by Leo Litwak
THE MEDIC
Life and Death in the Last Days of WWII
LEO LITWAK
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2001
DEDICATIONS
To Jessica
To Emma
To Sophia
To Carolyn
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to Herbert Gold for his all-important counsel and close reading; to Charlotte Painter for her detailed critiques; to George and Annie Leonard for their support and fine editing; to Molly Giles for her sly, trenchant criticism; to Bernard Taper for suggesting Algonquin; to Tom Farber for his encouragement; to the men and women of the Saloon who urged me on; to my agent, Ellen Levine, who kept me on the path; to my editor, Duncan Murrell, who read the manuscript as I hoped it would be read and guided me to the finishing touches.
CONTENTS
Prologue
CHAPTER 1
LEAVING
CHAPTER 2
BAPTISM
CHAPTER 3
BELGIAN WINTER, 1945
CHAPTER 4
ACROSS THE RIVER
CHAPTER 5
LUCCA SAID
CHAPTER 6
PARIS LEAVE, 1945
CHAPTER 7
SONGS OF WAR
CHAPTER 8
DISPLACED IN GROSSDORF
CHAPTER 9
THE FACTORY
CHAPTER 10
THE RUSSIANS
CHAPTER 11
MAY 8
CHAPTER 12
LEAVING GROSSDORF
CHAPTER 13
DISSOLUTION
PROLOGUE
In the last weeks of the war in Europe my company entered a village in Saxony that was decked out in white flags. We found cozy billets in large houses—feather beds, tile ovens in kitchens, cellars stocked with food and drink. Details were assigned, the night’s password given, guards posted.
One of the guards outside our platoon billet heard a noise in nearby bushes, maybe ten yards away, spotted a German uniform, yelled something like, Who goes there! and started shooting before there could be an answer. I was the platoon medic and came running when I heard the call for aid. The German lay facedown, his hair, abundant, dirty yellow, was tangled in the bushes. We turned him over. He was a kid, maybe sixteen years old, unarmed and barely alive.
Maybe he didn’t understand the challenge. Maybe he didn’t have time to respond. The thirty-caliber bullets had scooped out his chest and bared his heart. When I recall the scene I see his beating heart. I don’t know how that can be but that’s how I remember it. He must have been prone when the bullets hit, just starting to rise, wedged into the bushes. He still had breath to whisper and I put my ear to his lips.
“Ich ergebe mich. Warum schiessen sie?” I surrender. Why do you shoot?
“Wir haben nicht gewüsst.” We didn’t know, I said, and uselessly bandaged him with large compresses and two-inch gauze and tape. The medics from the battalion aid station arrived by jeep and carried him away. The next day when I asked a medic from the aid station what happened to the kid he said it was a hopeless case; why had I bothered to send him back when he had no chance? I’d wasted the resources of the aid station and the field hospital.
Toward the end the German army was stocked with kids and old men, and this kid, among the masses of dead, was no one special. Kids were running the war. I wasn’t much more than a kid myself. The wound was terrible but I’d seen worse. After we packed him off to the aid station I returned to a meal scrounged from a German cellar—ham and black bread and white wine and cherry preserves—and didn’t give the dying boy much thought.
Twenty-three years later he unexpectedly showed up. It was 1967. I was at the Esalen Institute, on assignment for the New York Times Magazine. Esalen, on the Big Sur coast of California, bordered a wilderness preserve on one side. On the other side were steep cliffs and the Pacific Ocean. Between wilderness and ocean there were plush meadows and a lodge and cabins and hot mineral baths.
According to its brochure, Esalen was engaged in a radical exploration of “human potentiality.” It was just beginning to receive media attention as a major source of the mind-blowing, erotic culture of the sixties. The Esalen authorites feared the media would be biased against them, on the hunt for sensational stories about the baths and drugs and nudity and sex. I was urged, as a matter of fairness, to actively participate in program offerings, rather than to stay on the sidelines and observe. That seemed reasonable and I joined, with some misgivings, a five-day encounter workshop that offered “body movements, sensory awareness, fantasy experiments, psychodrama.”
I had enrolled in a particularly aggressive group and from the beginning felt exposed and vulnerable. I decided on irony as the strategy for handling the new experience. The intense, intimate connection to strangers made the workshop seem to last for weeks, and toward the end, irony went out the window and I felt close to blowing up. The group leader saw that I was strung tight. He asked if I would be willing to take a fantasy trip. Where did he want to take me?
“Into your body to examine the stress you’re under.”
I said okay and at his instruction lay on the floor of the workshop room and closed my eyes. He asked me to imagine entering my body.
I imagined an enormous statue of myself, lying prone in a desert. I imagined my tiny self climbing into my open mouth and down my gullet and into my chest. I became absorbed by the effort and lost sense of the room and the group and heard only the leader’s voice.
He asked, “Where are you?”
“In my chest.”
“What do you see?”
“It’s empty. There’s nothing here.”
“Where’s your heart?
“There’s no heart here.”
