We couldn’t get into the United States because our quota number had not come through yet, so we had to go to England. Ten days before Germany invaded Poland, we were on a train to Frankfurt with very little: three suitcases and whatever was on our backs. Then we took a plane to England. At that age, I can only describe certain numbness in me and an apprehension about the future.
The place we stayed in London was an enclave of refugees. I worked in a button factory and learned all about London. Just before I turned sixteen in May 1940, we went to the United States on a Dutch ship and arrived at the port in Hoboken. My cousins met us and took us by subway to Brooklyn. It was strange taking the ferry and then the subway, and pretty scary. My cousin had a job waiting for me at a bakery. At sixteen I can’t say that I was that introspective. I was making 38 dollars a week and I went to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers.
The refugee neighborhood in New York was Washington Heights, but where I was there were no refugees. The baker who I worked for was a Galizianer—an Eastern Jew—and he said, “Listen, you’re a ‘greenhorn’ and I’m going to learn you everything I know.” I didn’t go to school, I only worked in the bakery. Whatever I learned, I learned from the streets, and before long there was no German left in me.
BEFORE THE WAR STARTED, I had the feeling that Hitler had to be stopped—that much I felt at that time. Chamberlain did the most idiotic thing when he shook hands with Hitler and turned over the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia. You can’t make deals with a dictator; that much I knew.
What I remember about Pearl Harbor was shock and disbelief, as well as disappointment that we weren’t alert enough. How could squadron after squadron of airplanes catch the entire Pacific fleet with its pants down? I cannot say that I was too eager to go and fight, but when Uncle Sam wants you, you accept it. So, just before I was nineteen, I received my notice and was drafted. When the recruiters asked me for my preference, I requested mounted cavalry because of my experience in Germany with horses. They laughed at me because, aside from one outfit in Kansas (for ceremonial purposes), there no longer was a cavalry.
I went to Fort Drum, New York, and then to basic training like all of the other shlubs, where we did what we were told, marched, sweat, and trained. After that, I was sent to “bakers and cook” school at Camp Barkley, Texas. In my training company, there were real Georgia rebels, ignorant guys who thought Jews had horns on their heads. My sergeant was a real-rum head ex-boxer who didn’t particularly like the guys from New York, especially the Jews. After eight weeks, I was asked to battalion headquarters and told to pack my duffel bag. I thought I had done something wrong.
I was sent to an intelligence school in Fort Ritchie in Hagerstown, Maryland. We always made fun of the cadre at Camp Ritchie, as we had Turks, Egyptians, French, Russians, Poles, and nearly every other ethnic group. We were in classrooms a lot of the time and there was just a lot of training. I was trained as an interrogator. In the training battalion, there were dozens of German Jews in my class.
On a Sunday, I became a citizen before I got shipped out. I was taken in a covered jeep to Washington, D.C., to be sworn in; before they brought the judge in, my commanding officer requested that I change my name because I was eventually going to Germany and it would be better for the nature of the work I would have to do. I was Siegfried Dingfelder, and you couldn’t get more German than that. So I changed it to Fred Fields.
We were taken to a British freezer ship known to transport meat and joined a convoy of fifty other ships to Europe, but we couldn’t see them because they were spread out so far. We lost ships, but we didn’t even know it. I liked the idea that I was going back to fight Germany; it was in my plans that I could get back to where I came from and get some Nazis, but I was there to do the job I was trained to do, not just to settle old scores.
From a replacement depot in England, I went across the channel to another replacement depot in Paris and then to a suburb called Le Vésinet, where I got my shipping orders. I was sent the French-German border to join my unit, 69th IPW in Domville, Alsace-Lorraine, outside Metz. We did our work there under the XX Corps. The men in my unit were Capt. Al Lithen, Lieutenant Wallach, Staff Sergeant W. Marry, Staff Sgt. Bornstein, and Cpl. Fred Reich. From there we went up to Luxembourg, then Belgium, and then up to the Remagen Bridge breakthrough, where we got closest to the action. My first interrogation was in Metz, and I was certainly exhilarated to be able to do something of importance.
