STILL WEARING ITEMS OF JOE'S UNIFORM, ALBERS WAS PUT IN for the Silver Star for saving Lieutenant Green at Veghel. In the meantime Joe was in a boxcar with trembling memories of the train across France. Now a homemade compass gave a depressing answer to the krieges' question of where they were going—east, deeper into Germany, farther from the liberation that seemed possible after initial good news from Market-Garden. They had just left a stalag that might soon be liberated, en route to one that obviously wouldn't.
As the suffocating miles rattled by, Joe's disappointment reached despair. The news of September 17—Market-Garden—had been like a call from the Screaming Eagles: we're coming! Then the echo faded. If luck were a lady, Joe had been her unnoticed suitor. Yes, he was still living after several events that could have killed him and nearly did, but merely being alive produced little gratitude at his age. It came over him that he'd have to change his luck by will alone. So Joe began eyeing the boxcar grille. The two troopers on the train from Paris could have been crushed on the rail bed for all he knew, but the memory of them disappearing into the night air was still an almost religious vision.
He maneuvered under the grille, pulled out his shiv, and started prying. Other prisoners helped. They pried, dug, pushed, and wrenched, but the German boxcar was better built than the French forty-or-eight. For two days and nights they worked on it, then tried the wallboards but found them inches thick with a metal plate in the middle. Joe gave up when his shiv broke, a time mark of prudence in his mental recovery from the blow that had put him in a coma for six days and distorted memory the way sunspots short-circuit the electromagnetic field. He was able to reconstruct his thoughts for a period thereafter, able to reflect that breaking the shiv probably saved his young life.
“Even if I'd gotten out, I was in the heart of Nazi Germany— not France—with no real plan to get away. I pushed my luck. Lady Luck doesn't like that. After the war I read a perfect description: luck equals opportunity plus preparation. I sure wasn't prepared.”
Mostly at night, skirting air raids on Berlin, the train rumbled on, its occasional toots low, grim, and authoritative, as if saying, Make way for Hitler's Reichsbahn. Joe awoke feeling a different pulse from the rails, a new sound that came from a bridge over a good-size river. The best guess was the Oder, that the train had crossed the prewar frontier into Poland.
“Anything in Germany at that time was nothing compared to what had happened in Poland,” Joe says. “Now we were in it. One of the college guys on the train said, ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’ ”
AFTER THE FALL of the Berlin Wall, it became possible for Joe to search for Stalag III-C, the destination of that train. During the cold-war years he had retraced his journey through France: St. Come-du-Mont, Starvation Hill, Alengon, the Paris railyard, visits therapeutic and resolving of memories. In 1992, when Joe crossed the Oder for the fourth time, John, his son in the State Department, was driving a rattletrap rental car. Joe had a detailed Polish map but only a vague idea of where III-C had been. As he had since V-E Day, Joe wore a small compass on his watch strap. It didn't help. With growing discouragement, father and son crisscrossed miles of unbroken pine forest. Saint Christopher never adopted me, Joe joked wanly.
Then on a dirt road they came upon a farmer trudging east. Fluent in German as well as Russian, John hailed him with wie gehts? There was a slight but not too friendly response, so John tried a Russian salutation.
Stalag III-C? Da, the farmer knew where it had been, and since he was headed that way, he'd gladly accept a ride. Joe moved to the backseat and peppered him with questions for John to translate. The farmer was impressed that Joe had been a III-C kriege, and was now the first American to return. But there had been French, he explained, and for good reason, as the visitors would see. He was a boy at that time … life had been extremely hard… he'd lost his parents, their farm confiscated when this part of Poland was annexed by the Reich. The Russians gave it back. They were hard masters but nothing like the Germans.
