by Oakley Hall
We could smell the camp before we reached it. At first no one identified the smell, like some kind of garbage dump. Then we came over a low ridge, and there was the barbed wire, an impressive-looking structure that must be a cell block, and ranks of low wooden buildings. Inside a gate were about a million people in black-and-white-striped pajamas, waving their arms, and over the gate was a banner with the message WELCOM AMERICANS.
Bunge, the driver, apparently didn’t want to go down there, either, because he slowed going down the hill, and a couple of other halftracks hustled on ahead of us to liberate the Frigga work camp.
Inside the gate we were surrounded by the prisoners in their chain gang outfits, clogs on their filthy feet. They all looked like clothes on hangers, they were so skinny, with faces carved out of hard, grainy wood. They were happy enough to see us, cheering and waving with big rotten-teeth smiles. And the terrible stink. One of them climbed onto my halftrack and motioned to us to keep going, pushing on through the crowd of prisoners, “Come Amerikaner, see!” something like that, enough so I got the gist and told Bunge to keep going. One of the other halftracks fell in behind us, as though they had a guide also. We ran out of the crowd and along the wire on muddy ground. Ahead there were two of the gray Kraut bulldozers, not moving.
So we came to the pit where they had tried to bury the corpses. The firefight must’ve been to hold us up until the bulldozers had covered over the bodies. They hadn’t got it done. More than 1,800 bodies were counted in that pit. They were stacked neatly in the Kraut way, naked men and a few women.
I looked from face to face in the halftrack, and I knew that no one else, like I myself, could think what expression to wear on his face. Our guide was grinning, grinning, pointing.
Later Colonel Grady assembled the men and women from the village, who of course maintained they’d had no idea that such things were going on, they’d just thought it was a camp where prisoners of war were making some airplane parts for the Wehrmacht, and there was a rock quarry. We herded the villagers down to the camp to dig up the corpses that had been covered over by the bulldozers, taking some pleasure in their weeping and puking and whining. Our own bulldozers dug new pits, and the villagers carried the bodies to them and laid them out. I guess it made us feel better. There was an awful kind of helplessness.
Some of the prisoners died from our feeding them. They had to be weaned back onto food, thin gruel to start with. Luckily Colonel Grady knew enough to lay that out early on.
There were some Pole prisoners who were as excited about kissing American soldiers as the Russians had been, but by now we knew enough to keep a hand on our wallets and an eye on the radio. The Poles were in the best shape of any of the prisoners, as a detachment of them had come in only two weeks ago.
Tallboy and Joe Pugh and I and some others talked with a Brit prisoner of war who was not in bad shape, as he’d bailed out of a fighter in March.
I asked him what had happened to the guards.
“Most of them they drowned in the river yesterday,” he said. “They had a kind of bucket brigade, you know, and they’d pass the buggers along down to the river. The Poles held them under and then let them float on down.
“The commandant was a Colonel Bultman, who escaped over the river. The real sadist was Colonel Haupt, who also escaped, too bad about that. There was a major they tore apart. Guards and kapos, they killed them.” The Limey leftenant discussed it calmly.
The camp was a work camp, slave labor, all nationalities but mostly Russian, French, Hungarian, and Polish, plus some Italian politicals and some Gypsies. The cell block was for important political prisoners. There had been a Rothschild there, and a member of the Polish nobility—but they were gone, flown out in a Junkers last month.
Outside the gate, the building a little way up the ridge was the officers’ barracks. The officers had girl prisoners for sex. The attractive girls among the prisoners were assigned to the officers, and some of the officers kept their mistresses in rooms in the village, away from the stink of the camp.
The prisoners who had mechanical abilities were assigned to the aircraft factory nearer the village, marched there at five o’clock in the morning and back at five o’clock at night. Less fortunate prisoners, especially the Russians, worked in the quarry breaking rock. There were 186 steps down into the quarry, 186 back up. Prisoners did not make their twenty or thirty trips a day for many days.
