Behind Hitler's Lines

by Thomas H. Taylor

  Yet the Poles Joe spoke with didn't hold a grudge against the Red Army, which was dutifully following Stalin's orders not to help the uprising. Major had said something about waiting on the Vistula, and knowing her, Joe is sure, if ordered, she would have charged across to help anyone fighting the Hitlerites. In his presence Russian troops had never bitched about bad commanders—Stalin being the worst— some of whom were as incompetent as the World War I generals whose troops were slaughtered by the tens of thousands. Probably Joe's buddies in Major's battalion just didn't want to air their feelings in front of a foreigner—certainly not within earshot of the commissar—but Joe thinks they just felt that any commander who gave them the opportunity to kill Hitlerites was good enough.

  The Red Army made amends to the Poles by paying back the Hitlerites in kind. Across from the convent was the shell of a burnt-out four-story building where dozens of bodies protruded from windows. SS prisoners had been herded and locked in. Fuel oil was poured till it saturated the roof, lit by flamethrowers. Joe was staring at this huge crematorium when an emaciated Pole sidled up. He had been some kind of scientist at one time, then an inmate of Auschwitz. In a cackly voice, he began to speak like a docent:

  “Body fat turns liquid at high temperature, then the skeleton comes apart like a boiled chicken. They were writhing, you see, and that helped separate the bones.” Some had jumped and many had fallen as they burned. Their scorched limbs strewed the street like offal dumped from a slaughterhouse, but left there, for there was no odor from the scorched jumble of remains. “The skulls—look closely—they're all cracked. That was from the heat too. That plastic is then-brains. But no eyes. They all popped out. See those big smiles? High heat does that. Everyone in hell is grinning.”

  Machine guns took care of anyone trying to get out. Thus the forces of Hitler and Stalin imitated each other. That had troubled the sisters, but they expresssed no sense of equivalence because it had been the Germans who had set the scales of immorality on the Eastern Front.

  As soon as Mother Superior examined his wounds Joe was taken to the infirmary, a structure half above ground, half below. The lower half had been for protection against bombs and shelling. There he was given a cot among many elderly Poles and a few children, all malnourished. There was no doctor, but a nursing sister treated everyone expertly, better than anything Joe had seen with the Russians. She didn't speak English, didn'tneedto, as she cleaned and packed Joe's groin and knee, manipulated his shoulders, salved his hand and even checked his head. It surprised him that she indicated the head wound was more serious than the groin; indeed, in the long run it was.

  “After a few days of treatment another sister told me that I could now have a hot bath,” Joe recalls. “Oh, happy day! Upstairs was a big iron kettle heated by a scrap-wood fire. My dressings were waterproofed, and another patient helped me into a four-leg tub that had once been in a house. You can't imagine how warm and comfortable I felt after months of deep bitter cold. After a good wash I soaked till the water cooled. There was only burlap from sandbag casings to dry off with, but I was given clean underwear and my clothes. They'd not been washed, but the sisters must have done something to them because they smelled fresh.”

  While Joe got better a number of old Polish men visited told him about their relatives in the States, and brought his ambitions up to date. The former American embassy was rubble; it had been for years. The American consulate in Lublin had been taken over by the Soviets, who set up a rump Communist government. It was not recognized by the United States, so if it was medical help Joe needed, he should stay here with the sisters.

  He'd have gladly stayed until Americans eventually found him, but he felt he could only stabilize his health at the convent, not improve it. Joe was also aware of taking up space and resources that could be used by more needy patients. He talked this over with Mother Superior, who said, “Then you must rejoin the Russians. They have transportation from here to Moscow. There is surely a big American embassy there.”

  “I'll be very sad to leave,” Joe told her.

  “We will be glad, not to see you leave but because you will go where you should and can regain what you have lost. We wish that for everyone who comes here.”