He asked if I could bring a heart into my body and suddenly there it was, a pulsing heart sheathed in slimy membrane, the heart I’d imagined seeing twenty-three years before in the open chest of a dying German boy, and I broke down, wailing for a kid I thought I had long ago put out of mind. Other memories of war came up, equally vivid. The war, which had long been out of mind, was not yet finished.
The war years were perhaps the most dramatic of my life, responsible for habits of mind that shaped my generation. It is hard to distinguish events as they were and as they have become in memory. And yet when I recall the smell of a cup of hot coffee on an icy morning in Belgium more than fifty years ago it seems more real than the cup of tea I drank this morning.
The Medic is based on my experience as a combat medic. It takes its shape from a memoir published in the New York Times Magazine in May 1995. I have modified and dramatized the memoir, merging impressions—some vague, many vivid—of wartime encounters. I have invented names so that no one I served with would be confused by the composites of people, places, and units. The First Platoon, A Company, is itself a composite of units in which I served. The town I have called Grossdorf has a wartime model in Saxony but its geography has been altered to conform to my imagination since my memory here is vague. However, the city of Chemnitz will still be on the horizon. There will no longer be a camp containing Russian women slave laborers, but that camp was once there, as was the camp of Hungarian Jewish women outside Kassel, Germany.
What I vouch for in this dramatized version of my service is the transforming intensity of war—the shellings, the entrenching, the wounded and dying, the Sauer crossing, marching fire, the sex, the loot, the Paris leave, Marishka, the encounter with the Russians, the war’s end.
CHAPTER 1
< LEAVING >
I had finished my first year at the University of Michigan when my number came up. It was February 1943. The university was in a war mode, students in uniform, graduations accelerated, programs designed to serve the war effort. I wanted to be
useful, too, and changed my major preference from literature to premed.
One morning in early March, my parents drove me to the Michigan Central Station in downtown Detroit, the jumping-off point for local draftees.
My father, at the time a greenhorn from Russia who spoke greenhorn English, had served in the First World War. He still had a martial bearing—a tough, muscular, little man who spoke with an accent.
He told me in his deep baritone, “When I left for war, I had no mama or papa to come with me to say good-bye.”
“I could have come by myself,” I said.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Your pa means,” my mother said, with the same slight accent as his, an intermingling of Yiddish and Russian, “that from the first he relied only on himself. He has become strong to serve his people and his family. You can always depend on him. He is always there for you. That’s what he means to say.”
She mediated between us as usual, softening his hard view of the world and easing my irritation.
“Your mother is more a politican than me,” Dad said, “but she is right that whatever happens you must keep us informed. Do not spare us anything. Wherever you are, whatever happens, you should rely on us.”
I looked around the station. There were thousands in my shoes. Twelve million were serving worldwide. I was part of it all and that was a thrill. I told them I’d be fine, not to worry.
If he had been able to pass on to me his toughness and fearlessness, he would have felt less anxiety as train whistles blew and engines began to churn and his naive, callow eighteen-year-old son prepared to join other soldier boys being hauled off to war.
When my group was summoned I pried myself from his embrace, received a last kiss from her.
“We love you, son.”
Halfway down the ramp I looked back and waved and was on my way.
AT THE BATTLE CREEK induction center I was interviewed, tested, and assigned to a medical detachment in South Carolina. It was a disappointment. I didn’t want to be in the medical corps. Medics carried no weapons. They operated under the rules of the Geneva Convention and had the status of noncombatants. They were obliged to treat enemy wounded as well as their own. I had no desire to give aid to the enemy. I had imagined myself an armed, vengeful warrior. Still, giving aid was my assignment and I was resolved to do my best.
CHAPTER 2
< BAPTISM >
Each morning we sat baking in a red clay South Carolina field while officers and noncoms lectured us on first aid. We were told all that could happen, from blisters to amputations, and taught the proper responses. For blisters, draw the fluid, clean with Merthiolate, cushion with gauze. For amputations, apply a tourniquet, cover the stump, inject morphine to prevent shock. Get the patient in shock position and keep him warm.
I bought army manuals at the PX and studied the bones of the body and the major muscles and the circulation of blood and the techniques of bandaging and the venereal diseases from clap to lymphogranuloma inguinale. When the instructor’s questions drew a blank from everyone else, I volunteered the answers.
I didn’t realize I was off on the wrong foot, an eager-beaver college boy among southern farmers and working-class kids. Others in the detachment had driven ambulances or worked as hospital orderlies. Some of the least literate were expert at first aid. When I bandaged a GI simulating a broken clavicle, instead of a neat mummy, hand strapped to the chest, the upper torso swathed in two-inch gauze, there was a tangle of loose folds undone by the first movement.
“Ah, well,” I said, “better luck next time.”
Sergeant Carrol, unbinding my mannequin, then rewrapping it with flourishes of gauze, muttered, “How the hell did you get into this outfit?”
Dewey Carrol was tall and fat, his belt notched beneath a swollen paunch. Instead of lymphogranuloma inguinale he said “blue balls.” He had deft fingers and a fumbling mouth. He knew the whole repertoire of bandaging and could wrap any part of a man. It didn’t please him that I had the words he lacked and none of his skill. I stopped volunteering answers, but the damage was already done.
