The Living and the Lost

by Ellen Feldman

  That night back in her room Millie opened her journal and began to write.

  Friday, May 9, 1941

  Tonight Miss Albright took me to dinner at the College Inn to celebrate my being made editor in chief of The College News …

  The entry took her half an hour to finish. She wanted to get down everything, what Miss Albright said and what she said in return, even what each of them wore and ate. The only detail she left out was Miss Albright’s line about punishing herself. Once her parents and Sarah were here, nobody would want to bring that up.

  Thirteen

  David had a more difficult time adjusting to life in America. His classmates and even some of the teachers and coaches saw to that. The anti-Semitism Millie encountered was veiled and fastidious. Good manners forbade rudeness. High ideals prohibited vulgar bigotry. The prejudice David met was as muscular and aggressive as the contact sports the boys were required to play. Occasionally, when David and Millie were together, they debated which was worse, the outright insults or the subtle snubs. They never could make up their minds.

  Then, just as David was getting used to the situation, the Third Reich declared war on England, conquered most of Europe, and began rattling sabers at America. In no time at all, he went from being a dirty Jew to being a filthy German. It was no use arguing that he was an enemy of the Germans. Adolescent bodies and minds grow too rapidly for subtle distinctions. There was only one way to prove himself. He made up his mind that as soon as he turned eighteen he’d enlist.

  Millie pleaded with him not to. She reminded him that they’d sworn to stay together. He assured her they would, as soon as he finished defeating Hitler. Mr. Bennett tried to reason with him. When war came, of course David would fight. Mr. Bennett understood how personal the battle would be for him. But there was no hurry. Russ Bennett, who’d served in the last war, believed he had some knowledge of the military. The more education David had, the more use he’d be to the Army. Later David would learn just how wrong Russ Bennett had been. A seasoned private or noncommissioned officer was likely to be twice as valuable as a well-educated junior officer. But that would be later. For the moment he allowed himself to be persuaded. He enrolled at Haverford. At least he and Millie would be close to each other.

  The venture was not a success. His mind was on other matters. He wasn’t the only one. At the end of the first semester, two of his classmates left to join the Canadian Air Force. In June, three left to join the U.S. Navy. This time he didn’t discuss the plan with anyone. He simply turned up one morning first in line at the Army Air Corps recruiting office. He remembered his father’s instruction about being early and eager. The officer in charge was surprised when David said he didn’t want to be a pilot. Every boy who walked through that door dreamed of being a pilot.

  “Bombardier,” David told him. “That way I can drop bombs on German targets.”

  The officer was listening closely, not something he often did, but the bombardier request had made him sit up and take notice. He thought he detected a faint German accent. He asked for David’s birth certificate. David took it from the breast pocket of his coat and handed it over. The recruiter couldn’t make out most of it, but he could recognize the language. He began to laugh.

  “You’re an enemy alien. You’re not going to get near a plane in this man’s army, let alone in the bombardier’s seat. No telling which side you’d drop them things on.”

  A month later, he ended up at Camp Blanding in Florida, a private in the 79th Infantry Division. That was all right. He’d kill Nazis on the ground instead of from the air. That was even better. He’d see their faces as they fell. He was young enough to think he’d enjoy that, but then so was everyone else in his unit.

  As it turned out, a Jew was no more welcome in the barracks than in the dormitory of a good Christian boarding school, though now there was a new twist. Many of the men who taunted and tried to fight him had never seen a Jew before. But enmity does not demand familiarity. It’s more likely to flourish without it. A joke went through the barracks, though the first time David heard it, the soldier who asked it made it sound like a serious question. “Tell me something, Mosbach, is it true a Jew is just a nigger turned inside out?”

  Halfway through basic training he was transferred to another division. He was surprised. So were the other men and even the noncoms in his unit. Men didn’t get transferred in the middle of basic training. It didn’t take long for him to figure out what was going on. His new unit was made up of men of foreign descent, German, German-Jewish, and Italian. As soon as they fell into formation that first morning, the sergeant ordered them to turn in their weapons and dress uniforms.

