by John Smolens
This may seem strange, a man wearing a prison uniform with PW stenciled in large letters on his clothes, walking alone down the main street of an American town. But no one seemed to notice. Only a few cars passed by and none of them stopped or slowed down. I was just a man on the street, and I had not felt so liberated since before I entered the Italian army and this God-awful war. I was also nervous with anticipation, and despite the chilly air, I was sweating beneath my shirt. After crossing the intersection, I walked up the street to the white clapboard house with the Ford parked in the driveway. At the front door I saw that a piece of paper had been taped above the doorbell: Frangiapani. In a country where many people have short, blunt names—Jim, Bill, Ann, Beth—I was relieved to be standing in front of a house occupied by someone named Frangiapani. As soon as I pressed the doorbell I heard voices inside, and then footsteps, and after a moment the door was yanked open. There was a storm door between us, and the way Chiara gazed through the glass you’d think she had never seen a man before—she seemed frozen in the moment, and I too could do nothing but stare back at her.
Then her mother pushed her aside and opened the door. “At last,” she said in Italian. “You have finally escaped from that prison out in the woods.”
“No, Signora Frangiapani, really I haven’t—”
“Come in,” she urged. “We will hide you in the attic.”
“Signora—” I began, but she took me by the sleeve, pulled me into the house, and slammed the door shut. “Really, I’m not—”
“In the last war,” she said to her daughter, “we hid many boys. Italians, Austrians, a Serb who was wounded and died slowly. That’s how I met your father, you know.”
Chiara sighed, and said in English, “Yes, Mother, I know. He spent months on your farm until the war ended, and you were married in the spring.”
Her mother looked up at me sadly. “Her father, Renaldo, was an officer. Older than the other soldiers, but he was a man, a fine man. I bore him two children. Shortly after we came to America the oldest, young Renaldo, died of influenza. This broke his father’s aging heart, and my husband died less than a year later. So this one I have raised by myself.”
Chiara was nearly beside herself with embarrassment, and her dark eyes were angry.
“Signora Frangiapani, please,” I said. “I only come to make a small request.”
But the old woman took Chiara by the arm—today the girl was wearing a purple short-sleeve blouse and she had the finest black hair on her forearms. “Chiara, we must get blankets for him, and candles—but,” she said, turning to me, “you must be careful about light at night. A light in the attic will surely give you away.”
And then Chiara lost it. She pulled her arm free from her mother’s grip and both women began shouting at each other, the daughter in English and her mother in Italian. They were so vehement, I was tempted to slip out the front door and run away, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Chiara.
“Abbastanza,” I said politely, but their arguing only became even more vehement. Finally, I took both of them by the wrist and shouted, “Basta!”
They both fell silent and stared at me.
“Now,” I said in English. “I have come only to ask if I could buy some pasta.”
Chiara, who calmly removed my hand from her wrist, said, “You want what?”
“The food at the camp, it’s—you said you made pasta. Could I buy some for myself and Adino, the other Italian prisoner?” I put my hand in my trousers pocket and pulled out a small wad of paper. “I have no money. They don’t pay us in real money, but they give us these coupons that we can use at the PX and the canteen. When the American corporal comes to pick me up, I will ask him to trade some U.S. money for these coupons, which he can use at the canteen. And if this is not enough, I would be glad to trade something else with him. The guards, they like souvenirs—buttons, hats, anything from our military uniforms. It’s like currency to them.”
First, Chiara revealed un sorriso—a hint of a smile—and then she laughed. It was the first time I’d seen and heard her do so, and it was like bathing in one of the gorgeous arias written by the great Verdi. Her mother, however, went over to the living room couch and sat down heavily. “You have not escaped from prison?”
“No, Signora. I gave the corporal my word that I would not run away.”
Chiara stopped laughing. “And where would you go?”
I nodded.
“I can’t get away from here,” she said, “and I am free to go where I please.”
She folded her arms and looked toward the picture window in an effort, I believe, to conceal her face from me. I looked at her long, black hair against the back of her blouse, trying to lock that image in my mind, but then through the picture window I saw the commander’s Jeep pull up in front of the house.
“I wouldn’t take your money, or coupons, or your buttons for a little pasta,” Signora Frangiapani said. She pushed herself up out of the sofa and shuffled into the kitchen.
I went to the picture window and waved to Corporal Marks, indicating that I would be out in a minute. Ruup sat in the back seat, the lower part of his head now wrapped in a bandage, with only a small hole over the mouth.
“What’s the matter with him?” Chiara asked.
“He had an accident.”
She looked at me. “You don’t sound like you believe what you say.”
This took me by surprise—she had never spoken to me this way before. “No, actually, I don’t—it wasn’t an accident. Somebody didn’t break some glass, sweep it up, and mistakenly put it in his bowl of stew.”
Chiara leaned back from me slightly. “It was intentional?”
“The glass was ground up very small, so it wouldn’t be detected.”
In dismay, she put a hand to her chin and ran her forefinger over her lips, and I knew that this was the image that I would recall later. Her mouth was full and wide; it seemed to possess its own language, neither English nor Italian.
