Destined to Witness

by Hans Massaquoi

  Thus, having long since resolved my moral concerns, I focused all of my psychic energy on pulling off the job smoothly without getting caught. The plan of action outlined by Werner entailed not only smuggling but a bit of bribery as well. Werner felt that the success of our mission depended on not leaving anything to chance, and he wanted to ensure that we didn’t run into problems with our contraband once ashore. To implement the plan, we immediately took a walk to the dockside British MP post, where we started a friendly chat with the lance corporal on duty. The redheaded Scotsman, who sheepishly confided that his buddies called him Ginger, turned out to be a dyed-in-the-wool Yankeephile. When we put to him the hypothetical question of what would be the best way to bring “a few extra cartons” of cigarettes ashore from “our ship,” he told us, quite hypothetically, that on the following day during certain specified hours, the chances for such a transaction would be optimal since he would be on duty during that time. We thanked him with a pack of cigarettes for the valuable information and promised to see him the next day.

  Some twenty-four hours later, around noon, I, Werner, and a black American sailor from Brooklyn named Jeff stepped off the launch and onto the same landing dock, our waists bulging with cigarette cartons and our hearts pounding. In addition to the cigarettes he was carrying around his waist, Jeff was carrying two obviously full canvas bags.

  Ginger, it turned out, was on duty all right, but with him was another MP he hadn’t told us about. Our first thought was that we had been double-crossed. But just when we were trying to make up our minds whether to jump back into the launch or to face the two MPs, Ginger waved us to come into his tiny sentry station. There, he told us with a smile that the other MP was, like himself, an “okay sort of chap,” and that we were free to proceed. Much relieved, Werner handed the Scotsman two cartons of cigarettes and we were on our merry way. The worst part of our mission was over—or so we thought.

  We had walked about five minutes beneath the el-train viaduct in the direction of Rödingsmarkt when we noticed three men in dark coats following us at quite a distance. One of them shouted, “Halt! Polizei!” “Run for it!” shouted Werner, who intentionally had lagged behind Jeff and me in order to make our group less conspicuous. As the German plainclothes cops began to gain on him, he reached in his jacket and hurled the half dozen cigarette cartons he was carrying at us. Like well-rehearsed circus jugglers, Jeff and I scooped up the cartons and kept running. The last glimpse we had of Werner was when, flanked by the cops, he was led away in the opposite direction. Apparently our pursuers, realizing that German police had no jurisdiction over Allied personnel, had given up on Jeff and me. Other than feeling sorry for Werner, there was nothing we could do for him. After zigzagging through several downtown streets to throw off any cops who might be following us, we went to the address of the German Leica owner and completed the transaction to the mutual satisfaction of everyone involved. Jeff got the best of the deal, having received a four-hundred-dollar Leica camera in mint condition for twenty-six cartons of cigarettes, for which he had paid seventy-five cents a carton at his ship’s “slop chest,” or commissary.

  That night, after making sure that Jeff and his Leica got back safely to his ship, I went home to Othmarschen with six slightly battered cartons of cigarettes. It was difficult for me to regard the three cartons that were my share of the transaction as ill-gotten “loot” instead of something that constituted just compensation for dangerous work, as well as for some of the hardships the Nazis had put me through. It did, however, cross my mind that the street value of the three cartons of American cigarettes that I had earned in one single afternoon was three thousand German marks, almost three months’ pay as a member of the Three Ah-Yue Hon Lous. While that kind of quick money seemed to suggest that I was well on my way to getting filthy rich, nothing could be further from the truth. The fact was that big hauls of American cigarettes, like their source—American ships in port—were few and far between, and as a result, my existence was a constant up and down, from famine to feast and back to famine. There was no doubt, however, that the added income from my somewhat unconventional lifestyle went a long way in making up for the hardships Mutti and I had endured immediately after the end of the war.

