The Medic

by Leo Litwak

  Captain Dillon had instructed the burgomaster that until Military Government arrived Lieutenant Klamm would be the final authority over all town affairs. He would only intervene if security was at issue.

  I was designated the unofficial translator.

  The slight, elderly burgomaster, who knew a little English, was entirely obliging. “My gracious sir, tell me what you wish and we shall cooperate to the fullest.” He listened to my German, heard its limitations, and, without condescension—with the greatest humility—reduced his language to simple, clear sentences, embellished with English even more awkward than my German.

  We discarded long johns and sweaters and walked Grossdorf in open-throated wool olive drab shirts, carelessly bearing weapons. There was little discipline. A desultory morning roll call, halfhearted calisthenics. I walked the cobblestone streets of a village that still maintained its ancient habits of deference, my sleeves rolled, helmet tilted back, the spring sun glittering in shop windows. The townsfolk bowed to me. Fräuleins smiled, offered curtsies, giggled.

  The forests were dense, the grass high in the meadows, the air sexy. The fräuleins worked bare legged and wore loose blouses. Their men were gone, either at the Russian front or cordoned off in vast pens behind our lines. Elderly farmers worked the fields with their wives and daughters, scythe and shovel, rake and hoe. There were few tractors or horses or mules. Foreign labor was no longer available.

  We called to the fräuleins when they returned from the fields, flushed and sweaty, shepherded by their fathers. Some managed to get GI messages despite the language problem and joined GIs in evening trysts at the Grossdorf cemetery or in the forest meadows above the town.

  There was much available but I didn’t know how transactions were to be made. One afternoon I met Ingrid Schultz, dressed in black, full figured, perhaps in her early thirties. She walked down the street, lugging a heavy suitcase in each hand. She had a fine posture, wore her fair hair tied back, and was carefully made up as if she had come from important business. She was no peasant. I asked if she needed help with her luggage. She was startled, didn’t understand. When I reached for a suitcase, she must have thought I was after loot and pulled away. I explained carefully that I only wanted to help and she cautiously yielded a suitcase. I introduced myself and apologized for my poor German. I asked her name.

  “Frau Ingrid Schultz.”

  “I would like to see you again, Ingrid.”

  She shrugged as if she didn’t understand and flashed her wedding ring.

  WE SETTLED DOWN to the easy rhythm of occupation while waiting for the Russian army to reach us.

  The DPs were also waiting. They gathered outside the farms where they had worked and stared at their onetime masters, who gave the former slaves wide berth. Justice, if it ever came to Grossdorf, promised to be brutal. Until that happened our days remained lax and carefree.

  Part of the platoon was on guard duty at the Grossdorf border. Those not on duty looked for booze and food and loot, and flirted with the fräuleins. There was softball in a nearby meadow after lunch. You could hike in the woods. Grossdorf wasn’t one of those tidy, neat, ancient villages huddled around a Gothic cathedral. It was more like a sprawling Iowa or Nebraska town. The architecture was ordinary, wood and plaster farmhouses with adjoining barns. There were no cathedrals, just the kind of simple church you might see in the Midwest.

  Our mansion was one of the more elegant places in Grossdorf, set deep in its lot next to the textile factory. The porch faced a vast lawn carved by a circular drive. We hung out on the porch after retreat, drinking Pilsner beer.

  There was still guard duty, but most other details were taken over by DPs. They ran our kitchen, handled the garbage, cleaned our quarters, did our laundry. For compensation they received cigarettes and the excess of our meals.

  The only sound of war was occasional rifle fire from GIs on guard at the city border, shooting at deer and birds and once at a stray cow. When the burgomaster timidly complained, the lieutenant ordered the shooting to stop.

  Mail had caught up with us—magazines, newspapers from home. We wrote to family and buddies and sweethearts, our attention turning to life after war. In Grossdorf we improvised a strange peace before the war’s official end. It was a peace with broken German as its lingua franca and American cigarettes the medium of exchange.