Her mother came back into the living room, a brown paper bag in her hand. “I don’t have much left. We will have to make more after Mass on Sunday.”
She handed the bag to me, and inside, the hard coils of uncooked fettuccine resembled pale bird nests. “Signora, I must pay you—”
She shook her head. “Not one word, please.”
I went to the door and opened it, but as I had my hand on the knob of the storm door I turned around. Signora Frangiapani looked at me sorrowfully, and then she blessed herself and began whispering a prayer in Latin. Her daughter folded her arms and studied me as though trying to determine if I was real, or something that she was imagining. Behind me, Corporal Marks’s whistle was impatient and off-key.
4.
That night Wilhelm rested in his bunk, while in the mess hall the men inspected their food carefully. Everyone knew that the doctor had pumped out Ruup’s stomach, and that forceps had been used to remove the larger slivers of glass embedded inside his cheeks and tongue.
At the soccer table other members of the team dissected their venison pot pie as though they were performing a delicate surgical operation, and they watched with grave apprehension as Adino and I ate our fettuccine. We had gone into the kitchen early, commandeered one of the stoves, and boiled a large pot of water. In a skillet, we had no choice but to prepare a simple sauce: butter (when we asked one of the cooks if they had olive oil, he offered us Crisco), salt, pepper, onion, one dried-up clove of garlic, and some grated cheese from Wisconsin. At the dinner table, we ignored our teammates as we leaned over our plates, twirled with our forks, and ate without pausing. Adino kept shaking his head as he sucked long strands of pasta into his mouth, and at one point I thought he was going to cry.
After dinner, one of the officers tapped his fork against a metal water pitcher, indicating that Kommandant Vogel would address the men. As Vogel stood up on the platform, it occurred to me that his head resembled a fist. That squint, combined with his bunched eyebrows, his pinched mouth,
even his blunt nose, all suggested tight knuckles. “Today is a day,” he began, “that we need to give thanks to our Führer because without his guidance and inspiration . . .”
Adino snorted, causing a couple of Germans at the next table to glare at him. What this little speech meant was that certain instructions would soon be conveyed through the ranks—not here, where there were several GI guards present, but later, when officers would visit the barracks. The kommandant went on for several minutes, spitting out the usual platitudes about the Fatherland (never once in these inspirational homilies would he acknowledge that some of us were not German), and when he was through, he snapped to attention. Over two hundred men in the hall bolted to their feet, heels were clicked, arms were raised, and there came a resounding “Heil Hitler!” All of us, regardless of what country we were from, went along with this because if we didn’t, one of the Nazis would take notice. Adino made a clicking sound with his mouth.
There was a half hour of free time until evening classes began. I went back to my bunk to collect my books. One of the remarkable benefits of being a POW in the United States was that it was possible to take university courses. For months I had been enrolled in a correspondence program with Wayne University in Detroit. Regularly I received packets in the mail from Assistant Professor June Stillman; they included grammar, vocabulary, readings, and essay assignments. She had also sent a textbook that contained a series of lesson plans for my Introduction to English Conversation course.
Before returning to the hall where classes were held, I walked to the far end of our barracks to see how Ruup was doing. He was lying on his side in the lower bunk, sipping salted water through a straw. Outside, members of the team were kicking the soccer ball around.
“Wilhelm, I think we’re going to have to keep you out of the match on Sunday.”
He sat up and motioned with his hands, indicating that he wanted my notebook. With my pencil he scribbled on a blank page: You know how this happened?
I looked down the long aisle that ran between the bunks. There were other men in the barracks, so I took the notebook back from him, and we wrote the following exchange:
Do you think it was an accident?
No. The doctor couldn’t understand how the glass was crushed up so small. It was on Vogel’s orders.
I think so too.
Gerhardt—he wasn’t a good Nazi. They gave him two choices. Break out and kill Americans. Or kill himself. He couldn’t kill anyone, even if he got out of these woods.
How did they convince him to do that?
Threaten his family in Germany. To do this from here they use code in their mail.
Why you?
I’m the next example. Not a “good Nazi.” My parents, my two brothers are all dead. I have no family—so I get the glass. I am a German. Not good enough for them.
Wilhelm handed me the pencil and notebook, and then he took my forearm and held it firmly. We sat for a moment, and then I said, “We’ll get you back on the pitch soon.”
Shortly before lights were out at ten, Kommandant Vogel came to our barracks. He spoke quietly, in a swift, precise voice. “I am ordering a work slowdown beginning tomorrow.”
After a moment, I said, “Kommandant, you haven’t been here as long as some of us. We have done this before. Once we even had a strike. The first time, the Americans marched us many miles through the woods, making men exhausted and sick. The next time, their response was ‘no work, no food,’ and they cut back what we got a little more each day. It went on for a week. Again, it only resulted in men becoming sick and exhausted.”
A hanging light above Vogel’s head cast long shadows down his face and darkened the hollows of his eyes. “We are doing too much to aid the enemy in their war effort. Thus I am ordering this action.”
“Kommandant,” I said. “Are you aware that the German government has expressly stated that we should perform the duties given us while in captivity? The Americans have, too. It’s the same on both sides. They are doing so to protect their men who are being held in prison camps.”