  The day after Werner’s arrest by the German cops, I returned to his neighborhood to find out what had happened to him. I was prepared to learn that he was languishing in some police lockup, but instead, I found him in front of his tenement, grinning from ear to ear and looking none the worse for wear. Savoring every word, he told me how his frustrated captors had been obliged to set him free after a couple of hours when their superior at the station explained to them that without the cigarettes as evidence, they didn’t have a case. They nevertheless gave him a stern warning to watch his step because the next time he might not be so lucky. When I told him that his three cartons of cigarettes were safe and sound in Othmarschen, Werner decided that he could well afford to lie low for a while and suggested that we keep away from American ships until the heat was off.

  GI DAZE

  Our decision to avoid American ships for a while was academic, since there was not a single one in port. That fact was easily gleaned from the conspicuous absence of hookers at dockside. Had only one American ship been in port, St. Pauli’s ladies of the night (or day, depending on which shift they were working) would have been out in droves, alerted by their unfailing grapevine that stretched from Hamburg to New York and back.

  Carefully avoiding the docks, which were crawling with intrusive military and civilian cops, Werner and I decided instead to try our luck in some of our regular waterfront dives. In the absence of American seamen, we were prepared to lower our sights and make do with a frugal limey sailor or, God forbid, with an even less well-heeled Greek. In our highly specialized business, we had quickly learned that beggars can’t be choosers. But after a few attempts at establishing rapport with British seamen, we gave up, recognizing that our hearts weren’t in it and that the chemistry just wasn’t right.

  Dropping in at the basement Irish Bar, we spotted a black GI seated at the nearly empty bar. As befitted the only two gentlemen of color in the joint, the GI and I shook hands and introduced ourselves, whereupon I introduced him to Werner. His name was Donald Patterson. He told us that he was from Chicago and was passing through on his way back to his unit in Grafenwöhr, near the city of Nuremberg in Bavaria.

  Donald was well built but short, about five foot six, with broad shoulders and a tiny waist. Of medium-brown complexion, he had deep-set black eyes, an aquiline nose, and a wide, generous mouth on whose upper lip he was trying to cultivate a reddish mustache, with only partial success.

  On a scale of ten, joining the U.S. Army ranked about eleven among Werner’s and my career choices. No wonder that we eyed with a mixture of envy and admiration his olive-drab uniform—the smart, double-peaked overseas cap that he wore low over his right eyebrow, the spit-shined combat boots, the brightly polished brass insignia on his collar, and the Pfc. chevrons on the sleeves of his tight-fitting Eisenhower jacket. We couldn’t think of anything we would not have given to be in his place. Of course we hadn’t the slightest idea what being a GI was all about. According to our highly idealized fantasy, it meant wearing a sharp uniform; having plenty of good food to eat, plenty of cigarettes to smoke, an inexhaustible supply of girls to bed down, and driving a jeep instead of walking.

  When Donald asked the inevitable question, namely what I, a black guy, was doing in Hamburg, I gave him the usual thumbnail sketch of my background, with the usual deviation from the truth—that my father was an American instead of a Liberian. This “little white lie,” I had discovered, could make the difference between cordial acceptance as a brother and cold rejection as an unwelcome stranger. It hadn’t taken me long to find out that most black Americans I met in the years immediately following World War II considered Africans and Africa backward and thus a personal embarrassment. With slavery just a few generations behind them, they pr
eferred not to be reminded of that aspect of their past. I certainly wasn’t going to spoil my chances of building mutually beneficial bridges of international commerce, I rationalized, by trying to impress this black brother from the Windy City with my royal African ancestry.

  Donald seemed pleased with my story, especially the true part about “my folks back home in Barrington, Illinois.”

  “Man, that’s only forty or fifty miles northwest of Chicago,” he remarked. It was news to me but I agreed as if I had known it all along. Donald told us that he still had three days of furlough left and that he wouldn’t mind spending some more time in Hamburg, but he was rapidly running out of cigarettes with which to finance a “swell time.”

  “How many cigarettes do you have left?” I asked.

