May 6.
Today we walked twenty miles in an unfriendly rain. We hurdled creeks and waded them and fell in them. We crossed one stretch of swampland by walking the railroad track that spanned it, but we lost one of our attendant tanks when it tried to emulate us and succeeded only in trapping itself, spread-eagled on the track with the ends of the ties jammed tightly against the inner mechanism of the caterpillar treads. We lost another tank when it bogged down in the middle of a marshy field. (The crew members climbed topside on the half-submerged vehicle and calmly began heating C-rations for an early lunch.) We lost a third tank when it crashed through a flimsy wooden bridge and fell into the creek below. Meanwhile it continued to rain, and we wound up the day in a very damp blaze of glory.
Our destination was Maria-Kulm—or Chlum Sv Mari (I like the Czech better). No sooner had we arrived than I was ordered to take the platoon out on a contact patrol. My bed, finally achieved at a weary midnight, was in a damp, musty-smelling cellar.
Throughout Europe I have been dismayed by the shortness of the beds. Single beds, old-fashioned double beds, or twin beds—they’re all too short. Damn it, I’ve seen tall Europeans. How the hell do they sleep? Maybe they curl up as in a womb and never really stretch out full length. (If these short beds were a uniquely German phenomenon, I’d hazard a Freudian guess and say, “No wonder the Germans are possessed by this dark frenzy for lebensraum! It would be cheaper for the world to give them longer beds!”)
May 7.
So it’s over. The news has just reached us. It will be final and official as soon as Eisenhower signs. And there will be no more guns, no more fear, and death that asks no questions no longer waiting around the next turn in the road. Night sounds will be innocent, and there will be no new corpses in the woods and in the ditches by the hedgerows. Now only the anguish and the tears and the slow cancerous grief... as it is in Germany on this May day, as it can be in no other nation in the world, because here there is no hope. Nothing remains of Germany but a great grief ... and hatred. Sorrow and hate, hate and bitterness. It is significant that the hatred (all of it) seems to be directed against Russia exclusively. Always Russia—never America or England, or even France.
There is little rejoicing among the men in the platoon. We are too tired to celebrate, though it may be different tonight if we can acquire anything to drink. And the civilians, though happy it’s over at last, weep fresh tears at the sharpened memory of husbands and sons who are dead or missing or prisoners of war. For the civilians the war has long been over. Today’s announcement is more of an anticlimax for them than it is for us.
Here follows the account of the last day of the war for the first platoon of George Company, 16th Infantry Regiment:
We shoved off this morning (May 7) from Chlum Sv Mari, but never reached our final objective. We paused at one of the intermediate points, a town called Bukovany, and it was there that we saw the war creak and groan to a halt. We are still in Bukovany as I write.
The first platoon spearheaded on this final thrust. There was no fighting of any consequence en route, but we collected many prisoners. The Germans were eager captives.
This town, this day ... I wonder if I will ever be able to make you see it the way it was. Our uneasy premonitions when we started out this morning ... the reluctance of every step forward, the prickling sense of peril as we approached Bukovany and saw men in enemy uniform appear silently in the streets ahead. They faced us, unmoving and watchful, but they did not open fire, and I cautioned the men in the platoon not to fire first. Without slackening pace we moved steadily upon the town, and the figures in blue uniform retreated, slipped furtively between the houses and disappeared.
Our orders had been to move quickly through the town, turn right at the main square, and follow that turning to the village outskirts. There, we were to set up a perimeter of defense. The platoons following would similarly occupy other quarter sections of the town.
Turning at the square, we’d moved some distance along a pleasant street lined with attractive houses when one of the scouts raced back to me. “Hey, Sarge,” he gasped, “there’s something funny up ahead! Some big buildings with a barbed wire fence around ’em and a bunch of guys inside yelling their heads off!”
Halting the platoon, I went forward with the scout. Soon I could hear the sounds, the distant, confined yelling of many male voices. Jungle noises heard through a filter. A few steps more and we came upon the jungle itself. Not a jungle—a zoo ... here were the cages and the animals. Several buildings, iron-barred, and faces pressing against the bars of the upper windows, scores of faces, a clotted mass of bearded, howling faces. As we came into view the yelling became a scream of triumph, picked up and echoed hollowly from the other buildings.
This was a stalag, a forced-labor camp (not a concentration camp) and these were the slaves. This was the “home” of the dispossessed, and this twelve-foot fence of barbed wire was the neighborly hedge that marked the boundaries of this country estate.
I called six men from the platoon and said, “Break the doors! Get ’em out!” The gates of the stockade were chained and locked, and we shot off the locks to the accompaniment of loud cheers from the faces. The first barrier. The heavy wooden doors were locked and we battered them down... the second barrier. Now we were within the building, but the slaves were confined on the second floor, behind still another locked door ... the third barrier. We smashed it open and were instantly engulfed in a struggling mob of shouting, weeping, insanely happy men.
