodies in the car.
When the train arrived in Kassel, the Americans shouted to us, “Get off the train! We’re stopping for a while.” We quickly got off, glad to escape the hot car for a brief stay at the station. There we saw several Red Cross trucks and a half dozen men and women with large Red Cross insignias on their white shirts standing by a table with a large pot of soup. As several former prisoners and I gathered around them, the Red Cross workers asked us, “Who are you?”
“We’ve just been released from an American POW camp,” we told them. We showed them our discharge papers, and the Red Cross workers gave us bowls of hot soup. Whatever was in the soup, it tasted delicious, since it was the first hot food we had had in months.
After eating, we climbed back in our cattle cars, and the train continued on through the devastation in the once thriving city of Kassel. We passed bombed-out ruins of houses, piles of trash in the streets, and scrawny livestock in the fields. The scene was devastating—a once proud city was now a smoldering ruin that seemed so bereft of people, it felt like the city had become a ghost town.
What we saw was so shocking that the people in my car began to talk about what they might find at home. “Will our families be intact? Will our cities have been bombed?” We had been incommunicado in the camps, having heard almost no news for months. Instead, until a few short months ago, we had been told that Germany was winning the war. It was only on May 8, 1945, when we learned that the war was over and Germany had surrendered. So now, in July of 1945, seeing all of this destruction was like seeing a bubble breaking to show us the grim reality of Germany’s losses.
But as the train sped on, I looked out the crack in the door of the cattle car, and I saw a little tree growing out of the rubble. It had a few green buds, and seeing them gave me strength. I thought, “If that little tree can survive and thrive, so can I.”
Finally, the train arrived in Eschwege, my home. As I got down from the train, wearing only my Belgian uniform and carrying nothing in my arms or on my back, I felt elated to see that the ancient town was still standing. Only the railroad station had been damaged by a bomb.
I left the station and took my familiar route from there to the building where my family had lived for ten years. As I neared the building with our apartment, my six-year-old cousin Lutz, sporting raggedy blond hair and shorts he had nearly outgrown, ran out on the road and hugged me around the knees. He looked up grinning with his new front teeth, jutting out like the teeth of a rabbit because they were too big for his face.
I was ecstatic to see him, and he was thrilled to see me. But as soon as I said, “I can’t wait to see the family,” he stiffened and pulled away from me.
“No, you can’t go in the apartment, Wolf,” he said, pointing to our apartment. “It’s full of Americans!” He pointed to a Catholic church and school across the street and announced, “The whole family is there.”
But why? What had happened that my family was no longer in our apartment? “I’ll go see them there,” I said, following him to the church, as I worried why my family had to leave.
Later my mother told me why. “We had to make way for the American soldiers. They used our apartment as a pro station.” This was, as she explained, a place to distribute prophylactics to the American soldiers, before they enjoyed a night on the town visiting the local bars and picking up girls.
Soon Lutz led me to the Catholic school, an austere brick building covered in vines, where the displaced women and children from the neighborhood lived in the gym, at the priest’s invitation. Once the gym had been filled with gym equipment, including balls and bars for exercising and punching bags. But now all that had been removed, and the gym had become a large cavernous room, where much of the floor was covered with burlap bags stuffed with straw to provide some improvised beds for sleeping. About thirty women and children stood in front of the bags, and I recognized most of them from the neighborhood.
I saw my mother, dressed in black, still in mourning for my brother, standing near Lutz’s mother, my aunt, Tante Lotte, and I saw my grandmother and Lutz’s one-year-old baby sister, Barbara, whom I had never seen before. The baby’s father had been killed in the war before she was born, so he never saw her. All my family members were shabbily dressed, their clothes faded and much mended, and I noticed how sad they looked.
Upon seeing me, my mother, aunt, and grandmother rushed forward, tears streaming down their faces. “I had no idea if you were dead or alive,” my mother gasped. They all hugged and kissed me in turn. I was overjoyed to see them, glad they had survived the war, just as they were excited and relieved to see me.