Vogel ignored this and said, “Furthermore, the kommandant and his officers have devised a new plan for a mass escape. The details are being worked out now.” And then he looked at me. “Captain Verdi, you are aware that it is the duty of every prisoner to try and escape?”
“Yes, it’s stated in the Geneva Convention.”
There were snickers, which quickly stopped as Vogel looked around at the men.
“You are not only expected to attempt to escape,” he said, “but when you do get out, you are to perform acts of sabotage and murder—anything that will aid the war effort.”
I was about to speak, when Adino said, “Kommandant, couldn’t we take a vote on this?”
There were murmurs of agreement from some of the others.
“What do you think this is?” As Vogel straightened up, the light above him shifted and I could see the fury in his eyes. “You think this camp is America? You think this is some democracy?”
“You know what the vote would be,” Adino said. “You might get 15 percent.”
Vogel inhaled deeply and then walked over to Adino. He was several inches taller, but Adino didn’t move. “There will be no vote,” Vogel said. “There will be a work slowdown. Tomorrow.” He turned on his heels and went out the door, followed by his group.
“Whenever Nazis leave the room,” Adino said, “the relief is like a good fart.”
Some of the others laughed, until I said, “Adino, shut up.”
When we were in the war, there was never any question about what we should do. You simply did what you were told by your superior officers. If you didn’t, you could be shot. What to do, what not to do as prisoners of war had been a great dilemma. After being captured in North Africa, there was overwhelming uncertainty and exhaustion, complicated by a sense of relief: the war was over for me. When I was with the army in Italy, even though I was in unfamiliar territory, I seldom felt that the end of the war was near for me. I was not close to the front, but helping to organize sending supplies and men forward. I understood that in those rugged hills of the mezzogiorno, it has always been hard to see one’s enemies, and this somehow protected me. But when we were shipped across the Mediterranean to Africa, the landscape changed and the war became something utterly foreign. In Africa, even Dante would be struck dumb by the horrors we witnessed. The land was essentially flat, lifeless; sand was everywhere and got into everything. Field Marshal Rommel’s cunning had elevated him to mythic proportions, but it was only a matter of time before the Allies would turn it all around. I was convinced that I would not leave Africa alive.
Since arriving at Camp Au Train, most of the prisoners (not Vogel and his Nazis, of course) had come to some difficult realizations. The war was truly over for us—that was not difficult to accept. What would come after the war was impossible to predict, and it was too distant to contemplate, other than knowing that the world as we knew it would no longer exist. The hard thing, the unexpected revelation, was that the Americans were not what we had thought they would be—we had been told that despite their smiling faces they were inherently evil, and if they won the war, everything that we knew and believed in would be swept away. If we survived such a loss, we wouldn’t know who we were: our history, our traditions, our beliefs, all crushed and forgotten. There was no option but to fight to the death. Instead, we had been captured, and to our surprise—even to our horror—most Americans treated us with decency and fairness.
In the morning the camp trucks took us several miles into the woods to a new site. As usual, we were met by American civilians, men who drove the trucks for the Bay de Noc Lumber Company. The drivers operated the skids and the equipment that loaded the logs onto the long flatbed trucks. They were earnest, hard-working men and we got along well with them. It was not uncommon for us to share a cigarette during breaks, and some of their wives had them bring us tins of cookies or brownies, or something I’d never had before arriving in
the United States, sugar doughnuts.
When we climbed out of the transport trucks, we went to the tool van, which was hitched to the back of an army Jeep. The Shepherd unlocked the doors, stepped back, and we began to distribute axes, bow saws, and shovels. I took an axe and followed Adino up the hill. We usually worked in threes, but Wilhelm had remained behind in the barracks, so today Adino and I would do the job ourselves. He had a shovel over one shoulder, the four-foot saw over the other.
“Wait,” I said, gesturing toward his saw. “Let me see that.”
We inspected the long row of teeth on the blade and found that they’d been twisted and bent out of line. I took the axe off my shoulder, and as I lowered it to the ground the head fell off. Looking at the top end of the wooden handle, we could see that the metal wedge that held the head firmly in place had been removed. Next we examined the shovel: the shaft had been sawn halfway through. We started down the hill and saw that the other men were making similar discoveries.
Officers only performed manual labor if they wanted to, but they did supervise. As a captain, I chose to cut wood simply because there were only two Italian prisoners and I couldn’t bear to sit around and “supervise” Adino all day, and without the work the days would seem interminably long. Kommandant Vogel, who had never had a blister or a splinter in his hands, stood in front of the tool van, explaining to the Shepherd that the men would not work without properly maintained equipment. The Shepherd looked cornered.
“Until this problem is resolved,” Vogel told him, “we should return to camp.”
“How’d you get into the van?”
Vogel turned to me, mildly surprised that I would have the insolence to question him.
“The Shepherd has a key,” I said. “There must be others.”
Now the Shepherd seemed not only confused but scared. “I don’t know,” he said.
Vogel folded his arms. “What are you saying, Captain Verdi?”