The dirt road became stone, huge flagstones pressed flush with the earth, stones scarred and marred by deep gouges, which, though anciently weathered, were so evident that Joe asked to stop and examine them. The farmer nodded; yes, down this road had come the first Russian armor, each cannon overlapping the hull of the tank ahead. No rubber treads, just the metal cleats clattering like tractors from hell. Stop, please. In twilight the farmer pointed to a low silhouette in the forest, a cairn. They got out to look, for this was all that remained of III-C, all that had not been reclaimed by the state-planted pine forest. The eerie cairn was a memorial to seven thousand French POWs who had been wiped out by a typhus epidemic in 1941-1942 when the stalag opened.
There was one other artifact. Where everywhere else the forest floor was flat, there was a field of wavy earth beneath the trees. Before years of gentle erosion the waves had been mounds, the mass grave for twenty thousand or more Russian POWs—the farmer could only guess how many. Most died he supposed, from starvation, for even farmers went hungry during the winter of 1944-1945, the hardest winter anyone could remember, the winter he'd lost his parents.
The three walked while Joe tried to orient the present with his memories, then returned to the car where he sat for long minutes hunched with hands clasped between legs. What happened to the railroad track? he asked suddenly. They had not walked far enough, replied the farmer. Darkness was deepening, but Joe wanted to see it. They found it, the single track overgrown with weeds higher than the rusty rails, weeds so strong they had pierced a rotted platform.
JOE' s TRAIN HAD DISGORGED its first load of Americans on the platform at III-C, half the size of IV-B, whence they'd come. There was no forest then; the surrounding land was farmed luckily for the new arrivals because local potatoes became their sustenance. Back in Germany everything had to be trucked to stalags or brought in by rail. The more the Anglo-Americans ruled the skies, the harder it was for the Germans to transport anything. But Jabos didn't strafe across the Oder. By Allied agreement, they left it to the Soviet air force, which at that time was out of range and not nearly so strong as the RAF and AAF. So in a way Joe never expected, III-C's location near the city of Kustrin was a blessing.
“If ten thousand Russians starved to death at III-C,” Joe says, “it wasn't because there was nothing to eat but because the krauts wouldn't feed them. That farmer's parents died when the Wehrmacht took their produce and livestock. Guards told us that all Slavs were to be exterminated. Starving them to death was the most efficient way to do it. When the guards said that, they just looked at us as if we should understand. The farmer's parents understood. They let themselves die while they gave him all their food so he could survive. It was that simple.
“I read that right after the war the U.S. government asked Hollywood to reconstruct the Germans. Please don't make any more movies about nasty Nazis; don't always make the Germans the villains. We need American public opinion to support the new Germany as an ally against the USSR.”
The British felt similarly, that the looming threat from Stalin was justification to sweep the evil of Hitler under the rug. After V-E Day Montgomery said, “Uplifting and enlightening films are needed at once…. He who controls the cinema controls Germany.”
FROM MEMORY JOE CAN diagram the layout of III-C: railroad track on one side, stone road on the other, with a creek beside it. Within a double fence of barbed wire, German buildings fronted on the road, separating several rows of American huts enclosed in another barbed-wire fence. The Russian compound, also set off by a fence, adjoined. Joe was among the first Americans transferred to III-C. More arrived after Market-Garden, and a flood after the Battle of the Bulge, but the Germans kept them in separate compounds so they could not learn the ropes from the old guys. Eventually the total number of Americans reached two thousand.
In setting up their compound they followed military organization, forming squads, platoons, and companies. Senior NCOs formed the chain of command; the lowest-ranking were hut commanders (six huts to a company), the highest being Master Sergeant Coleman from the 82nd Airborne. Joe never met him. Coleman and his small staff lived outside the compound by the stalag headquarters. That created some resentment at first, but they had to live where the Germans told them to, so if they were better off than other krieges, that was just an example of an old army acronym, RHIP—rank hath its priviliges.
There was another chain of influence, if not command, a democratically capitalist one headed by BTOs—big-time operators. They gained that status by being the shrewdest barterers or biggest winners at gambling. A big loser had nothing to pay off his debts except personal service, so he became what the British back at IV-B called a dog robber or batman.