I felt that my training was sufficient enough; our unit officer, a captain, was of German parentage and came from Wisconsin. His German wasn’t very good, so much of the work was left to us refugees, while he was more in charge of administration. Certainly, my German background was pivotal to my ability to do an effective job. From the Germans, we had to get information on the strength of their unit, how many men they had, how many they lost, and where their last campaign was. We found out that a lot of men came from the Eastern Front, running tail from the Russians and were coming to the west to gain some kind of foothold and drive us back.
Before the Remagen breakthrough, one of our guys found out that the Germans were pulling every regiment, every division they had from Strasbourg (southern France), to where the breakthrough was going to occur—all the heavy stuff. Our unit turned it over to our commanding officer, General Walker with the XX Corp, and Omar Bradley with the First Army. I did start to believe that a lot of troops had no use for our intelligence units at times, no matter how valuable it was. Commanders often liked to talk to their officers in the field to tell them what was in front of us.
It felt damn good to interrogate Nazis, especially when we had a pistol (usually one of their Lugers) in a holster on us. We knew that the average German soldiers just followed orders, so getting information out of them wasn’t difficult. Name, rank, and serial number didn’t mean much to them, so if we could put them at ease, it usually worked to our advantage. With SS and officers, however, it was drastically different; we had to be rough with them, psychologically (and sometimes physically) and threatened them with everything under the sun. On more than one occasion we would say, “If you don’t talk, we are going to put a bullet in your head.” With one guy, we had him dig his own grave, measure it, and then made him lie in it before bringing him back to the interrogation table. During one interrogation, I let my anger fly when I knocked a Sturmhauptführer’s teeth out. I was stupid for not wearing a glove, because I hurt my hand.
At one interrogation, we had a platoon of Greek guys from New York who had their own anger for the Germans and who loved to get their hands hand on the prisoners.
WHEN WE GOT INTO GERMANY, I went to Buchenwald concentration camp two days after the war. We saw the skeletons in the ovens, and the skeletons were still walking, barely alive. There were dozens alive out of god knows how many thousands of people who were killed. As a German Jew, I felt anger and helplessness over what had happened to these people—you couldn’t make good with what had already happened to these people and it was frustrating.
No matter what I have read or heard, it doesn’t tell a damn thing compared to what I saw. I saw the ovens, the bunks where they packed people in like sardines. The ordinary person cannot fathom that. After the persecution we had experienced, I didn’t expect that much more—but the concentration camp left us speechless. The eastern camps were worse, but I don’t know how it could get much worse than what I saw.
Instinctively, I knew that whatever relatives I left behind ended up dead. Of my fathers seven siblings, three never made it out. My mother lost her twin brother, who was a communist. So, I had no love left for the Germans. When we caught Germans, suspected Nazis, their response to our questions was always, “Ich bin nur ein kleiner Mann” (I’m only a little man).
After that, we were turned south from there. When we got near my hometown of Uehlfeld I got permission from my captain to go back there. My cousin, Henry Schwab, who was in another unit, 57th IPW, operating nearby, took a jeep—a day and a half side tri
p—and we went back to Uehlfeld to look for the Nazis who we remembered. I asked around and they said they disappeared into a neighboring village. Unfortunately, when someone takes off their uniform and slips into a pair of overalls, they are very hard to identify out of a group of people. In Uehlfeld, I also made it a point to visit the cemetery to see if my relatives’ stones were still there.
I was in Tutzing when the war was over. I applied for a civilian administrative job after the war but was turned down because of my limited education, even though I had all of this experience. All of us trained interrogators were well … suited to run an administration to ferret out any Nazis from a town.
Fred Fields is a retired butcher living in Riverdale, New York.
