The family were delighted. “Rosie thought you looked real cute in your scarf,” Peg wrote to me.
Great for Rosie. She was Rosie again.
Yes, I had drafted a letter to her. I still have it; that’s why I was able to quote it verbatim.
But I didn’t mail it.
Did I know then how much I really loved her?
Yeah, I knew. I didn’t admit it to myself, but I knew.
13
I lost my virginity to a Nazi. And received a Leica from her. It was a momentous exchange.
I was seduced. By a girl who was fighting desperately for her life. But there was more to it, I still believe, than just seduction.
It was another surprise, another error in my comedy of errors. But it didn’t seem like comedy then.
The affair—I know of no other word—began the week after we had “liquidated the werewolf cell” (Life’s phrase, not mine) in the Bohemian Alps. I was driving back from Nürnberg late at night in my white jeep, shivering from the cold, against which the jeep’s canvas top was little protection, and peering through the erratic windshield wipers as I drove in a small blizzard on the autobahn.
The trip had been long because a heavy convoy, using both lanes of the autobahn, had slowed my ride down to Nürnberg. Oddly, they had turned off the road and disappeared into the forests about halfway to Nürnberg.
I worried about that convoy. I worried that I had seen John Nettleton with some dubious-looking characters in the shadows outside the headquarters at Nürnberg. I worried about the “shipment” I was bringing back to General Meade. I didn’t want to become involved in any of the Army’s generalized corruption.
I was late and so I was tempted to hurry on the way home. I told myself that I had to be careful. We’d been losing men all over the European Theater in accidents on the autobahns. I was sober. But I was tired and discouraged and lonely, and that didn’t help.
I was a perfect target, an accident waiting to happen, a young man looking for love, or something like love, without even knowing it.
As veterans of any military service in the last century will tell you, the greatest enemy is boredom. Occupation duty did not involve combat dangers, but the boredom was almost as bad. There was literally nothing to do. I could finish the work of my “clerk typist” specialty each morning in about an hour. I would draw patrol duty once a month at the most. An occasional errand for the general down to Nürnberg (to pick up a case of bourbon he was not about to trust to ordinary channels) became a welcome relief from the monotony, if it also troubled me about his possible connection to the black market. In Bamberg I was taking courses from the University of Maryland extension so I could have enough credits to enter Notre Dame as a sophomore. I spent a lot of time in the base darkroom. And still there was nothing to do much of the time.
Except daydream.
I cursed myself every day for the stupidity of my stubborn determination to earn my college education by two years of service. They were two wasted years. Maybe I could earn one of them back by taking enough classes. Possibly, if I worked at it, a year and a half.
I don’t want to suggest that everyone in the Seventh Army was drunk every night or gambling away their paychecks or buying girls in exchange for chocolate bars and nylons or profiteering on the black market. There were some who, like me, did their work, played their basketball, and counted the days and the hours till they went home.
But the atmosphere in Bamberg in those days reeked of depravity and corruption (with the sentimental strains of “I’ll Dance at Your Wedding” providing an ironic counterpoint to the depravity). I was so sickened by the way we were degrading ourselves and those whom we had conquered that, instead of seeking friends whose values were something like mine, I became, for the first time in my life, a loner. I withdrew to my darkroom in the USO (and continued my philosophical arguments with Dr. Berman), and to my tiny cell at the Vinehaus Messerschmitt (when it was built in 1832, it was a home in the country and not so long ago the country home of Willy Messerschmitt, the pilot and airplane designer, though they didn’t talk about him in Bamberg in 1946). I curled up with my class books about English literature and art history and even photography (yes, there was a class in that).
And my daydreams.
I turned off the autobahn and limped carefully through the snow to Bamberg. The city was so far east that it was subject not to the weather produced by the Gulf Stream but to the weather of the Eurasian landmass. In other words Russian weather instead of English or Irish weather. That meant hot summers and bitter winters.
The Regens River was frozen, the slanted tile roofs and the platzs covered with snow. Under a half-moon, ducking in and out of the clouds, the city glistened like a magic imperial capital in a fairy tale. The streets were deserted, even near our housing. What revelry occurred in this kind of weather took place indoors.
I crossed the river and drove carefully down the Untersandstrasse and by the Dom, the strange cathedral whose front was Romanesque and back Gothic. My destination was not HQ in the Residenz (where most of the lights were already out) but the general’s quarters down the river in the Concordia. An MP patrol stopped me at the intersection of the Judenstrasse (a ghetto street, in the days when there were Jews in Bamberg) in the oldest section of the town, where the streets, if not the buildings, had been shaped in the Middle Ages. “Sorry, Sarge,” the corporal in charge said cheerfully in a cracker dialect so thick that I could hardly understand him, “but we’ve got word that there are black-market folks coming through with medical supplies. Mind if we check your cargo?”
“Suspect even the Constabs?”
“My grandmother if she’s out on a night like this. What you got?” He swept his flashlight around my jeep. It paused on the carton on the seat next to me. “What you got there, Sarge?”
“Bourbon for my general.”
“No kidding?”
