by Tom Young
“Just kill them all,” the boy said in German as he placed his knife back in its sheath.
Another leered at Karl, drew his finger across his throat in a slashing motion.
“In a way,” Karl whispered to Albrecht, “that’s the scariest thing I’ve seen here.”
“We learned nothing like that as Sea Cadets,” Albrecht muttered.
We better win this war, Karl thought. What if all the young people in Europe got brainwashed like this?
The old man in the SS uniform barked orders, and the boys formed up in two rows.
“As you can see with your own eyes,” the man said in German, “the enemy is not ten feet tall. He is a man like any other—at best. Unlike us, some of them carry blood tainted by untermenschen. That means their minds are not as sharp, their vision not as clear, their coordination not as developed as our own.”
Karl rolled his eyes. So that’s why the boys’ leader had brought them here. This guy—what did you call a Hitler Youth leader, anyway? “Scoutmaster from Hell”?
Whatever his title, somebody had told him when the POW train would stop in his little backwater town, and he had figured it for a training opportunity.
Karl tried to imagine what a training folder for Hitler Youth might look like: Item 32: demonstrate acting like a hateful little son of a bitch.
Check that box.
What a damnable crime to poison kids’ minds like that. You could teach them so many useful things in youth groups like the Boy Scouts or the Four-H, Karl considered. How to put up a tent or dress a wound or milk a cow. But instead they learned this.
“Someday you will fight our enemies,” the Scoutmaster from Hell continued. “Note their weakness. Look at them, milling about like drunkards. Now do you see why our victory is inevitable?”
“Yes, sir!” the boys shouted in unison.
Scoutmaster from Hell called the boys to attention, and they locked up with arched backs and stiffened arms. The man raised his index finger and conducted as the boys sang:
“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,
Über alles in der Welt.”
Some of the old folks beamed. One or two kriegies groaned, which earned them prods from the guards’ rifles. The boys completed the anthem and continued their hit parade with “The Horst Wessel Song.” When they finished, their leader snapped marching orders. The boys about-faced and filed off the platform, heels thumping in unison.
“Wasn’t that precious?” one of the prisoners muttered.
This stop in the fresh air couldn’t last long, Karl realized, so he opened his Red Cross box once more. He had little appetite, but he knew he’d feel even less like eating once he reboarded the stinking boxcar. He opened his tin of dried apples and ate with his fingers. He also opened a pack of crackers for Albrecht, who raised his hand as if to say no thanks.
“You need to eat,” Karl said. “It will be easier here than on the train.”
Albrecht’s mouth twitched in a dismissive expression, but he accepted the crackers. When Karl finished his apples, he opened the Lucky Strikes. Tapped out a cigarette and lit it with matches from the Red Cross parcel. Took a deep drag and exhaled through his nose. At least for a few minutes, the smoke would clear his nostrils of the boxcar’s odor.
As soon as the smoke wafted across the platform, a guard came over. He carried his Mauser with the muzzle down, so he didn’t look particularly threatening. Karl hadn’t noticed him before; unlike some of the guards who liked to scream, this guy had stayed pretty quiet.
With politeness that surprised Karl, the man said in accented English, “May I have a cigarette?”
Karl took another drag, held the smoke in his lungs, and eyed the guard. Exhaled and said, “You want a Lucky Strike?”
Albrecht, in character again as Meade, offered an explanation: “They like our cigarettes a lot better than theirs.”
The guard nodded vigorously.
“You got a name?” Karl asked.
“Brunner. I am Private Brunner.”
Karl fished a cigarette from the pack and offered it to Brunner.
“Danke,” Brunner said as he took the Lucky. Placed it between his lips, withdrew a lighter from his pocket, and lit the cigarette. Savored the first puff as if it were a delicacy.
This Brunner doesn’t seem like a bad sort, Karl thought. He remembered how he’d wished he’d asked Kostler more questions when he had the chance. Maybe here was another opportunity to learn something useful.
“What can you tell me about where we’re going?” Karl asked.