  “We got weekend passes coming up, Sergeant. You want us going into town in fatigues?” one of the men argued.

  “There ain’t going to be no weekend passes,” the sergeant snarled as he marched them to a muddy field and ordered them to start pitching the tents they’d been issued. “Barracks is too good for the likes of you Nazi and I-talian spies.”

  For the next five months David and the other men lived in a muddy field in those tents, worn relics of the last war, and performed the most menial and unpleasant duties the Army could come up with. The joke among them was that in this unit KP was a reward for good behavior.

  Then one day, for a reason the Army never explained and David never learned, a new sergeant showed up—the last one had had a southern drawl; this one barked with a Brooklyn accent—and told them to break camp and reclaim their uniforms. The next morning David received his orders and a train ticket to Maryland. He didn’t have a chance to find out where the others were posted, though months later he would come across some of them.

  He spent the next forty-eight hours sitting and standing on trains crowded with men in uniform and wives and girlfriends and children going to meet other men in uniform, waiting for hours in rural junctions for connections to other trains that were invariably late and just as crowded, and bouncing over unpaved country roads in a military bus. Finally, the bus came to a stop, the doors opened, and he swung his duffel over his shoulder and climbed down to the dusty road. Ahead of him, the sun was just rising behind a distant mountain. He put his hand up to shade his eyes. In front of him was a stone wall with an iron gate. A sentry box stood on one side of the gate, a sign on the other. The sign was the only indication of where he was. It said STOP. Great, he thought, I’ve been posted to Camp Stop.

  He squinted into the slanting rays of early morning sun, made out the silhouette of an MP in the guard box, approached, and saluted. The MP returned his salute and asked for his orders. At first David thought he had misheard. The MP seemed to be speaking German. Obviously the past forty-eight hours spent on crowded unreliable trains and buses, drinking cold, bitter coffee, and eating stale sandwiches and greasy doughnuts had monkeyed with his senses. Then it got worse. He glanced past the MP into the camp. A platoon of soldiers was marching down the street. They were wearing Wehrmacht uniforms. He blinked. They were still wearing those gray-green uniforms. And now he could hear them chanting in cadence. They were counting off in German. He knew he wasn’t dreaming, and yet …

  He looked from the parade ground to the MP. The man was grinning. “Welcome to Camp Ritchie, Private Mosbach. I’m from Dortmund. How about you?”

  “Berlin,” David answered. He was still incredulous but beginning to catch on.

  “Uncle Sam finally realized we weren’t enemy aliens but a goddamn gold mine he was sitting on. We speak the language. We got the customs on wires. We know the country, or at least our particular corner of it. And we have firsthand experience of the fucked-up German mind. Hell, the prisoner you end up grilling—if you don’t wash out—might be the kid who called you a dirty Jew back in the good old days. You’re going to feel right at home here, Mosbach.”

  The MP was on the mark. For the first time since he and Meike had boarded the train in Anhalter Bahnhof—and even before that, he realized when he thought of all the events leading up
to that day—he felt as if he’d come home.

  Not that life at the camp was easy. The physical training, including the course in close combat, commonly dubbed Kill or Be Killed, was brutal. The classes in photo interpretation and terrain and aerial intelligence were grueling. The course in Order of Battle entailed endless hours memorizing every unit in the Wehrmacht, its chain of command, arsenal of weapons, terms, abbreviations, personnel, and every fragment of information the military possessed about the enemy army. The idea was that if an interrogator mentioned names, places, and details known only to those involved while questioning a prisoner, the prisoner would conclude that someone had already spilled the beans and pour out some more.

  Many weren’t up to the task. The washout rate, as the MP had warned, was high. David kept making new buddies and losing them. Every week men were sent back to their original units. But David had made up his mind. He was not going back.