  We had no clear idea as to how to conduct this quasi peace. Military Government was supposed to arrive with a plan for the occupation of Grossdorf. Until then we had little to do with running the town. We were privileged and powerful guests. Our main job was waiting for the Russian army. When it reached us the war would be over.

  ONE AFTERNOON A young Dutchman came to our quarters to do business. He gave his name as Willy Vanderzee. He seemed young for his age, nineteen or twenty, fair-haired, blue-eyed, almost pretty, neatly dressed, no apparent evidence of hard labor. You didn’t see civilian men that age in Grossdorf unless they were DPs. He spoke an accented, but colloquial, English. He had picked up GI slang. He told us he was Dutch and had been pressed into German service as a textile worker and translator.

  Roy Jones was suspicious of this too-well-off young man. “How do we know you’re Dutch? You look kraut to me.”

  “Obviously I am not German. A German my age would be at the front.”

  “Show us your ID.”

  There was nothing soft about Willy, despite appearances. No show of subservience to win our favor, no smiles, no effort to justify who or what he was, no explanations, no apologies. Instead of an ID he flashed a roll of dollars and offered to buy our rations of PX cigarettes at twenty dollars a carton.

  Maurice said, “Twenty bucks is ID enough. Let the kid be whatever he says he is.”

  That first afternoon Willy handed out two hundred dollars for ten cartons of cigarettes. It was a surprising bankroll. Dollars weren’t easy to get. We were issued the occupation currency. The Germans didn’t trust our version of their money and there was little the military mark could buy. Cigarettes and dollars were the accepted currency.

  Willy’s trade wasn’t confined to cigarettes. “I am your man for whatever you need.”

  I asked if he knew the penalty for doing black-market business.

  “Corporal,” he said, in a cool, calm tenor, “I do not give a fuck.”

  Two days later Lieutenant Klamm found him inside our quarters and demanded an ID. Willy produced two cards, one official and one that he’d kept hidden. The official German ID, issued to foreign workers, named him Willem Vanderzee, nineteen years old, from the Netherlands, a language specialist and loom operator. The other card, Dutch, in poor condition, dated a few years earlier, displayed a photo of a sullen, sixteen-year-old Willem Frucht, Jood stamped in the center. Lieutenant Klamm asked what “Jood” meant.

  “It means I am a Jewboy, sir.”

  “Well, which Willem are you?”

  “Whichever one you like.”

  He’d kept the second card at the peril of his life and it was Willem Frucht he chose for his identity.

  Willy spoke French, German, Russian, some Polish, in addition to English, and, of course, Dutch. His Russian and Polish had been developed during his year’s service in Saxony, interpreting for the foreign workers. The other languages he’d picked up in good Dutch schools.

  The lieutenant asked why he didn’t return to the Netherlands.

  “There is nothing for me there.”

  “You got no folks?”

  “My future is here.”

  “What’s for you here?”

  He knew the politics of Grossdorf. He could tell us who we were dealing with. More important he could get us almost anything we wanted.

  “With a little something for yourself?”

  “Something for myself, naturally.”

  “What I’ve been looking for,” the lieutenant said, “is one of those high-quality ceremonial blades, a sword or bayonet or a top-of-the-line hunting knife—high-grade steel with a great-looking insc
ription, you know, the Reich eagle etched over Gothic lettering.”

  “I can easily get that for you.”

  “And top-of-the-line Zeitz field binoculars.”

  “No problem.”

  “A Leica with wide-angle lens.”

  “The Leica is more difficult. I will see what I can do.”

  Willy quickly found camera and binoculars. The transaction cost the lieutenant several weeks of cigarette rations. It was the blade Willy couldn’t immediately produce. He brought disappointing specimens that the lieutenant rejected. Willy said, “No problem. I will keep looking.” While he looked, the lieutenant let him hang around our headquarters.

  I ASKED WILLY why he had come to Germany.

  “To save my neck.”

  He offered no details, almost vehemently refusing to disclose his personal history.

  “The past is gone. Entirely erased. All questions are stupid because there are no answers. Everything begins now.”