They loved us ... they wanted to kiss us, and we blushed and resisted in a flapping sort of way and squealed like virgins in a haymow. (Forgive me if the flip tone seems in bad taste. I have tried and tried over again, yet I cannot write of this hour except awkwardly. Simple, direct language would capture some echo of that terrible joy, but I cannot find simple terms that do not also suggest the disciplines of selection and restraint. This was a pagan scene, a Pan-ic revel, with emotions too raw, too unashamedly naked, to be contained in the cool syllables of dignity.)
Even now, hours later, my throat aches and my eyes burn with unshed tears before the adoring respect that’s spread like a carpet before our muddy feet. Tears and kisses and embraces, salutes proffered with the trembling intensity of worship. They are quiet now, content to bask and adore, consecrate themselves in the miracle of our presence, but only a few short hours ago they were expressing their happiness more vigorously. For the first (and surely the only!) time in my life, I have been carried on shoulders like a football hero. And I’ve been bounced. (“Bouncing” appears to be a boisterous Slavic way of expressing enthusiastic liking—a couple of strapping fellows seize the object of their affections and toss him high in the air, catching him as he comes down and heaving him upward in flight once more. As they tire, two more huskies take over the game and continue from there.) They “bounced” me in the building until my head ached from hitting the ceiling and I was powdered with fallen plaster dust. Then they carried me to the courtyard and bounced me some more. My pack fell off, I lost my helmet, I dropped my carbine—I couldn’t make them stop, and everyone was having a good time but me. In a lull between bounces I grabbed desperately for my cigarettes and hastily began passing them out. That small gesture nearly finished me: I went down for the count under a fresh wave of kisses and impassioned bear hugs.
It was hilarious and exciting and heartwarming, and we were wrenched by the ardor of this joy. But the moment I cannot forget, the memory that still shakes me with pity and shame and the sorrow of knives, is the memory of the little man. He was middle-aged, I think, but slavery had stamped upon him and left the mark of eternity. He could have been thirty years old; he might have been sixty.
He followed me; wherever I went, he followed me. I’d turn and he’d be there, dog-like, his shoulders curved abjectly, his eyes shining with tears, a half smile, distant and dreaming, on his lips. He followed me because... he followed me because he wanted to kiss my sleeve, to kiss my sleeve,
damn it! Oh, damn it, damn it! To kiss my sleeve in humility, to bend his head and kiss the filthy sleeve of my jacket as though I were Christ and he not worthy to touch my flesh. And I wanted to cry and to hit him to make him proud again, I wanted to hit something, I wanted to smash something because he was so broken and everything whole and perfect was an impiety.
I tried to get away. There was much to do and I rushed around in a fury of movement, trying to escape the whipped animal who shamed me with the reminder that he had been a man. But I could not lose him: whenever I paused, I would feel that slight pressure on my arm, sense that gentle, abject presence, and he’d be there, kissing my sleeve. You cannot know the raging humility, the angry degradation in being even for a little while another man’s Messiah!
A sound of pounding and the muffled clamor of voices led us to investigate a long hallway in the building. When we smashed the locked door at the end of the hall, a new wave of men rolled over us, surging from a second stockade behind the building, and for a time it seemed we would not be able to control the screaming mob.
The German guards had deserted the stalag only a few minutes before we reached it (We learned later that a hanging had been scheduled for that morning: a slave guilty of a minor infraction was to be strung up on the gallows in the rear stockade as an object lesson. By arriving in Bukovany sooner than the Germans had anticipated, we’d saved a life. The guards feared reprisals and decided to skip the morning’s entertainment.)
Some of the guards, unable to get away, had sought hiding places in the vicinity of the stalag, and the slaves offered to smoke them out. I told them okay, go ahead. The manhunt that followed was a frightening thing to witness: the hunting pack of ragged, foul, wolfish men creeping upon a suspected hiding place, moving with a cushioned stealth that stirred dim, atavistic terrors and made the hair on the back of your neck suddenly bristle. And then the discovery! The cowering prey revealed, his body curled in pathetic weak defense ... the howl of the pack, the animal howl of feast and delight!
We tried to save the wretched guards from hurt, but I confess that we didn’t try very hard. I wanted no murders, but I rendered cold judgment and decided they had well earned this guerdon of kicks and blows and the bitter spit of hate. So we let the slaves beat them up a little before we rescued them. We had to fight to save one guard. A higher note of hysteria from the crowd, and more piercing screams of agony from the victim, warned us that this must be a special case and we’d have to move fast. We had to use our rifle butts roughly before we reached the skinny wretch in SS uniform who writhed on the ground, trying to protect himself from the blows that fell upon him from every direction. His face was covered with blood, his nose had been broken, and the slaves were jumping on him with savage intent. We lifted him to his feet and formed a chain of protection to get him to the prisoner detail that waited in the road. His hands shielding his bloody, ruined face, he ran through the cursing mob and howled, a keening, animal sound.
