A guy I didn’t know took a hesitant step forward. He made no eye contact with anyone else. Everyone tensed.
“Nur eine?” Schultz grumbled. “Only one? I think not.”
He began to walk along the line of Americans, looking each one up and down, holding his Luger pistol in his hand. The SS dog handler followed him. Every few men, Schultz would nod, the dog handler would grunt and the American would be pulled out of line to stand with the Jewish soldiers.
“But I’m not a Jew,” one of them objected. He was a short Italian-American private that I recognized from boot camp. Sebastiano Campisi. Like Goldsmith, he was from New York, but I guess they didn’t know each other. Goldsmith stood rigid, looking straight ahead.
The officer ignored Private Campisi’s objections.
“We need thirty volunteers,” he said. “If there are no more Jews, others will be chosen.”
He continued down the line, getting closer and closer to Goldsmith, who stared down at his socks in the snow. The officer walked past him. I let out a sigh of relief, but perhaps it was too soon.
Schultz stopped a few feet farther on.
He turned back and walked up to Goldsmith, lifted Goldsmith’s chin with his index finger and looked him in the eyes. He nodded and my friend was pulled roughly from the line. Mike held on to him for support.
“Let go,” Schultz commanded. Some of the other Americans grabbed Mike and held him up as Goldsmith was pulled forward. “You should have volunteered,” the officer sneered at Goldsmith. Then he raised his pistol. Goldsmith closed his eyes. So did I.
A shot rang out.
I opened my eyes and saw Mike, the man whose life I had saved, the only one I could be sure I’d saved, lying in the snow, a red stain spreading out beneath his head like spilled paint. He didn’t move.
The others immediately started shouting and pressing forward toward the murderer, but the big dog barked and one of the German Army guys fired his machine gun into the air.
“Disobedience will be punished!” Schultz yelled. The lightning bolts on his collar gleamed even in the dim light of the overcast morning. “You are responsible for one another’s actions. I trust that lesson has now been understood!”
He grunted some more commands at his men, and the German Army guys began marching the American officers and the enlisted men in a long line back to the road, leaving the town for the long march into Germany. The SS men stayed with Goldsmith and the other soldiers who had been pulled out of line.
“You are going to a very special place,” I could hear Schultz telling them. The snow and the stillness of the air made the sound travel so clearly, it was like he was whispering in my ear. A chill ran up my spine. “Do not dream of running away. Even if you escape, the others who remain will pay the price. Now!” he yelled. “Los! Geht!”
Goldsmith and the others looked at one another, confused. Even though they probably understood that the officer wanted them to start marching, they weren’t about to make it easy for him to drag them away. Sort of like Yutz, I guessed. Sometimes, even when you know you have to obey, you resist in little ways just to know that you can. Resisting like that might not destroy your enemies, but it will keep them from destroying you.
“Go!” the officer shouted and started shoving the men forward, toward a different road than the rest of the Americans had taken out of town.
They began moving very slowly, dragging their feet.
“Keep it up,” I whispered. “Just keep going slow until I can save you.”
As they moved out, the SS dog handler took up the rear of the line. His big dog barked and the men sped up their pace a little.
The bark must have set something off in Yutz, because he snapped his head suddenly to the side, slipping right out of the loop of his leash that had muzzled him, and he let out a loud series of barks. They cut the morning air as loud as machine-gun fire and they were, to me, just as deadly.
I pressed myself down flat on top of him, pushing his face against the snow, and I rewrapped the leather strap around his snout three times and yanked it tight, probably harder than I should have, but it silenced him. Yutz relaxed again, having gotten out his message.
It was probably a call for help.
My breath came fast now, puffing out in frosty blasts. I dared lift my head again to look, and I saw that the handler and his dog had broken from the back of the line. They were walking across the square, heading straight for the other side of town — the side where I was hiding.
The dog led his master with his nose in the air, sniffing, searching for the scent of the dog that had barked, the dog lying calmly beneath me.