“I don't know where batman came from,” Joe says, “but it wasn't the comic book. You might see a BTO private with a staff-sergeant batman who made his bunk, stood in for him at roll call, swept his hut, brought him chow—did anything else the BTO wanted. Now and then those roles would reverse after a big crap game. Coleman's chain of command had a lot of respect for the BTOs, more so than vice versa.
“Our first concern at III-C was the winter coming on. A smart thing I did was throw my ditty bag on the top bunk of a three-decker. There was a small stove in the middle of the hut, and I knew the heat would rise. Also no one would climb over me and drop straw. I think it was at that point I considered myself an old kriege.
“I did all right in crap games but wasn't a BTO and, looking back, actually didn't want to be. BTOs pretty much lived in the present, accepted it, made the best of it, enjoyed the status. It could be very different from what they'd been in the army. I understood their point of view: if you had to be a POW, be a BTO. But for me escaping was all that mattered, so I used my hoard of cigarettes to get on the escape committee.”
Word evidently reached Coleman about Joe's efforts to break out of the boxcar. His application for the five-member escape committee was readily accepted. Three of them had to approve any escape plan before it went up to Coleman for the final go-ahead and support from the supply committee. During Joe's first month only three proposals were presented, two for tunnels—the classic British way—and one jail break. None was approved, indeed not a single vote cast in favor of any. Tunnels, the committee felt, were too slow, especially with the ground starting to freeze. Using force (jail break) needed enough “nonescapees” who would risk their lives to support it. To get a few escapees outside the wire required a full-scale riot inside. Lives were sure to be lost and everyone else punished. None of the committee thought krieges would sacrifice the way they had on D Day. Back then their attitude was save the world; now it was save yourself.
“When the Market and Bulge POWs came in we heard their slogan, ‘Win the war in ‘44.’ We told them that here it was’ Stay alive till ‘45.’ ”
Proposals were also rejected for want of an escape strategy when loose in Poland, the inherent problem with III-C. No one had a solution, just as Joe had not when he tried to pry his way out of the boxcar. Nor was there any precedent because no one in institutional memory had ever escaped from III-C. After a while proposals stopped coming in and the escape committee was dormant, but their deliberations had keened Joe's thinking about the potential and pitfalls of an escape. Just as important, he had identified two men who looked like good escape confederates. Their names, as Joe remembers them, were Brewer and Quinn. He transferred to their hut, though that meant giving up his top bunk.
One of the first essentials for an escape was getting to know the Germans and their routines. The guard shifts were eight hours, one of which was at night when krieges couldn't leave their huts, but shifts rotated, so if Joe wanted to focus on a particular guard, he could talk with him every couple of days. Starting a conversation was no problem. Guards liked to practice English. Word was that several were planning their own escape, to get away from the Red Army and be captured by the Americans. Using his German name and a cigarette, Joe could get along with almost any guard who wasn't SS. The rule was, don't mess with the SS. Don't even try to talk to them, or you might get a smashed mouth. Besides the guards, there was a “ferret” in his compound, Sergeant Schultz, the only German Joe ever got to know. Their introduction was through a warning.
The pitiful Russians were herded around like sheep, taken out to labor details before dawn and returned after dark, worked to death while being starved to death. Schultz advised Joe about a new guard—don't go near the fence when he's on duty. One afternoon the Americans saw him in action. The Russians had been hauling garbage from camp headquarters when a whistle blew, the signal to get back to then-compound or be lashed there with bullwhips.
“One skinny little kid tried to scoop up potato peels from the bottom of a garbage pail and fell behind,” Joe recounts. “The master racist Schultz warned me about was a dog trainer—police dogs. He yelled something, let a German shepherd loose, and it sprang right for the jugular. The dog threw the poor kid's head back and forth till the neck was cut through and his head came out like a wine cork. The new guard had a belly laugh, and the kriege next to me threw up. He was sick all day.”