We practiced giving each other injections, angling the needle for the different shots—subcutaneous, intramuscular, intravenous. I didn’t flinch when my novice buddy punctured my arm. When I jabbed in return I pierced a vein and stained his forearm with a bruise.
Dewey Carrol said, “With hands like that you got a tough job eating breakfast. Too bad you can’t work with your mouth. Then you’d be champ.”
I said, “Touché!” and spent the rest of the day grinding pots and pans with steel wool until the kitchen shut down.
In time I picked up the knack of bandaging, learned pressure points, how to give shots, all the business of first aid. I was good at drill, never fell out on marches, made good time over the obstacle course. But nothing I did changed Dewey Carrol’s first impression and his dislike spread to other noncoms.
A buck sergeant named Johnson came alongside while we were on a fifteen-mile march. It was a blazing day, the sun ferocious. I could see the heat working on him. He poured sweat and his freckled red skin looked boiled. He mirrored my step, said nothing for a few minutes, then, out of the blue, asked in a sly, innocent way, “Is it true, Leo, a Jew is just a nigger turned inside out?” He made it sound as if he were asking someone in a position to know a legitimate anatomical question. He stayed in step, at my hip, a beefy, ruddy man, with a plump, burning, freckled face, waiting for a response.
I had been taught never to use the word “nigger,” and that if we were all turned inside out we’d find no differences, so, in a sense, I had to agree with Johnson. I should have said, The only thing I wouldn’t want to be if I were turned inside out is you, Johnson. I said, “Too bad you’re wearing those stripes.”
“The nigger turned inside out thinks I shouldn’t be wearing these stripes. Why don’t you try taking them away?”
He may have been drinking. Maybe it was the sun. The challenge was crazy and I shut up. Harry Roman, a burly private from Polish Hamtramck, marching next to me, couldn’t stomach the offense.
“Why don’t you wear your stripes on your ass, where they’d fit better?”
That got laughs and Johnson scowled and dropped to the rear. Harry told me to ignore the bum. Johnson, he said, had no life outside the army. “He sees someone like you who goes to college and who maybe thinks he’s better than him and he’ll try to screw you.”
“I don’t think I’m better than him.”
“You are,” Harry said. “Who isn’t?”
THERE WAS ONE other collegian in our outfit, Joe Witty, also from the University of Michigan, a sophomore like me. He was tall and wellborn and generally favored. Joe Witty volunteered no answers. He offered his judgment only when asked and then he was authoritative. He was helped by a fine, deep voice whose tone was more convincing than any good argument. Joe Witty was a natural leader, aimed for Officer Candidate School after basic training. When he was invited to lead drill he was as good as any noncom. Anyone who lagged in preparing for inspection got reamed by Joe Witty. He didn’t want screwups in any outfit he was connected with. Dewey Carrol recognized future brass and scraped low for Joe Witty.
I hoped that since we were both college boys from the University of Michigan, in the same sophomore class, the respect given him would rub off on me, but it didn’t happen.
Witty was chosen to lead the current events discussion in our Information and Education class. The issue of the day was a coal miner’s strike. Witty rallied us against the strikers. The goldbricks were striking for a larger share of the pie while we had to serve our country for a miserable sixty-five a month. He didn’t put it exactly like that but that was the tenor. Witty came from the rich suburb of Grosse Pointe outside Detroit. His father was a Detroit surgeon. I doubt that he’d ever have to complain about his working conditions.
I was on the other side of the political fence. My dad was a labor organizer, president of a truck drivers u
nion. He was all for the coal miners and accused the mine owners of using the war effort as an excuse to weaken the union.
I spoke up against Joe Witty and talked about the hazards of coal mining—the fires, the cave-ins, the silicosis, the black lung. I said something like, The union is trying to guarantee miners a living wage and safe working conditions.
Joe Witty said, “What horseshit.”
I said, “‘Information and Education’ isn’t the same thing as propaganda.”
Someone said, “Why don’t you shut up,” and that seemed to be the general feeling, and I shut up while Joe Witty kept talking.
I admired his physical grace and his confidence and his great voice and frat-boy good looks. I’d hoped we would hit it off, but he put me on the same list as unpatriotic striking miners, and I think most of the men agreed with him. They may have been working class, but they were suspicious of unions and suspicious of me.
That night I slid into bed and was brought up short by a doubled-over sheet. There were guffaws and snorts of laughter. I stood in the center of the barracks in my khaki GI underwear, a raging fool, and dared whoever was responsible to face me man to man. More guffaws. A skinny kid named Lowry placed himself behind me and aped my outrage. I wheeled, grabbed him in a headlock, dragged him toward the latrine. Dewey Carrol came out from his room and pried us apart.
“Kill each other off the base. This is no damn playground.”
Lowry screamed, “It wasn’t me, you damn kike.”
Later I saw his ears were red and bruised where I’d squeezed. I went up to him and apologized for losing control.
I said, “Don’t ever again call me what you called me.”
He nodded glumly, still humiliated.
I asked Harry Roman, “Why do I let myself get sucked into something so stupid?”
“You should be pissed off. They made a fool of you. Me, I’d kill.”