I could swear that underneath his muzzle, Yutz had a cruel doggy smirk on his face.
We had to hide.
I dragged Yutz behind me, scrambling through the snow toward a barn about thirty yards away. Yutz resisted, planting his back legs and leaning away from me. I had to use both hands to pull him along.
I realized too late that the dog handler wouldn’t even need to use his German shepherd’s keen nose to find us. We were leaving an obvious trail of footprints — boots and paws — and big, long drag marks where Yutz made me pull him. There wasn’t time to do anything about it. I couldn’t see the SS dog team anymore, but I knew they’d be coming over the top of that hill any second now, and we were totally out in the open. All I could think about was getting inside that barn.
Once we were inside, I shut the door and dragged Yutz to a stall in the back. There was a slight scattering of hay, but otherwise the barn was empty. All the animals gone. I pulled Yutz down and held him tightly in my arms so he couldn’t wiggle free or make any more loud noises. He squirmed at first, but finally he relented.
His chest rose and fell with rapid breaths, and his nostrils flared at the end of his nose. I could feel his heart beating against my hands, but with every second that passed, he relaxed a little more. I guessed that even for a war dog, it felt good to be held. It felt safe. I had to admit, holding him against me, I felt a little safer too. I knew the dog wasn’t on my side, but he was warm and soft and he made me think of home.
Any good feeling I had in that cold damp barn vanished when the door creaked open and I heard the clomp of heavy boots and the panting of a large dog. The SS dog handler had stepped inside.
“Hände Hoch! Zeigen Sie sich!” he commanded. Yutz squirmed in my arms. I didn’t understand German, but he did. Every part of his body screamed out for escape. Freedom was so close, he could smell it. I squeezed him tighter. His freedom would mean the end of mine.
I heard the footsteps coming closer. The big dog snorted loudly. Yutz whimpered and the tiny noise sounded like a thunderclap to me. I held my breath. Yutz whimpered again. The German shepherd barked and I could feel Yutz’s chest heave, trying to let out a bark in response.
“Hände Hoch!” the dog handler repeated slowly, very quietly, and I knew the game was up. Maybe if I surrendered, he wouldn’t let his dog attack me. I looked down at Yutz’s frantic eyes. Yutz would have loved to make a chew toy out of my head if he had the chance. I began to slip Yutz off my lap, letting go with one hand, while I held the leash with the other so that I could stand.
Just as I started to move, I saw a glimmer in the barn stall across from me, a golden ring in an ash heap. It took me a moment to realize it was the little boy who had brought the Americans that piece of bread. He slid out of the shadows and met my eyes. He put his finger to his lips, urging me to be quiet, and then he made a whimpering noise that sounded almost exactly like Yutz’s. He stepped to the center of the barn with his hands raised above his head, shuffling toward the SS soldier and his big Nazi dog.
“Nicht schiessen,” he whimpered. That was a German phrase I knew. We had all learned it on the boat heading over to Europe. It meant “don’t shoot.”
I felt like a coward. There I was, lying on the floor of a barn, clutching a dog to my chest while a little boy risked his life to protect me. Some soldier I was.
But still, I stayed down and did my best to keep Yutz quiet.
The dog handler grunted some questions at the boy, and the boy answered them in tearful whispers. Then the man yelled, and his big dog barked again.
The boy yelped.
The dog handler said something else. I didn’t know what it was, but the tone was clear. It was the same tone adults all over the world used when they scolded children.
The boy answered in the same tone boys all over the world use when they apologize for whatever they’ve been scolded for, even if they didn’t do it.
I heard the horrible click of a pistol being cocked. The Nazi dog handler shouted, but a loud whistle cut the air. Obersturmführer Schultz was calling his dog handler back. The other SS men probably didn’t want to stand around waiting for this guy and his dog anymore. The dog handler exhaled loudly and shouted something in return.