Schultz's job as a ferret was to roam around the compound during the day, observe what was going on, and chat with krieges. He had been a World War IPOW himself. He made a daily report to the commandant, so the Americans knew why he was there but didn't mind. Schultz was a shrewd psychologist for offering tips like the one about the sadistic guard both for its apparent generosity and the chilling reminder of the penalty for disobedience. Schultz was a Bavarian, which provided an entree to speak with Joe about possible common ancestors. His wife lived with him in a cottage just outside the camp. They had two sons, one serving in Italy, the other last seen in France. He hadn't heard from either in months.
Joe hadn't received a single letter either. Schultz said he'd look into it and shortly advised that some mail had arrived at XII-A or IV-B (the return address Joe had used on postcards) but for some reason was sent back to the Red Cross. Schultz gave him an extra postcard and offered the hope that with a permanent III-C address he'd get a Christmas package. Schultz had gone outside channels to help Joe, who showed appreciation by giving him some Red Cross chocolate. So it wouldn't be seen as a bribe, Joe gave it to him to give to his wife.
Curfew rules were the same as at previous stalags, but power generators were scarce at III-C, causing frequent outages, so it was hard to keep the fence floodlit throughout a night. Schultz enforced the curfew, however, which was broken usually when diarrhea forced visits to the latrine. He solved the problem by putting a can in each hut. To prevent other curfew violations he loosed a pack of police dogs in the compound at night. If a hut door was closed, there was no problem, just the sound of them sniffing and growling as they roamed around. Brewer and Quinn decided to make friends with them. It took many nights of “Here, boy, nice doggy,” but then they could open the door when it was dark and watch the brutes think about entering. The biggest, a huge Belgian shepherd, was the one Brewer wanted.
They argued some about that. Quinn and Joe said let's take any that'll come in, but Brewer pushed them aside and kept calling for the Belgian shepherd. Because only Brewer was willing to give up a Red Cross biscuit, he got his pick, one he named Heinz. At last Heinz trotted in, looked around, pissed on the stove, wagged his tail, and almost let Brewer pet him. They planned for the next evening. Quinn smuggled in a small coal shovel, and Joe gathered some kindling during the day. But that night was not Heinz's shift.
“We were sure disappointed, though Brewer didn't give up and spent most of the night calling quietly for the dog. Before I went to sleep I told him he'd have to improve his German because Heinz didn't understand English.”
Early the next evening Heinz came around. Brewer stood well inside the hut and called him. Joe was beside the door ready to slam it. Quinn was on the other side with the coal shovel. Heinz never knew what hit him. Four feet spread like he'd walked on ice. Heinz was still warm when the krieges bled and skinned him. Fur, guts, and bones went down latrines. In a Red Cross can the rest was slivered and broiled. What came out was three jerky steaks for Brewer, two for Quinn and Joe, a half each for their hut mates. The testicles were offered to a West Virginian, but he was insulted, so Heinz's future went into a latrine too.
His meat was stringy and tasteless, even as hungry as they were. Heinz wasn't very filling either, and a full feeling was what krieges craved most of all. As the three dognappers ate they talked about future canine ranching. Was the risk to grab more dogs worth the skimpy reward? Besides, Schultz might notice that Heinz was AWOL, so better to lie low for a while.
“I said Schultz would think Heinz went off with some Polish pooch,” Joe recalls. “Yeah, Quinn came back, but what about the next three or four missing males? I said when there's a bitch in heat, they go off in a pack. Okay, but why would they disappear one by one? I didn't have an answer for that. Then Brewer and Quinn got into it: every mutt removed was one less to guard the fences at night, so don't just think about dogs as food. I gave them each a cigarette because they were thinking about escape as much as I was.