Chapter 22
PETER MASTERS
VIENNA, AUSTRIA
6 Commando Normandy
Born Peter Arany in Vienna, Peter Masters left Vienna after the Anschluss and made it to England in 1938. He was interned with other friendly Enemy Aliens before volunteering for the Pioneer Corps. Anxious to get out of his unarmed labor outfit, Masters volunteered and was accepted into 3 Troop, 10 Inter-Allied Commando, and trained as a frontline interrogator. He joined 6 Commando right before the invasion of France and landed at Sword Beach on D-Day. He is pictured above in 1943.
I feel I have a mission. The mission is to say that the Holocaust took place, but not all Jews went like lambs to the slaughter. All of them would have preferred not to have been gassed defenselessly and hopelessly, and would have fought back if they’d been given the chance, but untrained and starving people can’t mount a revolt efficiently. They did it in desperation in the Warsaw Ghetto and so on, but by and large their chances are very, very small. Partisan warfare is very difficult because it is unlikely to have any substantial success unless it is meritoriously and materially aided from the outside. The French Maquis could not have functioned if they hadn’t had weapon drops from the Allies, and that goes for every occupied country. There has to be a hope of relief, of support, and ultimately of an invasion. When the Allies invaded Italy, the partisans rose up right, left, and center to fight against the Germans and helped in the toppling of Mussolini, who was hung by the feet.
I have always suggested that the partisans in the forests or the ghetto fighters would have done the same thing that we did: get out, get trained, get equipped, come back, and strike back. We were lucky to have that chance.
When the Anschluss came in 1938, my sister was eighteen and I was sixteen. We heard Nazi broadcasting and it was a memorable experience. We were watching the entry of the German forces, and then their tanks and infantry and motorcycles. It was a tremendous visual job, and of course they paraded at the slightest provocation.
Soon after, my aunt, who was away working in London, got fourteen people out of whom I am one. My father tried to ski into Switzerland and failed because there were too many German patrols out, but he managed to get to Switzerland by posing as a teacher with little kids, who were being marched across the Austrian border. From there, my father left for Belgium and tried to get into Britain because my sister and I were there by that time with my mother. He had no papers all along, so he had a problem because the British wouldn’t let him in without papers.
My father, being a rather eccentric yet enterprising person carved a bust of George Bernard Shaw and sent it to him with a letter saying, “Please help me to get into the U.K., where my children already are living.” Shaw responded, “Thank you for the very spirited bust. I have no influence at the Home Office, but I have forwarded your letter further. Good luck.” Eventually, he stowed away on a Polish steamer to England with the collusion of one of the ship’s officers, hid under a heap of coal when the customs and immigration people came aboard, and after they left, embarked and hitchhiked to London.
The aunt who got us out of Austria got me a job on a farm near Henley-on-Thames, and I worked there for a year and a half as a farmhand. It was mostly unpaid, but it meant that I was not a burden to my mother in London. When I would go across the fields in my rubber boots at night to shut up the chickens in their houses, I would pretend I was stalking Nazis. My sister came to visit me one weekend, and we hitchhiked to town. There was a crowd around a car and the car radio was on. There, we heard the Chamberlain speech, declaration of war, in Henley-on-Thames, in the street from a car radio. And as far as we were concerned, this was the only hope to end Hitler.
Being pacifists, I shudder to have to admit we were still praying for war. Why? Because we realized no one could negotiate with Hitler, as had been aptly demonstrated in Munich when Chamberlain thought they could get “peace in our time.” That was nonsense.
Jewish refugees who had lived under the Nazis were motivated to fight them. I’ve always made the point that if I’d lived under them for six hours or six days, it would have been sufficient to motivate one to volunteer to fight them. I had no doubt Hitler planned to kill us all, and that if he invaded England, we certainly would have been killed.