  I was immediately attracted by his intelligence and nerve. Whatever he had experienced must have been enormous. A wartime journey from the Netherlands to the heart of Saxony by a Dutch Jew was beyond anything I could have managed.

  We sat on our porch in the evening, apart from the others. It wasn’t difficult to open up to Willy. It was a pleasure being probed by someone of his intelligence. I told him I was also Jewish and he nodded, no surprise. I told him about Lucca and Paris and Marishka and other stories of war.

  He asked me one evening, “The war in Europe will be over, sooner or later. What will you do then, Leo?”

  “There’s talk of our being sent to the Pacific and fighting the Japanese.”

  “And after the Japanese?”

  I had no plans beyond returning to Detroit and college. He pressed me about Detroit. I told him about my neighborhood, the main library, the art museum, the downtown theaters, Ford, the great factory at River Rouge.

  “How will you earn a living?”

  “Something will turn up. Anyway, my life will be at the college.”

  “What life is that?”

  “The life of the mind, not commerce.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, “the life of the mind. I recall.” He said mockingly that he had been a voyager in the land of the learned but wanted no credit for what he had learned. He recited the partial itinerary of a precocious schoolboy’s journey. Before he had finished high school, he had read some Shakespeare in English, much of the first volume of Faust in German, Corneille and Racine in French, stuff he would never read again. It was all without survival value, irrelevant to the business of getting on. He claimed to have stripped to the bone, no superfluous weight. “The life of the mind,” he said, “is so much dreck, shit.”

  I told him I was not concerned with survival.

  He said, “Then you will not survive.” He called my attitude immature and stupid, especially for a Jew. “I listen to your story of war and think you must have learned something and yet here you are in Grossdorf, deep in the asshole of Germany, still believing in the life of the mind.”

  “Yes,” I said, “even here in Grossdorf.”

  He got up to leave. “This is one of the last things I picked up in my advanced German literature class. Georg Büchner wrote, a hundred and nineteen years ago, ‘Lass uns nach Kreuz pissen, dahin ein Jüde stirbt.’ Let’s piss on the cross—a Jew’s dying there. After reading Büchner, what is there to say? Fuck the life of the mind, better commerce. A few dollars in your pocket, a few cartons of cigarettes in your pack, then, perhaps, you have a chance.”

  The war had turned this Dutch boy rock hard. There was no limit to his zeal for commerce. He disappeared for two or three days at a time, in disregard of curfews, somehow able to roam Saxony without benefit of passwords or passes. He showed up at our headquarters, loaded with dollars, looking for cigarettes, soap, chocolate, chewing gum, even toilet paper—whatever rations we carried. He had a precise cigarette and dollar equivalent for each bartered item.

  He showed me parts of Grossdorf I wouldn’t otherwise have seen. One day he saw me wave to Frau Schultz, coming from the textile factory. She smiled, waved back.

  “You like her?” Willy asked.

  I shrugged.

  “You wish to meet her?”

  “It’s something you can arrange?”

  “There is nothing easier. I know her well.”

  One afternoon he led me to a house behind the market where Ingrid Schultz lived with her two small children.

  “She works when there is work at the textile factory. A widow for more than three years. She is past mourning and ripe for romance. She likes you, Leo. She waits for you.”

  They had been coworkers in the textile factory office. He had listened to her story of grief, consoled her with difficult-to-obtain bath soaps and shampoo, brought gifts of chocolate and chewing gum for the children. She had reason to be grateful.

  Willy came in with me. She was waiting in what I presume were her best clothes, a velvetlike dark red dress, low at the bodice, breasts pressed up and braced. The blinds were down, the children gone. She only spoke German and her nervousness made it difficult for us to communicate. Yes, she said, she had met Willy at the factory, a Wunderkind, das zahme Tier der Meisterin.

  “What’s that?” I asked Willy.

  “She tells you I was the boss’s tame animal, her pet.”

  “You were her pet?”

  “I was to her whatever was necessary.”

  Willy went to the kitchen which he obviously knew, brought out shot glasses and plum brandy, toasted our health, “Auf ihre Gesunderheit!”