It dawned on me that this cheerful MP had the flap on his .45 open. He half-suspected me. Brave soldier that I was, I felt my stomach turn anxiously.
“Take a look.”
“Wow! That’s Old Fitz!”
“Couldn’t prove it by me. About whiskey I don’t know much.”
“Good stuff, a long way from the bluegrass country,” he sighed. “Sure your general couldn’t spare a bottle?”
I pointed at Gen. Radford Meade’s name on the carton. “I don’t know. You want to come along and ask him?”
“I value my ass too much for that. Okay, Sarge, thanks for being cooperative. The last group through here were shitheads.”
“Not ours?”
“Naw. Never seen them before. Which doesn’t prove anything.” He waved me on.
I thanked God that He had not put me in the world with the mind and heart of a black-market operator.
At the next corner, right behind the Oberpfarrkirche—the big Romanesque parish church—I slowed for a slippery spot and skidded anyway. The jeep bounced over the curb and settled peacefully, like a Saint Bernard ready to rest for the night after a difficult, all-day trek in the Alps. The motor died, telling me that it too was ready to call it a day.
I was about to start the ignition when I heard a muffled scream from a distance. A woman’s scream.
Hand on the key, I listened. If there was no repeat, I would mind my own business and drive on to the Vinehaus.
I heard in my brain Rosie’s sobs in the dark church. This time, I gritted my teeth; I would not panic.
There was another and more terrible scream. Someone was hurting a woman, hurting her badly, down a flight of steps and in a twisted alley on the left, across the street from where I had stopped.
What happened next is of the same order of folly as catching the blocked pass in Hansen Park or plunging into Lake Geneva. Exit Charles Cronin O’Malley, enter daimon on horseback and with a lance.
I grabbed my automatic weapon and my flash, jumped out of the jeep, and raced toward the screams, now even more plaintive. I turned a dogleg c
orner, shone my light on the thick, old walls, and saw in a boarded-up doorway three GIs tormenting a civilian who, from her screams, was obviously a woman.
Dear God, they must need sex bad if they’d rape on a night like this.
Or perhaps only entertainment.
“Halt!” I shouted. “Constabulary!”
One of them shone a flash back at me, saw my automatic weapon and blue beret, and shouted, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
They took off down the street, their boots clattering on the cobblestones, despite the cover of new snow.
I should have taken off too. I had saved her, had I not? Wasn’t that enough?
“Fräulein?” I turned my light on the heap of rags slumped on the ground at the doorway.
Her face was incredibly young, fifteen or sixteen at most, a pretty face framed in long, pale blond hair, the kind of face that should have been beaming next to a date at a weekend dance. Now it was dirty, bruised, and wet with tears.
I helped her up. They had torn most of her clothes. They now hung from her thin shoulders in shreds. Her breasts were dirty and red where they had abused her, but she was alive and not hurt too badly. I took off my jacket and draped it around her quivering torso.
“What are you doing here?” I tried my terrible German.
“I speak English,” she sobbed.
“Good. I’ll take you home.”
Give a lonely male a battered woman to take care of and he thinks he’s the king of the universe.
“No, please, please. I am all right.”
“You haven’t answered my questions.”
“Polizei?” she asked dubiously.
“I’m not here to make an arrest, fräulein.”
She stifled her sobs. “Out to the square, then down two streets, Obersandstrasse off Kasernstrasse, but you need not . . .”
“Not all Americans are rapists, fräulein.”
“I know that,” she said in a tone appropriate for admonishing a little boy. But she leaned against my arm, trustfully I thought, as I led her back to the jeep.
“And my second question?”
“I don’t remember it.” She was still quaking, as though the cold and her terror would shake her poor little body apart.
“What are you doing here at this time of a bitter-cold winter night?”
“They promised me medicine for my sister if I paid them.” The words tumbled from chattering teeth. “I gave them the money, but they wouldn’t give me the medicine. Instead they tried . . . but you came. Danke, Herr Yankee. You saved me.”
“What’s wrong with your sister?”
Note how masterfully the young hero speaks his lines, the young knight in shining armor on his white horse. Well, in Constabulary finery and on white jeep.
“Pneumonia. We need, what is it you call it . . . ?”
“Penicillin?”
“Ja. Otherwise she will die.”
It sounded implausible. “That drug is available on an emergency basis for civilians in this city at the American hospital.”
We were back at the jeep. I opened the door for her.
“Not for us.”
“Why not?” I pushed her elbow toward the door of the jeep.
“We have false papers. If they are examined, we would be found out. We . . . are not legal.”
“Why are you illegal?” I shoved her harder toward the door.
She cowered against the side of the jeep. “If you had not come, they would have tortured me more and then raped me. Then perhaps they would have killed me.”
“Perhaps,” I admitted. “Probably.”
“You saved my life.”
An old trick of mine, fräulein. I salvage pretty girls once every year or so, just for the hell of it, if you know what I mean. “You could say that.”
“I can trust you?”
“I think so. I mean, you don’t seem to be a criminal that I should turn in. I’ll help you if I can. Now, why don’t you have real papers?”
“We are worse than criminals, Herr Yankee. My mother and my sister and I are Nazis.”