  When Donald confided that he had two cartons stashed away in his duffel bag, Werner and I assured him that with our savvy of the lay of the land, two cartons of cigarettes would be more than adequate to finance any kind of swell time for all three of us.

  When Donald agreed to join us, I was ecstatic. Hanging out with Donald offered me a perfect opportunity to learn more about the country of my dreams—its customs, language, and racial attitudes, as well as what was hot and what was not. I also figured that being seen in public with an American soldier in uniform could only enhance the credibility of my Ami impersonation ploy.

  After finishing our drinks, Werner and I took Donald to all of the city’s hot spots, from the popular Faun Bar to Haus Vaterland. Since in in British-occupied Hamburg an American uniform was a rarity, our interracial trio invariably became the center of attention. Whenever I ran into acquaintances, I made sure they met Donald, who, to my infinite delight, introduced himself as my cousin from Chicago. I couldn’t have asked for more. It seemed that Donald was as proud of having a cousin in Germany as I was of having a cousin in the United States.

  The day Donald had to return to his unit in Grafenwöhr, he invited Werner and me to come along. When we asked him how he figured he could get us to ride with him without tickets and without any papers of authorization or a passport, he told us, “Just let me worry about that and let me do all the talking.” Before we knew it, we were riding on a Nuremberg-bound train in a wagon reserved for Allied personnel. We were understandably nervous when an officer, whom Donald identified as a U.S. Army first lieutenant, approached us and demanded to see our papers. After a brief exchange during which Donald told the lieutenant a heartrending story of how his poor cousin and his American friend had gotten stuck in Germany during the war, the visibly touched officer welcomed us aboard the sparsely occupied wagon and asked us to make ourselves comfortable. That we did. We rode toward Nuremberg in a style to which we hoped to become accustomed—smoking American cigarettes, reading American magazines, listening to American big band sounds over the train’s intercom, and, in the diner, eating delicious American food. Careful not to blow our cover and get thrown off the train the way we were evicted from the Appleton Victory, I meticulously followed Werner’s sage advice to eat with my fork only instead of the European way.

  Comfortably, we arrived at Nuremberg Hauptbahnhof, which was crawling with black and white GIs, including a disturbing number of MPs. When we reached the street, Donald had us stand at a curb while he held out his right arm and poked his thumb in the direction of the traffic. “Do you mind telling me what you are trying to do,” I inquired.

  “I’m trying to hitch a ride.” Before he had a chance to go into details about the time-honored American custom of hitchhiking, a jeep stopped in front of us.

  “You men goin’ back to camp?” a white army captain inquired.

  “Yes, sir,” was Donald’s reply.

  “Hop on!” the captain responded.

  Cautioning us to hang on, he floored the gas pedal and, to our great delight, the vehicle took off like a bat out of hell. Soon, we had left Nuremberg behind us and, following a dizzying drive on a two-lane cobblestone country road, we reached the main gate of the U.S. Army installation at Grafenwöhr. A white-helmeted military policeman in a glass-enclosed booth saluted the captain, and without bothering to ask for our IDs, signaled him to proceed. The captain returned the sentry’s salute, and after a short drive past row upon row of wooden barracks, dropped us off in front of a shedlike building that a sign on the door identified as ORDERLY ROOM, COMPANY A. After Donald checked in with the sergeant on duty to report his return from furlough, he took us to his barrack to let us take a look at his home away from home and to meet some of his buddies. The barrack was empty, with the exception of one orderly.

  Neither Werner nor I was prepared for what happened next. All of a sudden, the barrack was teeming with GIs, but instead of the smart Eisenhower jackets and overseas caps that had made American soldiers look so glamorous to us, they were wearing drab fatigues. They were soaking wet with perspiration and covered from hat to combat boots with grease and dirt. It was quite obvious that they had been working hard at some less than glamorous task. Donald explained that they were Signal Corpsmen who had just been digging trenches and laying cables. As we looked at the primitive barracks and the motley soldiers, it became increasingly clear to us that serving in the U.S. Army—our most cherished fantasy—was a far cry from what we had imagined.