  Joe says, “I promised to pray for her convent, she blessed me, and we parted in tears. Mother Superior died in the 1970s before I got back to Poland. She is surely in heaven because she'd done so much for people suffering in hell.”

  The only sister still living when Joe returned forty years later was so old herself that she didn't remember much at all. He presented himself and told her his story. Yes, she recalled the story but looked Joe up and down and said she didn't recognize him. Nevertheless they enjoyed a long embrace. She felt as fragile as a bird in his arms.

  IN 1945 THERE WAS a big Soviet headquarters right across the frozen Vistula. Joe was driven there in a horse cart. All the permanent bridges had been destroyed, so the crossing was on Russian pontoons. The man who delivered him was old and gaunt; he worked at the convent for food. The sisters had provided Joe with black bread, jam, and some sawdust sausage; he gave it to the driver for his help. They embraced, Joe painfully got off the cart, and the driver clucked to his horse and turned back to Warsaw.

  “I gave him my picnic but still had what was most valuable from the convent—the sisters' promise to pray for me each morning at mass. They'd done their part for my salvation, now it was up to me to complete the last leg of my journey from Normandy to freedom.”

  The Soviet headquarters was in a medieval building with a courtyard. As Joe was in a combination Russian-American uniform the guard looked at him curiously and assumed he was a veteran of the Polish Home Army. There were very few of them left. Joe presented Zhukov's passport and was ushered right into the HQ. An English-speaking officer invited him to sit down and offered assistance. This was a logistical base, he said, and most of the activity was to push supplies up to the front. Joe told him he needed to get to Moscow as fast as possible for medical treatment. The officer asked to see his wounds, then said the only transportation to Moscow was trains.

  Any chance of a flight back there? Joe asked. The officer went off to some office to check. A Red air force major returned with him and informed Joe that the planes were not pressurized. That might not be good for a head wound. Joe hadn't thought of that. The two officers left and came back with a high-ranking doctor, who looked Joe over, heard his medical history, and seconded the advice against trying to fly to Moscow. The planes hopscotched all over, the air force officer added, and were often diverted in flight as higher priorities came up. There was no telling when it would get there. The consensus was, Better take the train. With luck he'd reach Moscow in two weeks.

  “I figured out that meant the train would average about sixty miles per day. We'd almost marched that fast to Fort Benning! Two weeks in a rolling field hospital didn't sound like it would be good for my health, but what choice did I have? I just hoped there wouldn't be too much screaming and dying, the kind that drove me out of Landsberg, but I didn't want to offend the Russians by showing what I thought of their medical system. It would be insulting, as lightly wounded as I was, to object to riding with comrades who were worse off.

  “I said it would be a privilege to be on a train with such men. The officers congratulated me, and we shook hands all around. They asked how I'd obtained the letter from Zhukov. Every Russian who looked at the letter asked me the same question.”

  Joe was put on a train that night. It was worse than he'd feared. His car was for ambulatory patients, about sixty feet long with about seventy passengers, including officers up to captain and enlisted men of all ranks. The officers took more than their share of space, the choice space next to the two woodstoves. They took the seats and left the benches for the enlisted men. NCOs didn't have much status either.

  “This surprised me because communism was supposed to make everyone equal. On an American train like that the worst wounded would get the choice space.
That's what we'd done on the forty-or-eight after the terrible strafing of the train to Stalag XII-A. The Russian military caste system was worse than the British. I've heard that was because it started with the Czarist army, when the officers were nobility, the soldiers serfs. But it carries over even today. When I attended a Russian veterans' reunion in 1992, almost all the members were former officers. Maybe the enlisted vets had then-own organization, or maybe not enough of them survived to form one.

  “Looking back I see that the American Airborne was very democratic; very disciplined but also very democratic. That may have been because, though we were all volunteers for the Airborne, many of us had been drafted (or barely escaped the draft like me) from all walks of life, so just being an officer didn't mean everything.