“Schultz … What did he look like? About fifty years old but looked more like seventy. Maybe six foot, thin but with a paunch. He wasn't a good poster boy for Goebbels. We watched his attitude closely after Heinz disappeared. He acted like nothing had happened. Still I felt he suspected that one hut had chowed down on canine fillets. He knew and we knew that we were not buddies. We were enemies whose job was to attack each other. It took a while before he counterattacked.”
American krieges in III-C, especially Airborne, constantly pushed the limits of camp regulations. Whereas earlier the Germans hadn't been much good at uncovering transgressions, in October 1944 it seemed that no one could get away with anything. Now far too many clandestine meetings were being busted, even those arranged by BTOs, whose security measures were the best. Guards had to be bribed and they could squeal, but the law of averages wasn't working. Men were being thrown into solitary on bread and water. With everyone's health so borderline this was more than punishment—it was life threatening.
The secondary duty of the escape committee was to prevent penetration by the Germans. Ferrets were open penetra-tors, pretty easy to neutralize, but it became clear that Schultz was also running something covert and effective against the Americans. The escape/security committee had a long talk about what could be going on. Krieges who looked like they might be collaborating were the first suspects. Coleman put out the word to rough them up. If they continued to be palsy with the krauts, beat them up. This was done, but the busts and punishments continued as before.
The committee then had to consider that there might be moles in the compound. A Ranger at IV-B had warned that the krauts' best opportunity for mole planting occurred during transfers between stalags. After Joe persuaded the committee that this had happened between IV-B and III-C, they pondered countermeasures. The one approved was to create kriege groups from all regions in the United States, create them openly for an ostensibly benign purpose. With the commandant's acquiescence, Coleman announced that there would be regional meetings to disseminate local news from home. Bring any mail you got, and read it to your buddies.
By then hut commanders knew the home state of all their men. If someone didn't go to his regional meeting, he became a suspect. There were only a few like that, checked out thoroughly and found to be just lone wolves, men who chose to go through the kriege experience by themselves. They did so very well, and none turned out to be a security risk.
The regional group that uncovered the mole was from Ohio. It took days of innocuous but very specific questions put casually: “Hey, anyone from Senator Taft's hometown?” Like the needle on a gyrating compass, suspicion began to home on a man who said he was from Cleveland but didn't recognize the name Bob Feller. How about the mayor in 1942? No response. What high school did you go to? He had an answer for that, however, he didn't know any of the icecream parlors in the neighborhood. What do you hear from home? Nothing. No mail? No. Why not? No parents? No girlfriend? They didn't write him. He had a Polish name, something like Websky, but couldn't say anything about the part of Poland his ancestors came from. This seemed like a pretty tough requirement to Joe, who couldn't have said much about Bavaria either.
After increasingly less friendly questioning, this Websky owned up. He'd lived in Cleveland for four years with an uncle from Lithuania before returning to East Prussia, where he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He clerked on the Eastern Front for two years, then felt lucky, because of his American English fluency, to be pulled out in 1944 to serve as an intelligence staffer in France. It was quite possible that Websky had worked at the chateau where Joe had had his head bashed in, but he was not allowed to ask because Coleman designated a prosecutorial team to handle Websky's case and they provided him Fifth Amendment protection. However, he made the mistake of acting as his own counsel. His defense was that he couldn't turn down the mole job, he didn't have a choice, and if he didn't produce results, it was back to the Eastern Front, this time as an infantryman.
That was too bad, but the committee didn't have much choice either. His hut commander was briefed and provided a stand-in for Websky at roll calls after Coleman ordered a secret court-martial. Joe asked, how can we court-martial a guy who's in the enemy army? Coleman's answer was, you know what I mean—have a trial and make it fast. It was fast indeed as a six-by-six hole was dug under a hut. What took inordinate time was the question of whether the hole would be Web-sky's execution site, grave, or both. He was given the choice of a shiv in the heart, a club on the head, or being strangled.