  He told me to walk him to the door. He whispered, “Four packs of cigarettes, and if you have them, one or two D-ration chocolate bars for the children. That will be sufficient.”

  She had overprepared, too much powder, the scent going stale after a little action. She was an attractive, thin-lipped, large-nosed woman, tightly bound at the waist and bosom, light hair coiled above her ears. She smiled stiffly. Her throat needed clearing. She asked if I wanted another drink. We sat on her couch, the door to the bedroom open, the bed visible. I could see lace pillow slips.

  She said Willy was a friend, a remarkable person, but sometimes confusing. She had never regarded him as one of the foreign workers.

  How was he different from the others?

  She had never known anyone so young and yet so clever. He seemed entirely German.

  We continued drinking. I sympathized with her nervousness, wanted to leave, but the only way out seemed to be through the bedroom, and we gave up the effort to talk, groped clumsily, her hair coming undone. I fumbled her red dress open. I struggled with corset and brassiere. I smelled her sweaty nervousness and the scent took me almost entirely out of the mood, but it somehow got done. I sought quick release, there on the couch, not on the bed. Afterward she offered me food and drink but I excused myself. I was needed at headquarters.

  She was more attractive uncorseted and no longer trying. When she let go of the fixed smile, her face lapsed into sorrow. I left cigarettes and chocolate on the antique dropleaf table in the vestibule.

  I reported to Willy that the pleasure was limited. The connection I had made with Marishka didn’t happen with Frau Schultz. My impulse was to offer solace, not love.

  “Neither solace nor love are called for in this transaction,” Willy said. “Cigarettes and chocolate are sufficient.”

  To Willy everything was quid pro quo, or at least that’s how he seemed to want it to be, cigarettes for dollars, sex for cigarettes, a momentary affirmation of existence for sex.

  He was the man Maurice was looking for.

  MAURICE’S STOOGE, NAGY, had carried a rucksack full of apparently worthless deutsche marks through much of Germany. Maurice offered Willy a percentage of the face value if he could dispose of the marks.

  “You mean that as a serious offer?”

  “Ten percent of whatever you get.”

  “You offer me ten percent of shi
t, my friend. That paper is junk.”

  But Willy figured out how the old marks could have some value and returned with a plan. The Germans didn’t trust the occupation currency. If you knew where to look you could find businesses—not necessarily legal—where the old deutsche mark was still used and unwanted occupation marks had accumulated from GI trade. Willy knew where to look and could turn old marks into new, at a steep discount, of course.

  The problem with the new currency was that GIs were limited in the amount they were allowed to convert to dollars.

  Willy’s plan was to use the military marks to buy U.S. postage. The stamps could then be exchanged for dollars without limit.

  “You want me to buy stamps?”

  Willy explained again—exchange the old marks for new, then use the new marks to buy stamps. That wouldn’t be simple. The stamps had to be purchased in relatively small lots so as not to alert authorities. It required traveling to post offices throughout Saxony, buying here and there, representing themselves as collectors if necessary. Army post offices were open between nine and seventeen hundred hours on weekdays, nine and twelve Saturdays. They would need transportation, an area-wide pass, a number of IDs.

  Maurice said he could arrange for passes and transportation and IDs, but how would they get dollars for the stamps?

  “We will offer the stamps at a discount,” Willy said. “No problem.” He wanted 50 percent of whatever the stamps brought in and Maurice said, “The hell with it. Go ahead.” Whatever could be exchanged for the outdated currency was so much gravy.

  Willy wanted me involved but I refused to have any part in it. There were severe penalties for dealing in marks.

  Willy said, “The first law of self-improvement is, you do not get rich sitting on your ass. I take it on myself—out of the goodness of my heart—to return you to Detroit a rich man.”

  I said, “No thanks. My buddies didn’t die so I could hustle marks in Grossdorf.”

  Willy treated me as though I were the one displaced. “You will return to Detroit with your stories of war and roll around in the life of the mind and you will have learned absolutely nothing. I offer you, entirely without cost, a few valuable lessons.”