Brunner twisted his face like a schoolboy puzzling over a tough math problem. Perhaps he was considering whether he’d get into trouble for talking to prisoners. After a few seconds, he said, “You are going to Stalag Luft XIV.”
“Yeah, I know. What’s it like there?”
“Prisoners back on the train,” another guard shouted from across the platform. “All aboard now, now, now.”
Grumbling and cursing, kriegies began to rise and shuffle toward the boxcars.
Brunner’s expression darkened. He took his cigarette between thumb and forefinger. Squatted next to Karl and spoke in a low voice.
“When you get to Stalag Luft XIV,” he said, gesturing with the Lucky, “please do nothing stupid. Do you know what happened at a camp near there in March?”
Karl shook his head.
“It was at Stalag Luft III. Some very foolish kriegies, most of them British, dug escape tunnels. Several dozen got out.”
Karl gave a wide grin. He hadn’t heard of this, but he liked it.
“Do not smile, Lieutenant,” Brunner said. “This story does not have a happy ending. I tell it to save your life.”
Karl’s grin faded. “All right,” he said. “Go on.”
“We recaptured all but three. Fifty of them were executed.”
Karl tapped ash from the end of his cigarette, looked over at Albrecht. “Son of a bitch,” he whispered.
“The stalags have become very hard places,” Brunner continued. His tone carried no hint of gloating. “Please watch yourself, and advise your countrymen to do the same.”
35
Hell, Fenced Off
After two miserable days riding the boxcar, the kriegies’ train trip finally ended. Wilhelm recognized the pine forests of Silesia, and he knew he must be somewhere near Germany’s eastern border. The locomotive hissed to a stop in the early evening. Clouds heavy with moisture hung low like smoke left over the ocean after a tanker burns and sinks. Searchlights stabbed the gloom. The temperature hovered around freezing, and the wet air made it feel even colder. Wilhelm pulled his field jacket more tightly around him. Guards shouted. Dogs barked. Englishmen grumbled. Americans cursed.
Hagan and two other Yanks helped Wilhelm down from the boxcar. Pain radiated from Wilhelm’s ribs and pelvis, though not with the same heat as yesterday. He nodded thanks to the kriegies who steadied him alongside the tracks. During the train trip, they’d treated him with deference as “the guy who took a thumping and didn’t say nothing.” Still, Wilhelm worried about maintaining his act in the longer term, especially among prisoners who had lost friends in the mass execution Private Brunner mentioned. Surely, such men would remain highly suspicious, always attuned to anyone they saw as a rat among their ranks. Brunner had called Stalag Luft XIV a hard place, but that wasn’t the half of it. Both the Germans and the prisoners would consider Wilhelm a spy if they ever found reason to doubt his story. Both sides would want him dead.
The guards formed the POWs into four columns and marched them down a dirt road through the pines. The pines ended at a fence that encircled a dozen wood-frame buildings. The dirt between the buildings had been raked so thoroughly that no pine straw littered the ground. Wilhelm noted that no razor wire topped the fence and the only people behind it were Germans. This, then, was not the POW camp itself but the Kommandantur, the military compound for the commandant and his staff.
Farther down the road, coils of
concertina wire appeared, and Wilhelm took his first glance at the prison. Double rows of razor-edged fence surrounded barracks that appeared far less maintained than the Kommandantur. Doors slanted off broken hinges. Newspaper covered broken windows. Prisoners wandered between the buildings; the men wore mismatched and tattered uniforms.
At the main entrance, guards unchained the gates and swung them open. Most of the new prisoners marched into the compound, but a few held back. Wilhelm could imagine what they were thinking because he felt it himself: Once I cross that threshold, I am well and truly a prisoner of war. A mouse in a cage. A captive.
But what is the alternative? Run for the woods and get cut down?
Eventually, to the shouting of guards, everyone shuffled through.
Hagan scanned the camp’s inmates with such focus that he didn’t look where he was going and nearly stumbled into the man in front of him.
“Watch where you’re going, bub,” the prisoner muttered.
“Sorry,” Hagan said. “Just looking for friends.”
“Do you see anyone you recognize?” Wilhelm whispered.
“Not yet.”