  “I remember a Bing Crosby song after the war, 'I've Got My Captain Working for Me Now.” That must have been a dream for many GIs, that a typical CO was nothing special, and under peacetime conditions he'd need something from GIs who no longer needed him. Can't argue with that, or agree with it either. The truth was a mix.

  “Off-duty we'd sometimes socialize in the 506th (that is, drink) with officers, but that didn't lessen the respect for rank when everybody started training the next morning. In the 101st Airborne Division Association there is no officer-enlisted divide at all.”

  Against his democratic principles Joe accepted special status as an ally and took a seat near a stove. All the officers wanted to hear his story and see the Zhukov letter. In return Joe asked if anyone knew Major. The answer was shrugs— there were so many women commanders toward the end of the war. In this way, his fellow passengers pointed out, the Red Army was more democratic than the American.

  The train to Moscow made innumerable stops. The Russian rail gauge was wider than in the rest of Europe, so during the Germans' conquest of the USSR they had to tear up all the Russian track and replace it with their own. They did this of course with POW and slave labor. During the German retreat the track was destroyed again. Most of Joe's stops were for track repair and replacement of the original gauge. That was now being done by German POWs from what he could tell.

  Joe mentioned to an officer on the train that, uh, it didn't seem the Red Army was taking a lot of prisoners anymore. That's right, was the reply, because so many had been captured previously there were enough to work on the railroad— like the lucky ones Joe had seen in summer uniforms toiling in subzero cold. No more than one in ten POWs of the Russians ever got back to Germany, and that wasn't until the 1950s.

  The hours rocked by slowly, reminding Joe of the forty-or-eight from Paris, so he rose and moved around, reassuring himself that this train was not headed for Germany but instead leaving it far behind. Memories and impressions merged as he scrubbed hoarfrost from a tiny slat of glass. Out there were nicks of distant light from the algid countryside, scraps of stiff paper twitching on railroad markers, pinioned there by the wind. The by-product of combat was as much trash as blood. Colonel Sink wouldn't have tolerated such tatters. “Police up the area” was his dictum—what you control controls your mind. But that was on another front, amounting to another war. Here those scraps of paper twitching in an arctic gale were ghosts. Thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of specters, uncountable as the snowflakes wailing against the wobbling train. The sounds of the railroad tracks became those of tanks. Buffets of wind felt like concussions of artillery. The heat of bygone battles—whether Carentan or Kustrin—was blanketed by a cold even more violent.

  What sleep Joe got was sitting up. Food on the train was as bad as the worst days in III-C: black bread so hard it cracked one of his teeth, washed down by scalding tea that produced a heat rush when it hit bottom and spread through the middle of the body like an internal sauna.

  “There was no water on board, so we melted snow scooped up at stops. It wasn't very clean. Many trainloads had stopped here and pissed. One time I scooped down into a drift and uncovered a hand. The skin was almost gone, so the body must have been there longer than the start of that winter. I still think about him sometimes. When and why did he die, what was his nationality? He had an untold story, like how many million others? It makes me feel very small.

  “One of the awful smells on that train was from frostbite wounds that had turned green. The Russian treatment of frostbite was very effective, but it didn't involve removing dead skin, though sometimes maggots were used to do the job. I was told they generated some heat, which was good for the lower tissue.”

  Under those conditions Joe's wounds became reinfected and began draining again. He perceived that the men on this train were a much lower medical priority than the casualties at Landsberg. There the system had been triage in order to send as many of the wounded back into action as soon as possible. No one on the train was in that “recoverable” category. The war was over for them, so they weren't as important to Stalin. None of the passengers seemed to resent that; they were just grateful to be returning to homes they had never expected to see again.

  The sisters had known Joe was in for a long cold trip and had wrapped cotton strips around his body for warmth. On the train he unwrapped some strips, asked a one-legged corporal to tear them, then used the strips as dressings to soak up drainage. After two to three weeks, about the time Joe ran out of strips, the passengers became excited. There were two small windows in the car. Joe was invited to take a look, and condensation was wiped off the glass to reveal windswept desolation. Look again, Yo—the outskirts of our destination! Snow had drifted into deep, wide trenches. These, he was told proudly, were antitank ditches dug by Muscovites in the winter of 1941.