So we tried to volunteer in any way we could, but it was extremely difficult. The age limit for joining the army was twenty and I was eighteen at this time. Suddenly, the army lowered its age limit to eighteen, and I immediately enlisted and got sent to the Pioneer Corp unloading trains, shoveling coal or ashes, and building roads. I kept volunteering to do something more active, because I said this war is mine.
In the Pioneer Corp, we were really frustrated. We tried to make the most of the situation; for instance, we tried to get onto task work. For example, we would say, “Give us a task, like unloading so many freight cars, and if we do it faster than you think we can, we’re off, right?” When they gave us three freight cars to unload, and we did it by two or three o’clock in the afternoon, they would give us four cars next day and we were done by 2:30. So they were cheating us and we were showing off that we could lick the system. Essentially, we wanted to get out and get into a fighting situation.
Many of us volunteered very seriously, and eventually I responded to a notice in the Labour Corps requesting volunteers for special and hazardous duty. I was interviewed and accepted by an officer in disguise, who turned out to be the commanding officer of the commando unit that had been formed of eighty-seven refugees from the Nazis. All of them spoke fluent German and were subsequently trained in all methods pertaining to German forces.
When I got to North Wales where they sent us for training, we were surrounded by guys in green berets. Some of them were people I had known who had disappeared from the Pioneer Corp, since they weren’t allowed to communicate once they’d been accepted. We didn’t even know they had volunteered, they had just disappeared; it had been done very hush-hush.
We changed our names, dog tags were changed, and we had apparently volunteered not from the Pioneer Corp, because it would’ve looked funny if all of us were ex-Pioneer Corp people. So we had volunteered from an assortment of elite infantry units with which we’d never had any association in reality. I had volunteered from the Queen’s Own Royal West Kent Regiment. In the commandos, you don’t have a badge of the commandos, you have a badge of the unit from which you volunteered, so I had the white horse of Kent on my beret.
On my dog tag, it said 637025, which is a West Kent Number, Private First Masters COE (Church of England), to protect us in case of capture and to build a cover story. Born in London was inserted in my pay book, as was next of kin: mother, Mrs. C. Masters. We were not supposed to communicate with anyone with a foreign name, so I sent a couple of my friends, who were on leave, to my mother to explain the whole thing to her, because I couldn’t tell or write to her about it.
The commander of 3 Troop, 10 Commando, was Brian Hilton Jones, who we called “the Skipper.” He was a Welsh officer who spoke flawless German and flawless French and was the best athlete I’d ever seen. He was an unbelievably fit man, and whatever had to be done, he would not only do it first, but he would also do it first to show us how “easy” it was, which it wasn’t. He would climb up the wa
ll of a building where you could barely get a finger into a crack to pull yourself up, and he would say, “This is easy.” He would come to a little ledge and say, “This ledge is big enough; you could have lunch here.” We learned it was not smart to walk by a rock wall and say, like we did in the beginning, “Hey, I hope the Skipper doesn’t see this rock wall or he’ll make us climb up and jump down.” If he heard it he would do exactly that.
We had all gone through a metamorphosis in which, to begin with, we were secular or religious Jewish or half German kids in Germany, Austria, or Hungary. When the Nazis came, we were a hate object, which was a traumatic impact. Then we became refugees, and next, in my case, a farmhand—all the things I had never dreamt of being. After that we became soldiers in the Pioneer Corp in the labor unit. And now, like a butterfly out of a cocoon, we were the elite of the elite—in my case, a commando parachutist, having volunteered also for parachuting, which is another story.
With this metamorphosis comes a whole new identity. There is something exciting and welcoming about this, because we were discarding all the aspects that were deprecated and abused. In the doldrums of the war, the depression that was felt by many people was because the bombardment came without them being able to hit back much. As a new person, I was legitimately assuming another identity and it happened to be an elite identity. I would ride the London underground, and people would point and say, “Look, commandos.” Try and tell me that this isn’t affirming to a young guy. All of a sudden I had respect, and that’s what it’s all about.
Steven Karras Page 28