Enlisted Luftwaffe men led the POWs into a receiving building. Wilhelm found himself inside an open bay nearly as large as a submarine pen. Electric lights hummed overhead and cast a harsh glare. The new kriegies remained there for hours, waiting their turn for processing. During the night, they were photographed, fingerprinted, and taken to a shower room. The shower lasted only a couple of minutes and it stung Wilhelm’s scrapes and cuts, but it came as welcome relief after two days of living in the boxcar’s filth. The water ran brown as it flowed down his legs, and the grime left sediment around the drains. After the shower, the prisoners were deloused and issued blankets, towels, and a mess kit. All the gear went into cotton duffel bags. As promised, the Germans also returned the boots that had been taken from them at the transit camp. The act of lacing his boots back on made Wilhelm feel slightly less vulnerable.
At the final stage of processing, the prisoners received barracks assignments. Wilhelm stood close to Hagan in hopes they’d get assigned to the same building. To his relief, they were. In the dark, early-morning hours, Wilhelm followed Hagan to Hut 4B in an area called the Center Compound.
What the guards called a “hut” was actually larger than a typical German village home—about forty meters long and a third as wide. Built from rough-hewn lumber, the structure looked like a lot of other wartime construction: featureless and boxy, identical in every way to the building on either side. Hagan mounted the plank steps and pulled open the door.
Inside, a single oil lamp burned above a coal-fired stove. A man sat next to the stove in a wobbly wooden chair apparently built by kriegies. The stove barely took the edge off the chill, and to ward off the cold, the man wore a leather flying jacket. The jacket bore the silver bars of an American captain. The captain sat with his legs crossed, apparently at ease with himself; these Americans somehow maintained that casual swagger even in captivity. The captain was a tall, thin man, a little too big for his makeshift chair. His lanky frame reminded Wilhelm of that nineteenth-century American president—what was his name? Lincoln? Yes, Lincoln, but without the beard. As soon as he saw Hagan and Wilhelm, he placed his index finger in front of his lips.
“Shh,” he said. “Try not to wake anybody. They told us to expect some new guys. I’m the block commander here, Captain Drew McLendon.”
In the lamp’s yellow rays, Wilhelm discerned rows of bunks on either side of the stove. Men slumbered and snored under green blankets. Naked lightbulbs hung from electrical cord. So the huts have electricity, Wilhelm concluded. McLendon must be using the dim oil lamp to keep from waking the other men.
Whispering, Hagan introduced himself, and he introduced Wilhelm as Lieutenant Thomas Meade. Both men shook hands with McLendon.
McLendon pointed to his left. “There’s a couple empty bunks down there at the end. They’re all yours. Try to get some shut-eye, and we’ll get you all briefed up in the morning.”
“Shut-eye”? Oh, yes, Wilhelm realized, sleep. Good heavens, any conversation could give me away. A camp full of Yank fliers was a minefield of American slang and aviator lingo.
Working in pale light, Wilhelm and Hagan took the blankets from their duffel bags. They placed them over the thin layers of padding that served as mattresses. For Wilhelm, simply making his bed became an act of endurance. Every movement pulled at something sore and bruised. When he finished, he removed his boots and belt. Other than that, he remained fully clothed as he pulled a blanket over him.
Captain McLendon extinguished the oil lamp, and Wilhelm lay in the darkness with his eyes open. Sailors have embarked on many a strange journey, he thought, but few strange as this. Masquerading as a captured enemy in my own country. Am I a fool or a genius? Perhaps neither. Maybe just a lost soul adrift in a sea of war, shadowed by towering waves that could crash over at any moment.
Troubled by such thoughts, Wilhelm doubted he would sleep. But exhaustion overcame his anxieties, and he fell into deep slumber. It seemed only an instant later when commands, shouted in American-accented English, roused him.
“Fall out, boys,” Captain McLendon called. “Time for morning appell.”
Roll call.
Some things about military life never changed, regardless of nationality, rank, or status as combatant or captive. Late-sleeping kriegies scrambled from their bunks. Wilhelm tossed aside his blanket. Answering all his military instincts, he tried to spring from his bed—and pain pulled him up short. Sore ribs, tender tendons, and bruised muscles protested. He winced, groaned, closed his eyes, then sat up and supported himself with the heels of his hands.