Colonel Haupt liked to hang out on the rim of the quarry with his Luger and shoot anybody who halted to rest on the climb out. Others would be nailed to carry the bodies out, and they had better not pause to rest, either. Haupt had a number of other nifty tricks for Luger practice as well. He was the worst of the Krauts, the Limey said.
* * *
We took on what seemed our priority, which was feeding those poor people in their stripes and clogs, keeping order mostly. You had to hold them back from gorging on what bread and meat and carrot and turnip stew the cooks were able to jack up in quantity, so they wouldn’t die in convulsions as we saw more than one of them do, feeding them in that terrible stink that only diminished when the bodies had been reburied in trenches, but many among them were too far gone, dying, and they had to be taken care of, too. It was both the worst time of the war, there at the very end of it, and the best; because the platoon, company, battalion were not just killing Krauts but trying to save lives, and we did try, and we did save lives, and we were better for it, though still that awful deep-running current of outrage for the deadly cocksuckers who would do a thing like this ran through and underneath everything.
For some reason the prisoners weren’t crazy to break out and start walking home, wherever home was—as though they had to savor their liberation on the site, and the food furnished to them by us and later the Swedish Red Cross.
I remembered Stan Takahashi saying that Manzanar was not a real concentration camp. Little did he know.
The Limey took us through the cell block, which was empty now. The accommodations were not bad for a prison camp. The cells had writing tables; some of them had easy chairs, cots with white coverlets, a crucifix on a wall. The emptiness of the place, echoing with our boots, was spooky.
Later I went over for a look-see at the officers’ quarters with Tallboy and Lieutenant Smithers. There was a big downstairs common room, with easy chairs and sofas and lamps, an office, and a window looking out on the barbed wire and the hovels of the prisoners behind the wire. There were women there, not bad-looking, either. Tallboy took upstairs a pretty Gypsy woman, who was willing enough, and came down with a case of crabs that hung on for a month.
Lieutenant Smithers, who prowled around in the office, called me over. He held a parchment lampshade out at a slant from the lamp, and he pointed at it with his other hand. I approached with that end-of-the-war reluctance, hoping this was not just one more thing I didn’t want to have to know about, and it was that, all right, it was a tattoo on the lampshade, a heart with a double eagle head looking over the top, and in the heart some Cyrillic words, a tattoo that had belonged on somebody’s body once.
2
About ten days after we’d liberated the camp, Lieutenant Smithers came off the phone with a finger pointed at me. We were in the commons of the officers’ barracks.
“Daltrey, there’s another report that bird Haupt’s been seen in the village. Visiting some snatch there. Take a couple of guys and go take a look. Sometime it’ll maybe not be a false alarm.”
Robbie and Bunker and I took off in the company jeep, Robbie driving and Bunker in the back. I sat with a boot braced up on the dash and a .45 holstered on my belt. There’d been three reports of Colonel Haupt seen in town, from suck-up villagers.
Robbie drove up the dirt road to the village past the dump of rusting Kraut earthmoving equipment. Down in the next valley were the big hangar buildings of the closed-up aircraft factory, black humped roofs gleaming in the sun. From the ridge we could look back on the camp in its wire-enclosed spread backed
up by the glistening ocher and shadowed rock face of the quarry, with its top fringe of grasses and black woods.
A Red Cross flag stirred in a little wind. The Swedish Red Cross had come in to take charge of the poor bastard inmates. They knew from other liberated camps how to bring these skeletons back from starvation. The war was definitely over, and rumors kept coming that we’d be moving on north along the river.
Robbie roared on into the town with its two-story tile-roofed houses like a toy village, where the good Austrians claimed they hadn’t known of the camp five miles away, that you could smell when the wind was right, and even when it wasn’t, and see the prisoners going in files to and from the aircraft parts factory. We knew the place where Haupt had been seen, and Robbie slammed the jeep to a halt before the building with a closed-up pharmacy on the ground floor. The door to the apartment upstairs was bolted, but Bunker shouldered it open, and I sprinted up the stairs with the other two behind me. Ahead I heard a woman’s screeched warning.