I pictured Schultz, who had shot Mike in cold blood, checking his watch and tapping his foot impatiently on the snow, like a coach when his team was late for baseball practice. I held my breath. Would this man shoot this boy dead before returning to his unit?
The boy didn’t make a sound. Neither did I. I heard the clomp of heavy boots and the creak of the barn door. The dog’s paws crunched the snow as he followed his master down toward the village.
Yutz lay on my lap, his nostrils flaring with deep breaths, like he was trying to inhale the Nazi and his dog, breathing them back to rescue him from his American captor: me.
But they were gone, and I hoped that when their smell faded, so would Yutz’s agitation. His barking had nearly gotten me captured, and I wondered now if trying to use him to track the prisoners would be more trouble than it was worth.
“American?” The little boy startled me, standing at the end of the barn stall, looking at me and Yutz with curiosity. His voice was stronger and clearer than I’d expected from how he had whimpered. He stood taller too, not nearly so small as he’d seemed with the Germans around. He must have been eleven or twelve years old.
I thought about myself when I was that age, running around the hard-baked earth outside my grandmother’s house, while she shouted at the kids to come in for dinner, waving her big rice spoon in the air. The thought made me smile. Oh, Abuela, if you could only see me now, I thought, almost eighteen, a soldier, cowering in fear while a tiny boy stands up to the Nazi SS. This was not my proudest moment.
I nodded and let Yutz slide off my lap as I stood slowly, keeping his leash and the loops around his mouth pulled tight. He growled at the boy, but the boy did not back away. He just cocked his head at the dog and Yutz stopped growling. He mirrored the boy, cocking his head too. For a moment they stood like that, puzzled mirrors of each other, while I stood in my dirty uniform, towering over both of them, yet feeling like the smallest thing in the whole barn.
Yutz started to growl again, but the boy growled back and the dog flatted his ears against his head.
The boy shrugged and looked back up at me.
“Hugo,” he said, which I figured was his name. Then he saluted me.
“Miguel,” I said and saluted him back.
“Meeguile?” the boy repeated, his accent thick.
“Close enough,” I said.
We stood staring at each other for a while. Then I had an idea. I rummaged in my medic’s supply bag for a second and found a foil-wrapped chocolate bar. I pulled it out and tossed it to him.
“Chocolat?” He smiled as he unwrapped it.
I nodded and he bit into it with a satisfying snap as the cold chocolate broke into his mouth. He took two bites and then offered it back to me. In truth, I was hungry, but, thinking of Goldsmith, I held my hand up and refused. Hugo wrapped the chocolate up and put it in his pocket.
“You wait,” he said to me. “Here. No problem. You wait.”
Then he ran out of the barn, leaving me and Yutz alone again. Yutz looked up at me, his dog eyebrows raised.
“I don’t know either,” I told him. Yutz growled at me. “What’s the kid got that I don’t?”
Yutz just looked away. He lay down, resting his head on his paws. His pointy ears twitched.
A few minutes later, the barn door creaked open again. I ducked behind the stall and Yutz sat up, turning his nose and ears to the door. He didn’t bark.
“Meeguile?” the boy called.
I stepped out into the open. Hugo had returned, but he wasn’t alone. A man was with him, a thin man with a shaved head and a scraggly blond beard. His eyes were blue just like Hugo’s.
“My papa,” Hugo said, and the man stepped forward. He shook my hand.
“Michel,” he said.
“Miguel,” I corrected him.
“No, no,” the man laughed. “My name is Michel. Like your Miguel. From Michael. The same name.” He slung a canvas bag off his shoulder. “I have brought food for you,” he said. “It is not much, but you must eat. And drink.”
He pulled out a canteen and handed it to me. I drank greedily as he pulled out bread and sausages. Only after I’d had my fill of water did I notice the marking on the side of the canteen: the swastika, symbol of the Nazis.
“The spoils of war, yes?” the man explained. “Taken from the Germans.”
He reached back into his bag and pulled out a heavy gray Nazi SS officer’s coat and handed it to me.