But then my mother told me, “I don’t want you staying with this room full of women. We must find another place for you.” But where? A moment later, my mother suggested, “I know. You can go to a farm owned by my acquaintances at work. You should be well fed there.” At the time, it seemed like a good idea, but she was wrong.
Reluctantly, I left my family, though it was difficult to pull away from them, since I hadn’t seen them in so long and so much had happened in the intervening time. I saw tears well up in their eyes, as I headed out the door and waved good-bye.
I set out for the farmhouse, which was about two miles from the center of town. As I approached, on the side of the road I saw a large half-timbered farmhouse, surrounded by a barn, stables, and a barnyard with skinny chickens and roosters running around. The roofs were caked with dirt, and the logs along the sides of the house and under the eaves were decaying, suggesting the farm was poorly maintained.
When I knocked on the door, the tall and skinny farmer and his tall rotund wife opened it, wearing shabby, torn, and patched work overalls. “I’m the son of Mrs. Dettbarn, and she suggested I should come here,” I explained. “I just got released from an American prison camp. I need work and a place to stay. Can you give me a job?” The farmer and his wife looked at each other, as if trying to decide what to do, as I waited anxiously, wondering where I would go if they said no.
Finally, the farmer replied, “You can work here, but don’t expect any pay. We’ll feed you, but that’s it. We’re only letting you stay because of your mother.”
“Thank you so much,” I said, as I followed them into the house. Inside, I saw several young women with long blonde hair, who helped the owner care for the house and garden. Like the farmer and wife, they were dressed in old and worn clothing.
“You can sleep in the barn,” the farmer said and led me there. Inside, I met three other men who helped in the fields. They were soldiers whose families were in the Russian-occupied zone, and they couldn’t go home.
The farmer pointed to the stalls with two horses. “You’ll be in charge of the horses,” he said. “That means you’ll be feeding and watering them, and cleaning out their stalls.” Then he strode off and left me in the barn for the night.
So that was my introduction to the farm, where my mother had sent me because she believed I would be well fed there. Unfortunately, the farmer and his wife gave new definition to stingy, as I soon learned. We all ate in the kitchen around a large pine table. For breakfast and lunch we had either oatmeal or dry toast with a little jam. At night, we had more dry bread, with butter if we were lucky. We never saw meat, or even cheese or eggs, on the table. The only eggs we saw were the ones we found in the hay in the barn where some chickens had strayed. We poked little holes in the eggs and drank them raw. I had dreamt about sausages in the prison camp and could almost smell them in my imagination. But I never saw a single sausage on that table. We were fed only marginally better tha
n prisoners at the POW camp that I had recently left.
While the women slept in the farmhouse, the men lived in a loft on top of the cow barn, which had only a small window for light during the day. We had to share a bowl of water for washing and use an outhouse, since the barn had no plumbing. We all slept on bags stuffed with straw covered with a linen cloth. At first, I found it hard to fall asleep, since during the night we heard the clanking chains on the cows as they moved about. But after a few days, I got used to the clanking.
Still, it was uncomfortable sleeping on the lumpy straw bags, and one morning when I tried to shake up the straw in my bag, I found a nest with a mother and four baby mice. They looked at me, terrified. But instead of putting them outside or killing them, I accepted their companionship and was willing to share the warmth with them, as long as they didn’t interfere with my sleep.
In the morning, as I took care of the horses before the three men went to the fields to harvest the crops, the young women came into the barn to milk the cows.
Although the farmhouse was in the village with other houses—and like most of them had stables and a barn near the house—the farm’s fields were about an hour away by horse cart. So in the morning and for most of the day, after I finished caring for the horses, I joined the men in the fields.
I soon found that the farmer’s stinginess extended beyond the food we got to the plow and other equipment, which was stored and locked in a shed in the yard. When we took the equipment out to use it, I found that all the equipment was old, badly maintained, and rusty, which made our work take longer, since it was slow using this equipment to sow or plow. We constantly had to stop to make makeshift repairs when the equipment broke down again and again.
From School to War: Growing Up in Hitler’s Germany (Contemporary Nonfiction) Page 14