  It wasn’t all harsh physical training and endless study and memorization. A Hitler impersonator held mock rallies where they practiced swearing allegiance to the Fatherland and the Fuhrer. The replica of a German village for instruction in house raids was straight off a Hollywood set. Ava Gardner could be just around the corner, they joked when the practice was over. The chow was, those from camps across the country agreed, the best in the Army. That was because the chief cook had worked at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, or so rumor said.

  Not everyone at the camp was of German descent. French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and others who had fled to America or been born there to immigrant parents went through similar training. As time went on, there were Japanese. And here and there was an American whose family had been in the country for generations but who had a facility for languages. One man was fluent in eleven different tongues and understood four more. But David trained and lived, ate and slept with German Jews. For the first time in years he was not taunted as a dirty Jew or a yid or a kike, or left alone in the dorm as others went off to a party or dance at a nearby girls’ school—there were no parties or dances in this training—or waylaid in a hallway by someone looking for a fight. And for the first time he could put his experience in context. When he heard about other escapes from Germany or Hungary or the Netherlands, he knew he’d gotten off easy. He swore he’d never tell Millie that. It would only make her feel worse.

  The training was, as the MP had warned, punishing, but instead of drifting through his studies as he had at Haverford, he excelled—with the exception of one course. Prisoner Interrogation was not the most demanding class. He didn’t come away from it bloodied and bruised as he did from Kill or Be Killed. He didn’t fall asleep over the manual as he did over the memorization charts of Order of Battle. In fact, he looked forward to the practice sessions in questioning POWs. He enjoyed sizing up people, trying to spot their weaknesses, figuring out how to exploit their vulnerabilities. The instructor, Captain Baum, said David was so good at it that after the war he ought to train to become a psychiatrist. His buddies Sam and Danny razzed him about that. Herr Doktor Mosbach, they started calling him. Then Baum was promoted, and Captain Krantz replaced him.

  “The first order of business,” Krantz announced the day he took over, “is to forget all the crap that’s been drilled into you. The training films are bullshit. In those fairy tales, you offer a Kraut a cigarette, and after the first puff he’s telling you where his unit is stationed. You tell him you’ll make sure his family knows he’s alive and well, and he’s drawing you maps of fortifications. Bullshit,” he repeated. “No food, drink, or cigarettes until after the interrogation. And if you don’t get anything out of them that first time, no food, drink, or cigarettes until you do. No whispering sweet nothings in their lousy Kraut ears. You shout. You threaten. You bully. You make them think you have the same tricks up your sleeve as their Gestapo bastards use. You can’t lay a finger on them, thanks to the goddamn Geneva Conventions, but anything short of that is A-OK with me. Anything that gets them shitting in their pants and willing to turn in their own mothers to save their skin is more than A-OK. I don’t give a fuck how you play the game, as long as you win it. Any questions?”

  No one had a question. They were, for the most part, highly intelligent men, and because they were, they couldn’t believe Krantz meant what he said. It was one thing for a sergeant to scare men into becoming soldiers in basic training. They’d all been through that. It was something else to believe you could verbally beat information out of a prisoner. You didn’t have to have training in psychology to know you get more flies with honey than vinegar, as David’s mother was fond of saying. Krantz just wanted to show them he was the tough guy in the room.

  * * *

  David knew what was up the minute he came out of the barracks and saw the bus with the blacked-out windows. According to scuttlebutt, close to half a million German POWs were imprisoned on American soil. Some of them worked on farms and in factories to compensate for the manpower shortage now that so many men were fighting overseas. Occasionally a handful of them were trucked into the camp to be interrogated. The Army wasn’t looking for information. The prisoners had been questioned as soon as they’d been captured. Now they were merely useful as guinea pigs for training.

  David was third in line for a practice session that morning. “How’d it go?” he asked when Sam came out of the room where he’d grilled a prisoner under Krantz’s eye.

  “I blew it.”

  “How?”