“You will move better in this,” he said. “If you are seen it is less likely you will be stopped.”
“You’ve done this before, huh?” I asked him.
He smiled. “La Resistance,” he said. “The Resistance. We have helped many Americans to escape. We will help you.”
“I’m not trying to escape,” I told him. “I want to help my friends who were taken prisoner.”
Michel ran his fingers through his beard. “The prisoners … This is not easy. They have been separated.”
“I need to help the smaller group,” I told him.
“The officers?”
“No, the other group.”
“The Jews.” He sighed. “The Undesirables, as they call them.”
“Undesirables?” I asked. I didn’t like the sound of that.
“The Nazis believe they are the master race,” Michel said. “They believe that anyone who is not like them is inferior, undesirable. So they take the Jews they capture, and anyone who they think looks like a Jew, and they send them to work camps in Germany. Very bad places. Many die there. Belgian, German, Polish … even British and American. They are called work camps, but they are truly camps for dying. They are death camps.”
“I can’t let them take my friend there,” I said.
“The SS will take these prisoners to the train depot,” Michel said. “A train will take them into Germany, to the camps.”
“Then I have to get them before they reach the train depot,” I told him.
“The march will take them some days,” Michel said. “All their fuel and equipment goes in the other direction, on the attack.”
“Yeah,” I grunted. “I noticed the attack.”
“The Americans have been pushed back, no? You think the Germans will prevail?”
“Not a chance,” I said.
“The SS will not allow their prisoners to escape so easily,” said Michel. “You will need help.”
“From you?”
“I am needed elsewhere. It is the German attack that concerns me.” Michel thought for a moment. “Hugo can take you to find some other Americans. We know where they are.”
“Hugo?” I wrinkled my forehead to show my objection. “He’s too young.”
“As are you, my friend,” Michel said gravely. “But we all do our part to fight the Nazis. And Hugo knows the countryside well.”
“But the Germans are getting away. If I detour for help, I’ll lose their trail.”
“Following my son, you will not lose much time. And this dog can help you find the trail again.”
I looked at Yutz. He did not seem eager to help me.
Mich
el asked, “Why do you have this dog?”
“The spoils of war,” I told him.
He laughed. “The Germans train their dogs very well. They train them to find escaped prisoners, train them to stand guard, and train them to attack the enemy. I have even heard Hitler tries to train dogs to speak in code and to read messages …” The man shook his head and laughed. “Though Hitler is mad, this last part I do not believe.”
“Me neither,” I said, looking at Yutz, picturing the big black Doberman with bifocals and a newspaper spread out before him. I had to laugh.
While I spoke to his father, Hugo had knelt in front of Yutz, close to the dog’s big snout. He was turning his head side to side, looking at the dog from different angles. The dog kept turning to avoid direct eye contact with the boy. Even with his leash wrapped around his snout, I worried about the child being so close to the mean dog, but he wasn’t afraid at all.
In fact, Yutz seemed afraid of the boy.
“If you can control him, he could be of valuable help to you,” Michel said.
“I think he hates Americans,” I told Michel.
“Dogs are not like people,” Michel said. “They do not hate.”
“Well, he sure doesn’t like me very much.”
“You must give him a reason to like you,” Michel said. “Give him some water.” He held out the canteen to me again.
“Water?”
“A thirsty animal cannot resist water,” Michel said. “And all friendships must begin somewhere.”
I guessed Michel was right. I hadn’t given Yutz any reason to like me. All I’d done was tackle him and wrap his snout and drag him away from his master. Then again, he’d tried to get me killed or captured, so it only seemed fair.
I sighed and pulled him over to one of the posts at the end of the stall. I unlooped the leash from around his snout and I tied the leash to the post. Yutz didn’t bark or snarl when I let his mouth go. He yawned, showing his big white fangs and his long pink tongue, then he spun in a circle and curled into a tight ball, with his head resting over his front paws. I guess even ferocious Nazi war dogs got tired.
Prisoners of War Page 5