“He didn't choose, he just started praying out loud, going from English to German, whatever came to his head. One trooper volunteered to club him, two to strangle. We chose the strangler, who was less eager for the job. I didn't watch the execution because I volunteered to be on security when it happened. I didn't say so, but I would have liked to have clubbed him, the way I was clubbed in the chateau. Getting rid of a cockroach like Websky also made me feel better about a chance to escape.”
There was a lively debate within the committee about how to dispose of the dead man. Joe was angry because the question should have been answered before Websky was executed. What's the problem? said Coleman's staff. Just leave him in the hole. The committee objected: dammit, when Schultz misses Websky, any fresh dirt in the compound will be dug up. We can't tamp down the earth enough to fool the krauts—they'd had a lot of experience in uncovering British tunnels.
Coleman sided with the committee, one of his most important decisions. Websky was dismembered and fed into latrines like Heinz. When the latrines were routinely emptied for use by farmers, the committee had a quiet party catered by extra rations from Coleman.
“Before long we knew that Schultz knew what had happened, but there was no reprisal. He had lost a dog and a mole, probably caught hell from the commandant, but he still showed respect for what we were doing.”
THE COMING OF WINTER was on everyone's mind, more than anything besides food. Before it permanently froze, Russians had dug under the ground with scraps of wood tossed over the fence to them by Americans. Three or four feet down it was not quite so cold as on the wind-chilled surface. The Russians were digging their graves, but why freeze before dying? Unless you wanted to die, or felt that if you died today, you wouldn't have to die tomorrow. Across the wire Joe understood what the Russians were saying by digging: do what you can, do what you want to do. God understands. He'll call you when ready. God's always ready. This subliminal message struck Joe because it was transmitted by voices of what the world thought were godless Communists.
In that way the Russians, their incomprehensible longanimity and endurance, began to haunt him. For Joe this had a double effect, reinforcing his gratitude, as with the terribly wounded in the boxcar, to be relatively better off; and forging a bond with Nazi-haters even more inspired than he. A somewhat mediating figure for him at that time was Schultz, working for the Nazis yet not one of them.
Though Schultz seemed to overlook Websky's disappearance, the commandant did not. Several moles were inserted into the compound. They couldn't have been more obvious if swastikas had been painted on their foreheads. The only question they consistently answered correctly was that Roosevelt was president. What invariably slipped them up was the location of the Grand Canyon. They always said Colorado.
With their cover so flimsy it wasn't healthy for new moles to stay in camp long and soon they were transferred, probably to other stalags, where they'd try again. Joe admits to taking part in a farewell party for one of them. It's a GI tradition that when a barrack thief is discovered he's wrapped in a blanket so men can pound on him without being identified. Then the thief is bounced down the stairs of the barrack. There was only one floor in kriege huts, but compensatory punishment was found. It was Joe's only opportunity to do unto the Germans, at short range, as they had done unto him, a satisfying experience of revenge without guilt.
Schultz said nothing about the mole batteries, indicating his wish for things to return to normal, the waiting to see how the war would end. Joe wasn't about to wait. With two good men willing to break out with him he felt it was past time to put it to the touch again.
“My last pre-escape conversation with Schultz went like this: I felt a little bad about Websky though he'd caused a lot of pain and grief and deserved to be where he was. Schultz took me aside and suggested we say a rosary together for Websky. Why? I asked. His answer was that it could be possible for all of us to find a way to escape more horrors from this war, one way or another. How each of us do it is between us and God. That's not a bargain, that's a proposal. We never know if God will accept it. That's why we pray, he said.
“My young mind was stunned to hear that. I had mixed my prayers for personal survival with prayers for the end of Germany. For sure the second was more important to the world than the first. Several miracles caused me to survive, and Germany was crushed. My prayers were answered in one result. Schultz's were not, in fact just the opposite, but I think God listened to him as much as me.”