“Easy there, bud,” Hagan said. “Lemme help you up.”
Hagan offered his hand. Wilhelm grasped it and let Hagan pull him to a standing position and steer him into a chair. Hagan then brought his boots, and Wilhelm pulled them onto his feet, gritting his teeth against the pain.
Kriegies who were already up put down tin cups and buttoned their jackets. Wilhelm stood under his own power, though it hurt, and he followed Hagan outside to what amounted to a parade ground. The first breath of cold air burned going down.
McLendon formed his men into six rows of eight. Similar groupings stretched across the parade ground. At the front of the parade ground, a British officer called the men to attention, and the block commanders repeated the order. Then the Brit ordered the men at ease.
“For you new arrivals,” McLendon said, “that’s our senior-ranking officer, Group Captain Ian Timmersby, Royal Air Force. They usually keep the Brits over in the North Compound, but lately we have a few here with us in the Center Compound as well.”
Timmersby wore baggy flier’s overalls. His hair and moustache appeared neatly trimmed. Unlike the men he had ordered at ease, Timmersby remained at the position of attention. Perhaps it was a small act of defiance; German sergeants strode between the columns of prisoners, counting, and Timmersby glared at them with undisguised hatred.
“Old Ian looks like he’s about to bust a gasket,” an American voice muttered somewhere behind Wilhelm.
“A ruddy fire dog, that one,” a British voice answered.
Wilhelm could understand the British officer’s attitude, given the escape attempt from a nearby camp and the resulting executions. The incident would surely remain a raw wound.
The Luftwaffe sergeants argued among themselves, counted, then counted some more. Apparently, their count was off.
“Not again,” someone whispered. “We’re gonna freeze our asses off.”
Indeed, the cold was already seeping through Wilhelm’s jacket. The chill sapped his reserves and worsened the pain in sore muscles.
A German officer mounted a podium at the head of the parade ground.
“That’s Kommandant Becker,” McLendon whispered.
“If one of you is hiding or has escaped,” Becker called out in English, “punishment will come swiftly an
d severely. We will all stand here in the cold until my guards have assessed the situation.”
“Screw you, Fritz,” someone whispered.
“Shh,” another man responded.
“Perhaps we will do the afternoon appell without coats,” the kommandant continued.
The guards continued scurrying and counting, comparing their figures. In a low voice, Captain McLendon offered an explanation to the new arrivals.
“The Gestapo and the SS have been all over this place since March,” McLendon said. “The guards are scared shitless of losing track of one kriegie.”
Mein Gott, Wilhelm thought. Of all the places to run aground, I find a hotbed of Gestapo activity.
The guards counted again, then recounted. Apparently satisfied that there had been an arithmetic error and not an escape, Kommandant Becker returned to his office. Timmersby dismissed the kriegies.
Back inside Hut 4B, Wilhelm warmed his hands over the stove and got his first good look at his new home. Triple bunks lined the walls. Rectangular tables stood between the bunks. Clotheslines stretched across the room, and from the lines hung field jackets, gloves, socks, shirts, and other laundry. A bookshelf held a row of ragged paperbacks. Other shelves contained tin plates, bowls, and assorted cookware. Above some of the bunks, men had pinned photos of women. So, Wilhelm surmised, the prisoners get mail. Or at least they used to. Given how the war was going, he doubted the Reich would put much effort into getting mail to POWs now.
McLendon lifted a coffeepot from the stove and poured into two cups. He carried the cups to one of the tables and called out, “New guys. Over here.” Wilhelm and Hagan pulled up chairs and sat with the captain, who pushed the steaming cups across the table. “It’s more chicory than coffee,” McLendon said, “but at least it’s hot.”
“Thanks,” Wilhelm said in his best American English.
“Appreciate it,” Hagan said.
Wilhelm took a sip. The bitter liquid tasted nothing like good coffee, but, as the captain had said, at least it was hot. For now, that was enough.