We were again standing in lines and we didn’t look at all like the motley crew from the beginning. We were Brave Forces, and Lieutenant Schauer, who looked at us with pleasure, was strolling around with his arms behind his back, saying that the motherland was expecting great deeds from us. He also said that tomorrow was our big moment, when they would send us to the front. He said he could already see our heads crowned with laurel wreaths of triumph. I’ve always liked playing the fool, and so I patted my head. There was no such thing as a laurel wreath there. Sergeant Major Zuckerl quietly hissed: “Private Blumenfeld!”
“Yes, sir,” I replied, and stood at attention.
In the morning the bugle was blowing. As of today we were going to listen only to military bugles, and maybe, with God’s help, to trumpets of victory. In full military attire, with our packs, helmets, gas masks, folded tents, and aluminum canteens, we were sitting on the dusty cobblestone plaza, next to the gun pyramids, drinking tea for the last time.
Our rabbi Shmuel Ben-David was sitting next to me.
“You look pale,” he said.
“I’m scared,” I said.
“Come on, you’re a man,” he said. “Shame on you.”
“Belly aches,” I said.
“It’s from fear. Go do your business, it’ll make you feel better.”
I got up, looked around and saw Zuckerl. “Sergeant Major, sir, reporting, my stomach hurts, may I be excused?”
“Go to it then and no fooling around, this is not a sanatorium!”
I ran toward the whitewashed shack, and while I was undoing my pants, heard someone shouting out from the other side of the street:
“Hey, is there a soldier in there? Hey, do you hear me? Is anyone there?”
I stood up on the plank, and looked outside: an elderly gentleman was standing there with a bowler and an umbrella.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The war is over. We lost,” said the gentleman, with a Hungarian accent, and he didn’t seem to be too disappointed about it either. “They just announced that a peace agreement has been signed.”
At that moment the bugle started blowing, the soldiers were scrambling into lines, turmoil, commands, first company fall in, second, third, and so on.
And in this, so to say, sublime moment for any army, I was running toward the plaza, holding my pants up.
“The war is o-ver!” I shouted out, lifting my arms, even as my pants fell down.
Right in front of me, ominous as a stormy cloud, the sergeant major was coming.
“Private Blumenfeld, attention!” It isn’t easy to stand at attention, salute and hold your pants up. “What are you jabbering about?”
“The war is over, Sergeant Major, sir! They’ve just announced it.”
The thought was slowly penetrating the mysterious and unexplored chasms of his brain: “Is it for certain?”
“Affirmative, Sergeant Major, sir.”
He was suddenly beaming: “So we won?”
I beamed. “No, Sergeant Major, sir. We lost.”
He thought for awhile again, then pinched my cheek with his deadly pinch. “You’re just so sweet! I love the Jews, and some day I’ll do something big for them!”
He proved to be on the up-and-up, and kept his word: years later I met him again in the Flossenbürg Oberpfalz camp, where he was a Stürmführer.