I shoved open another door and followed the .45 in. A fat, blond young woman in a petticoat stood barefoot by the window as though thinking of jumping out. A man in a civilian jacket, corduroy pants, a blue shirt, and a striped tie faced me, smiling.
“Colonel Haupt?” I said, as the others came in behind me.
He made a shrugging motion of his upper body, still smiling. “Hi, fellows!” he said. “Any of you fellows from New Jersey?” he asked.
I felt silly holding the .45, so I holstered it. Robbie and Bunker carried M-1s.
“I spent seven years in Lakewood,” Haupt said, no trace of a Kraut accent. “Seven good years,” he said, smiling, nodding.
The woman sat down on a window seat, hands in her lap. She had a creamy pink-and-pale fat-girl complexion, and she stared anxiously at me.
Haupt had a dark, lined face with neatly brushed hair growing low on his forehead.
“There was a nice little bar there where you could get a good lager,” he went on. “Or a nice bottle of Gerolsteiner if you were inclined.”
“Pat!” Bunker said, and I put my hand on the butt of the .45 when the Kraut unbuttoned his jacket. He took the jacket off and laid it on the bed.
He made a gesture, asking permission, and stepped to the big armoire against the wall. I drew the .45 as he opened the door of the armoire. He took from a hanger a Kraut uniform blouse and armed into it. It had a colonel’s insignia on the collar, and the black lapels of the SS.
The girl murmured in German.
“My uncle is American,” the colonel went on. “He is a butcher there. A fine modern shop, very nice. All modern things. I worked for him.”
“I understood you were a butcher here,” I said.
His smile did not falter. “I kept company with a very nice girl there,” he went on. “Her father was an automobile dealer. She was very nice. Sometimes we would go for picnics.
“Once I went with her to New York. We went to the Statue of Liberty, to a film also. We had supper there. We walked on Fifth Avenue among the rich people. It was very nice.”
He made the permission gesture again and took a uniform cap from the shelf of the armoire and donned it. Now he wore a colonel’s cap and blouse, with the brown corduroy trousers and the striped tie. He had straightened so he was standing at attention, his shiny shoes set at right angles to each other.
I told him he was under arrest.
He shook his head. I could see a gold-filled tooth at the corner of his lips. He had a little hairline mustache like Errol Flynn’s, which you didn’t notice right away because of the darkness of his face.
“Ah, no,” he said. His voice had become deeper, that harsh Germanic bark. “I will only surrender to a person of proper rank,” he said. “I will not surrender to a sergeant!”
“Yes, you will,” I said.
He shook his head again. He made a military right face and started toward the door beyond the bed.
“Halt!” I said, cocking the .45.
He marched toward the door. I skipped after him and swatted him hard on the back of the head with the barrel of the .45. The woman screamed as Haupt went down on his face, the cap rolling free.
I bent over him as he laboriously turned on his back. He glared up at me, his mouth working. He spat in my face. I jerked upright, swiping at my cheek. Then I jammed the muzzle of the .45 into his mouth. My finger contracted on the trigger, but just then Bunker swung his combat boot and kicked the colonel in the head, putting out the lights.
There was no point killing him if he didn’t know I was killing him.
“Get him out of here,” I said, boosting myself off him.
3
Another sergeant, Tom Dowling, and I were sent to translators’ school at the University of Grenoble in May of 1945. We came up to Paris whenever we could get away, and one night we were eating dinner in a hot little café on the Left Bank when somebody started throwing torn-off bits of breadstick. Tom and I scowled at each other over our bottle of rouge. From time to time bits of crusted bread bounced off us or the table. I finally figured that I was the target.
It was Americans mostly, some uniformed, some not. Just about everybody in the place had girls but Tom and me. It was one big party in Paris at that time, and we felt very out of it down in Grenoble. I had never looked up Corinne.
Finally I approached the table by the window where a major was sitting alone over a demitasse. The glass that had held the breadsticks was depleted from his games. He grinned drunkenly at me. He was Mr. Chapman from San Diego State College.