  “When I told the prisoner to sit, he pulled the old I’m-a-German-officer-and-prefer-to-stand gambit. But according to his record, he’d been busted up pretty bad when he was captured, so I said, suit yourself, but since you got that wound saving another man, it seems to me you’ve earned a seat. You could see the wheels spinning in his tiny Kraut brain. Was I pulling his wounded leg or did I really think he was a hero. I said his comrade had told us how he’d saved his life. He sat in the chair. I offered him a cigarette. He looked like he wanted to kiss me. Krantz could barely wait till the session was over to tell me if I ever did that again, he’d bust my ass out of here so fast my head would spin. I said no cigarettes, he howled. I told him I thought he meant before the interrogation. No means no. I was sure he was going to blow a gasket.”

  “Do me a favor,” David said. “Hang on to these while I’m in there.” He held out a pack of Lucky Strikes. “I’m not taking any chances on reaching for them out of habit.”

  Sam laughed, but he took the cigarettes.

  David’s interrogation went well enough, at first. He didn’t shout or bully, but he did remain distant and correct, almost disdainful. Nonetheless, he managed to pick up on the prisoner’s sullenness. This wasn’t an arrogant Wehrmacht soldier; this was a disgruntled boy. He opened the prisoner’s folder and pretended to study it again. Finally he closed it and looked up.

  “You were with the KG 76.”

  “I never said that.”

  “You didn’t have to. We know these things. Fine unit.”

  The prisoner didn’t answer.

  “Hogg is a good commander.”

  The prisoner shifted in his seat.

  “You must be proud of serving in that unit under him.”

  The prisoner’s mouth curled in disdain, but he said nothing.

  “What I don’t understand is why a man with your record is still a corporal. How come you weren’t promoted long ago?”

  Still no answer, but another shift of position.

  “It wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that Hogg is Prussian and you’re Bavarian?”

  The man looked at David, then away, but his mouth twitched as if he was fighting to keep the words from spilling out.

  “They’re all alike, those Prussians. Good soldiers. I’ll give you that. But so are a lot of men from other areas. Brandenburg. Saxony. Bavaria. But try telling that to a Prussian.”

  The prisoner couldn’t stand the injustice any longer. “Do you know how many Prussians were promoted over me? Not one of them with my r
ecord.” He began listing them.

  “What exactly did that achieve, Mosbach?” Krantz asked when the interrogation was over. “We’re looking for information, not a grudge list.”

  “I’m sorry, sir, I was getting to that, but you didn’t give me time.”

  “Time! You think the Krauts are going to give you time before they start firing?”

  “I think a few minutes spent establishing rapport with the prisoner will pay off.”

  “Rapport! Rapport doesn’t save lives, Mosbach. Information saves lives. Troop location, troop strength, troop movement saves lives. If I catch you establishing fucking rapport again, I’ll bust your ass out of here so fast your head will spin.”

  “How’d it go?” Sam asked as he handed the pack of Luckies back to David.

  “He threatened to bust my ass out of here so fast my head will spin.”

  Sam managed a laugh, then frowned. “You think he means it?”

  “Nah. Like we said that first day, he just likes to play tough guy.”

  Nonetheless, Krantz continued to ride him. He rode them all, but he rode David the hardest. The same traits that had made him a star interrogator under Baum made him a failure under Krantz.

  One morning toward the end of his training period, he was told to report not to his usual class but to camp headquarters. His heart was in his throat as he made his way past the barracks and classroom buildings. Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe Krantz really meant what he said, though the timing was strange. He’d finished the prisoner interrogation course two weeks earlier.

  A truck stood, engine idling, outside the building. An officer asked him his name, checked his clipboard, and told him to get aboard. Most of the seats were already taken. If he was washing out, so were a lot of other men. He found a seat toward the back. No one was sure what was going on, but there were rumors. They couldn’t be washing out, some of the men said. They hadn’t gotten orders. So it had to be the other thing. A couple of men told them to shut up and stop tempting fate.