  While the discovery of GIs’ lowly lifestyle came as somewhat of a culture shock to me, it was not nearly as disturbing as another discovery. It dawned on me that all the soldiers in Donald’s unit were black, and—even more disturbing—that all of the officers we had seen were white. Donald had never mentioned to us that black soldiers were serving in racially segregated units. I recalled the pithy words of Smitty, the messman on the Appleton Victory, who had said of race relations aboard ship, “We keeps to ourselves and they keeps to theirselves; we don’t fuck with them and they don’t fuck with us.” I had no idea, and it didn’t make the slightest bit of sense to me, that the same social order prevailed in the U.S. Army, which had just fought a brutal war for the stated purpose of making the world free for democracy.

  It took me a while to psychologically digest my introduction to the American dilemma—America’s inability, or unwillingness, to live up to its creed of “liberty and justice for all.” I had known for quite a while that white people in America, especially in the South, did not always live up to that creed and, indeed, had committed some of the most brutal atrocities against their black fellow citizens, but I had no idea that racial discrimination was not only condoned but openly practiced by the United States government. As much as I hated the Nazis for it, somehow, their overt racism and refusal to accept me in their military ranks seemed more honest to me than the United States’ lip service to democracy and eagerness to recruit blacks while keeping them at arm’s length in segregated, low-status service units commanded primarily by whites. I found it difficult to admit to myself, but my newly created ideal of an America that had mounted and won a crusade to free the oppressed had received a severe, perhaps fatal blow.

  But at age twenty, I was not about to let philosophical differences come between me and my determination to survive as best I could. Regardless of how poorly black GIs were treated compared with their white counterparts, I realized that physically, they were incomparably better off than the vanquished Germans. Having discovered that my resemblance to a black American had decided advantages in war-torn Germany, I resolved to continue my efforts to learn how to sound and act like one. Being able to study black GIs close-up, in their own habitat, struck me as serendipitous.

  The next morning Werner and I heard the voices of two men entering the barracks, then footsteps coming up the wooden stairs. We were confronted by a white captain and a black sergeant with a clipboard. The two were apparently conducting an inspection. “Who are you and what the hell are you doing here?” the captain demanded to know.

  When I explained that my “cousin,” Pfc. Donald Patterson, had gotten permission from a sergeant to let me and my friend spend the night in the barracks, the officer turned on hi
s heel without saying a word and, trailed by the sergeant, stormed out in a huff.

  With an acute sense of foreboding, I hastily substituted an overdue shower with liberal splashes from a bottle of Old Spice. Both Werner and I agreed that the captain’s sudden exit was a bad omen. We were right. Within less than ten minutes, Donald showed up. He was wearing unflattering fatigues and an uncharacteristic troubled expression on his face. “I’m sorry, but you guys have got to leave the post right away,” he blurted out, half worried, half embarrassed. “The company commander has been pitching a bitch; he says he won’t have unauthorized people staying here.”

  I had never heard the term “pitching a bitch,” but I got the idea. “So what are we supposed to do?” I inquired. “It takes almost twenty minutes to walk to the main gate. And how do we get to Nuremberg?”

  “It so happens that there’s an officer leaving for Nuremberg in a few minutes,” Donald explained. “He agreed to give you two a ride, but you’ve got to hurry.”

  While Werner and I hadn’t contemplated a long visit in Grafenwöhr, neither had we expected that we would overstay our welcome quite that soon. Mindful of our untimely expulsion from the Appleton Victory, we quickly grabbed our overnight bags, said so long to Donald, then jumped on the waiting weapons carrier whose driver, a black first lieutenant, was impatiently checking his watch. Exceedingly handsome and meticulously dressed in officer’s twill, he was the first black U.S. Army officer I had seen. His friendly smile gave no indication how much, if anything, he knew about our plight. It filled me with an extraordinary sense of pride when I watched the white MP at the gate come to attention and salute the black officer as we were leaving the post.