The slaves were angry at our interference and explained that he had been the officer in charge of their food rations. Last winter, that bitter winter of 1944, he had enriched himself by selling their rations on the German black market. Sometimes their day’s food had consisted of one frozen potato per man. I was almost sorry we’d saved him. And when I made an inspection tour of the stalag, saw the cramped and foul rooms where they had been confined, forty-six men to a room ... saw the four-decker bunks, so close together that a man could get in bed only by sliding in flat, and once in, had to sleep on his back or his stomach because there was no shoulder space between the bunks in which he could turn his body, when I saw the gallows and the barbed wire, heard the accounts of whippings and other punishments ... I saw the toilet and sanitation facilities ... the coal mines where they worked fourteen to eighteen hours a day ... when I smelled the place, the foul breath of it, I was sorry we had saved any of the guards. (There was another coal-mine stalag not far from Bukovany where the slaves had been too strong for the American soldiers who freed them. Seizing their former guards, the slaves made their own justice and hurled the screaming, struggling wretches down the mine shafts.)
The hunt for the guards over, a new turbulence arose when the slaves broke into the kitchen and storehouses and began to gorge. I tried to halt this insane banquet, but only halfheartedly. There would be many sick men before the night was out, but I could not find it in my heart to take the food from them and put it under guard once more. They had been hungry so long ... and the guarding of food, the withholding of food from the hungry, has always seemed to me the last cruelty, the ultimate perversion in a world of contradictions.
By late afternoon the camp had settled down and all was quiet. The nightmare of the past years had abruptly ended, and now the men were lazy and relaxed, in a trance state between sleep and waking. They didn’t talk much, and then only in low murmurs. They sat in the sun, making faint markings in the dust with bits of wood, smiling secretly, remotely. Most of them would not sit in the courtyard, but chose the open road outside the stockade. Even with the gates torn off, the stockade was a prison still, a cage of daggered wire.
I do not know how many slaves had been held in the stalag. There were three groups—Russian, Polish, and French—each with its own elected leader or spokesman. The Russians and Poles greatly outnumbered the French. And hated them. It was easy to understand why. The Russians and Poles were truly slaves, having no rights, no privileges, no hope of deliverance except death. The French, however, enjoyed some of the privileges of free workers and comprised a distinct community, living in a separate part of the camp. They had less barbed wire and fewer guards; their food was better and more plentiful; they worked shorter hours, and they were even permitted a degree of intercourse with the civilians, including the freedom to go into town and purchase certain permitted articles at the shops. As a result, the French seemed healthier, more vigorous than the gray-faced skeletons whose labels identified them as Slav.
Wherever I walked, I was greeted with smiles of devotion and love, awkward salutes from hands that had nearly forgotten. Gravely I returned each salute and wished my supply of cigarettes had not run out. Presently, the room leader of one group approached and with simple dignity—and in English— invited me to be the guest of honor at a party his group was giving in their quarters. I accepted the invitation with a gravity and correctness that matched his own and we set out.
He snapped an order as we entered the room and the men seated at the long table jumped to their feet and saluted, holding the salute as I passed to the place of honor set for me at the head. I returned their salute and smiled foolishly when they continued to stand at rigid attention, studying me with grave eyes. And then, since I could not speak their language and did not know what I was to do, I collapsed helplessly in my chair. Instantly they completed their salute and sat down, moving in the perfect unison of military precision. Still they remained silent, watching me intently, not moving. In desperation, I turned to the leader and said, ‘Tell them to be happy ... tell them to eat and be happy ... that they will be going home soon!” He smiled, spoke rapidly in Polish, and the table came to life with a roar. They leaped to their feet again, offering toasts in water and bad coffee, and there were tears in their eyes and on their faces. There were tears on mine.
The meal was simple. We drank water and ersatz coffee. There was something called bread, and a red, sticky substance called marmalade. It had the consistency, the smell, and surely the taste, of old fish glue. But the main course was potatoes—raw, unpeeled potatoes, cut in thin slices that were slapped against the red-hot belly of the tiny stove at the lower end of the room. Sizzling on contact and making a delicious smoke, the raw potato slices would stick to the hot metal. When they’d been scorched brown on one side, the “cook” would pick them loose with his fingernails and turn them over. The room was filled with a nutty richness, and the men sniffed the good smell and grinned and pounded on the table, happily cursing the sweating “cook.” I stayed for ha
lf an hour, but I was aware that my presence was a social burden and they could not entirely relax while I remained. Pleading the pressure of many duties, I begged their permission to leave, wished them “Godspeed” on a speedy return to their homes, and left. They rose and stood at attention until I passed from the room.
I have established my C.P. in the house next door, an attractive, well-furnished building. Only a high barbed-wire fence separates the rear yard from the exercise yard of the prison. The people in this house cannot help but have acquired a very intimate knowledge of the stalag—the work, the food, the living conditions, the punishments, the executions. It’s apparent that their observations have not disturbed them: they are smugly placid and too damned healthy looking. Their normality under the circumstances offends and irritates me.
Since my major responsibility at the moment is the administration of the stalag, it was imperative that I establish my C.P. as near at hand as possible. Shortly after we freed the prisoners, I sent Dettman to tell the owners of this house that I required accommodations for four men. In a moment or two he was back to report, somewhat apologetically (he was a gentle guy), that there was no room for us. So the inhabitants had informed him.
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