  The mile-long train ground to a halt at a station that was large but had no city around it. Nonetheless, this was it, New York and Times Square for his fellow passengers. In their tunics they had hoarded flasks of vodka. Now was the time to break them out in gratitude and also break out in song. Joe accompanied when he knew a tune like “Meadowlands,” but his thankfulness was nothing like theirs. He'd come a long way from Normandy but still felt he'd struggled up to just an upper ring of hell.

  Arrivals of hospital trains were not publicized, so there were no families to meet the returning wounded. Only when the soldiers limped into their homes—often after hitchhiking hundreds of miles—did their families know they had survived the war.

  “I wish I could have been at one of those reunions,” Joe says. “It would have been overpowering beyond any level of emotion I can imagine, even my own homecoming.”

  Joe was with the ambulatory patients who had plans to get home. They were released with a month's leave paid in advance—Stalin's generosity—about three dollars for most of them. A stretcher case could only get news out to his family through word of mouth. Then it was for them to find him in an army hospital and bring food, dressings, whatever he needed lest he die.

  When Joe hobbled off that hospital train a snowstorm was building. In Michigan it would have been called the start of a blizzard.

  “Our snow and cold rolls in off the lake,” Joe says. “Whenever it does I'm back in Eastern Europe and feeling glad to be inside on my La-Z-Boy. The snow at the Moscow station made a ghostly scene. It seemed like the dead were coming back to life, given a second chance without expecting much more than before. The singing stopped.”

  Joe was wearing everything he owned, so outside the train the temperature seemed even colder than it was. The other debarking patients felt the snowfall was good because they knew from long experience that the worst cold came alone. He looked around at shapes eerily vague in the gliding snow. There was steam exhaling from parked army trucks, not nearly enough of them to transport all the patients. A few medics were helping with stretcher cases. Between them and the trucks was a huddled group of soldiers around a trash fire. Joe went up and saluted the only officer there, a major, and handed him Zhukov's letter. He had to bend away from the snowfall to read it, worrying Joe that the passport would become wet and illegible. The major brightened, returned Joe's salu
te, then told a subordinate he was leaving and to take charge of the debarkation.

  He pointed Joe to a car, and they drove off. The major put the letter on his lap and kept glancing at it in a pleased way. It was about an hour before they reached a headquarters. Joe's wounds were draining again, and he didn't feel good at all. It seemed bureaucracy would kill him after the Germans couldn't. He was sat down by a stove; that was welcome but built up his intermittent fever. He was barely coherent in answering questions by various officers.

  “I was ready to pass out, just hoping someone would get me to the embassy before I faded completely. In a way it was like listening to the Gestapo and Wehrmacht argue about what would happen to me.

  “The Russians made some phone calls. I got the feeling that Zhukov's name hadn't quite the clout it did back in Poland. But it was enough. Eventually a colonel who spoke very good English took charge of me and commandeered a Dodge truck with its driver. In good spirits (I was groggy) they drove me into town to a subway station.”

  The colonel ordered a train held while he pointed out the tile and murals of the station. They were remarkable, much more attractive than anything Joe had seen in New York. The colonel noticed his admiration: “We have the only subway system in the world, but with our help someday America may catch up.” Joe let that go.

  At the subway's destination were many steps to reach street level. The colonel said proudly that the depth was for bomb protection and had worked very well. Joe had trouble climbing; his breath was short when they emerged into a luminously bleak snowscape. The state-of-the-art subway seemed to represent the future of the USSR, while the absence of streetlights was their present. Joe has come to believe he was taken on the subway as sort of a tour; the colonel's truck could have driven to the American embassy faster.