“Hullo there, Daltrey!”
“Hello, Mr. Chapman!” I said, making about a third of a salute.
“Major,” he slurred, pointing to his shoulder pip. His eyeballs looked as though they’d been soaked in olive oil, his forehead was slick with sweat, and his tie was loose.
“What are you doing here, Major?”
“Enjoying life,” he said and huff-huffed a laugh. “And what are you doing, Sergeant?”
I told him, standing uncomfortably beside his table while the couple at the next table tried to ignore us. Major Chapman’s eyes didn’t focus when he regarded me, as though he were fixed on somebody over my right shoulder. Major Shitface.
“Daltrey,” he said in a low voice. “I have managed to imbibe more alcohol than my system seems able to process. May I ask you to help me home? I have been sending signals your way for the last twenty minutes.”
Tom had paid our addition, and he and I helped Major Chapman, hard-breathing, out of the restaurant to the cooler air of the street, where Chapman took some deep sucks of breath. He stank of smoke and red wine. It turned out he was quartered at a narrow little hotel down the street, and we got him into an ancient elevator from which he waved a feeble good night as he was borne upward.
“Come see me tomorrow, Daltrey!” he called, just as he ascended out of sight.
4
He was not all that sober the next morning, either, but we went along to the café on the corner and had coffee and croissants.
“Daltrey,” Major Chapman said with his jaw gritted as though he were trying to keep his face from falling apart. “What has happened to your determination to become a writer?”
“I got a letter from the editor of Black Mask saying he would help me get published there if I wanted to work with him.”
“Ah!” the major said, sipping coffee. He squinted at me with what he must have thought was a steely gaze. “And have you in fact been published in Black Mask? I am interested, of course, in the literary progress of my former students.”
“Well, sir, just about that time I got the letter from this editor, I’d started reading Faulkner. ‘The Bear’ in particular.”
“Ha!” he said, rubbing his hands together and grinning. “Oh, my goodness, yes! ‘The Bear!’ So that was the end of your private eye ambitions?”
“Well, I’ve been busy fighting a war.”
“And have you been provided with material for a war novel?”
“The liberation of the Frigga work camp, for one.”
“Ah? And what of your theories of molestation?”
“I saw one of the lampshades.”
“Really!”
He asked me to accompany him that night to a performance of Ubu Roi at a smelly little theater on the Left Bank. The performance in French was deeper water than my immersion in Langue et Littérature, and halfway through I was pretty much out of it, but Major Chapman was having a high time, drinking brandy out of a flask and ready for another merry night of breadstick throwing. I got him into his wrought-iron and brass-curlicued elevator again and was ordered to meet him at his office at Stars and Stripes the next day.
There it turned out that he was the editor of a magazine called Soldiers’ Monthly, and I could consider myself detached to Stars and Stripes, with the assignment to write a piece on the liberation of the Frigga camp for the magazine.
In Paris I received a letter from Pogey. He had seen in the San Diego Union that Barbara Bonington was engaged to Daniel Rothenberg, a medical intern at Stanford, wedding in June. By this time Bonny and I hadn’t corresponded for months.
Long ago she had warned me she would marry a doctor.
Only three days later, Tom Dowling came up to Paris from Langue et Littérature in Grenoble, with a battered yellow telegram that had been forwarded to me all over France.
It had been sent by Barbara Bonington on January 2, 1944. The address should have brought it to me, except that I had moved along a couple of times. It had taken five months to reach me.
PAYTON I AM SURE YOU ARE IN THIS TERRIBLE BATTLE AND I PRAY AND PRAY YOU ARE NOT HURT STOP PLEASE COME BACK TO ME.
Shit!
BOOK THREE
Love and War in California
Chapter 14
1
In November of 1945, attached to Stars and Stripes, I was sent by Soldiers’ Monthly to report on the War Crimes Trials in Nuremberg and attended the execution of Colonel Haupt.