“No one has ever admitted to being a Nazi to me before in this city,” I said to the shivering young woman. “Don’t tell me you’re a war criminal?”
“I am.” She was shaking again.
“Nonsense.” I lifted her into the jeep. “Get inside. We’ll turn on the heat to warm you up, you can rearrange your clothes, and you can tell me the whole story. Then we’ll look at your sister and see if we can help her.”
“Why do you do this?”
Fair question. Because it makes me feel like a knight in armor, I suppose. Or Scaramouch back from the Spanish main. Or the Reiter—the ideal medieval German knight—over in the Dom.
“Because I object to women being attacked at night in a city for which my country is responsible.”
Ah, noble sentiments, were they not?
I walked around to the other side of the jeep, climbed in next to her, and turned on the ignition.
Her breathing was still uneven, half-gasp, half-sob. I turned the heat up to high. I considered putting my arm around her and thought better of it.
Eventually she calmed down, tried to restore her blouse and skirt, and considered me cautiously.
“I must trust you.”
“I think I can get medicine for your sister.”
Her story came in gulps. Her father had been a Nazi official in Dresden; her mother was a party member too. He had charge of the utilities in the city. He had to join the party. He was not an enthusiastic Nazi, but when she had asked him what had happened to two Jewish girls who had been friends of hers in school, he replied that it was good that the Jews would leave Germany and not interfere with its racial purity. She had wept because she loved the two girls so much.
She herself had belonged to the Jugend. She was seventeen, her sister thirteen. Her father was not an important man in the government. He did not approve of everything Hitler did but lacked the courage to quit. When the Russians came, he fled on foot from the town with his wife and daughters to protect them from Russian rape. They hid in the woods and the fields and struggled toward the advancing American Army. They were caught in an air raid on the road south. Her father was killed. She and her mother and sister managed to straggle across the American lines before the armistice was signed. At first they had hidden in Coburg, living as best they could from garbage cans. Then the Americans began to hunt for them because the Russians wanted her family for war crimes.
“A woman and two children?”
“They did not know my father was dead. We had many enemies in Dresden who had become Communists when the Russians came. They wanted my mother too. We came to Bamberg after the Americans replaced the Russians here. We had some friends from before the war. We work at the Bambergerhof where American civilians stay. When we have enough money, we will buy new papers, then we will go to Stuttgart where we have good friends. . . . But now they took all our money . . .” She started to cry again.
“You were in Dresden during the raids?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “So many died. So many of my friends. Sometimes I wish I had died. We cursed the pilots. But now I know that we started the war. It was perhaps what we deserved.”
The raid on Dresden occurred the last month of the war. The city had not been attacked previously because, like Bamberg, it lacked military or industrial targets. It was a jewel of a city, filled with the great architecture and art for which the Elector Augustus the Strong (also king of Poland) had been responsible. Stalin wanted it destroyed and Churchill went along, gladly it seemed. A few nights of incendiary bombs and the resultant firestorms obliterated the city and burned at least thirty-five thousand people to death. Just to keep good old Uncle Joe happy.
Never once in the months we knew one another did she use the Dresden raid as proof that the Allies were as much murderers as the Nazis had been. Yet there was no excuse for what Winston Churchill and the RAF had done to that harmless and defe
nseless city. Murder is murder, even if it is small-scale murder—compared to Hiroshima or Buchenwald.
The young woman worked right across the Schönleinsplatz from my Vinehaus. How convenient.
“What is your name?” I extended my arm around her shoulder. “I am Trudi,” her tears turned to sniffles, “my mother is Magda, my sister is Erika.”
“Your father?”
“Gunther . . . Gunther Strauss.” She was watching me closely, trying to read my reactions.
“Is that your real name or the name you use now?”
She leaned over the gearshift and examined my eyes, searching for clues to my character. I stared back. Her eyes were more green than blue, worried, anxious eyes, a rabbit trapped by a dog.
“Our real name”—she turned away from me—“is Wülfe.”
“What did you see in my eyes?”
“Kindness.” She spoke with a catch in her voice that might have been a sob.
“There’s a chocolate bar in the pocket of my jacket. Go on, eat it, there’s more where it came from. Now let’s have a look at your sister.”
I did not necessarily believe the whole story. Right after the war we had shipped back to the Russians whatever refugees they wanted and we could find. A charge that they were war criminals was enough. Then we learned that they routinely shot without trial everyone we sent them, women too if they survived weeks of gang rape. Moreover their requests were often grudge lists put together by local Communists (frequently ex-Nazis). So, we had become much less cooperative. But if you’d had a narrow escape or two during the first year after the war, maybe you’d be cautious. There was indeed a thriving business in preparing artificial papers. Our intelligence men at Constabulary headquarters knew it was going on and even how to get them, but by then our relationship with the Russkies had deteriorated so badly that we didn’t much care about some hunted folks acquiring a new identity. Also, Stuttgart was in the French zone, and they were even less disposed to turn refugees over to the Russians.
So the story was not implausible; but the Wülfes, if that really was their name, seemed like pretty small potatoes to be on anyone’s hit list.
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