At Oflag 64, Jerry Sage learned on February 4 that Colonel Millett had left Schubin and headed east. Sage and Charlie Kouns decided to follow the colonel’s example, and, gaining a place on a four-seat, horse-drawn Polish sleigh heading northeast for Bromberg (Polish Bydgoszcz), they departed from Schubin on Monday, February 5, in heavy snow.
As they slid along, they came upon a lone, fresh-faced Russian soldier on the roadside out in the middle of nowhere. The short, stocky figure in a thick coat and fur Chapka cap was trying to hitch a ride. The Americans urged the driver to stop, and the sleigh drew to a halt beside the solitary figure.
“Spasibo,” said the soldier in thanks, stepping up onto a runner and holding onto the back of a seat as the sleigh moved off again.
Sage noticed that the weapon slung over the soldier’s back was fitted with a sniper’s scope. Pointing to the soldier and the rifle, Sage tried his limited Russian. “You kill many Germans?”
“Da, da,” the soldier responded with a grin, using fingers to count out thirty plus.
“Over thirty Krauts dead,” said a nodding Sage, impressed.
The soldier’s bulky overcoat was now unbuttoned to reveal the military decoration of the Order of the Red Star for the defense of Stalingrad. The act also revealed that the soldier had ample breasts. The decorated sniper was a woman. And an attractive one. When both Sage and Kouns let out exclamations of surprise, the sniper laughed, removed her cap and shook her head. Fair hair tumbled down over her shoulders. Sage would describe her as looking like Norwegian Olympic skater and movie star Sonja Henie. Sometime later, the femme fatale was dropped off to join her unit, after which Sage and Kouns alighted in Bromberg and found a room in another local hotel run by the Red Cross.1
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PESSIMIST BILLY BINGHAM and his escape partner, Bob Kroll, had made it to the displaced persons camp at Rembertów, where they joined Colonel Drury and the kriegies from Oflag 64’s hospital, including Wright Bryan and Jonel Hill. The American party at Rembertów continued to grow as Holder, Durgin, Diggs, Tacy and other Schubin escapees also arrived after briefly returning to Schubin and being rounded up by the NKVD.
Bingham and Kroll found this place to be worse than any German POW camp. American kriegies were thrown in with 1,500 civilians from across eastern Europe, all living in a single two-story building. There was no running water or heat. It was bitterly cold, and at night, sleeping on straw on the floor, the Americans could only huddle together for warmth. For food, all the Red Army gave them was barley.
After a while, a Russian major came through the camp, and Bingham and Kroll confronted him. Declaring they were US Army officers, they demanded transport to Moscow. The major looked them up and down with disgust. Neither had bathed or shaved in months. Bingham was wearing a worn US Army shirt, Ukrainian breeches, a legging wrapped around just one leg, and a Polish greatcoat.
“You do not look like officers,” said the skeptical Russian.2
The duo was eventually able to convince the major they were the real McCoy, and he gave them a slip of paper containing written approval to use any available transport to travel into the Soviet Union. That was fine except that few of the Russian enlisted men they would show the piece of paper to could read. In the camp, Bingham and Kroll had befriended a pair of attractive young Ukrainian women who admitted to having been the girlfriends of German soldiers who had dumped them in Poland when the Wehrmacht retreated. Like Bingham, the girls could speak some German. And they were keen to get home to the Ukraine.
“We will take you to Moscow to see Stalin,” said one of the girls with a grin.
“No,” Bingham responded, “we’ll take you back to the United States and make you movie stars.”3
So Bingham, Kroll and the cheeky Ukrainian girls teamed up. Armed with the major’s written authorization, the quartet slipped from the Rembertów camp and boarded an eastbound train, taking places in a crowded boxcar. Fifty miles east of Rembertów, the train pulled into a station in a small town. The door to the Americans’ boxcar was thrown open. Russian soldiers barged in, grabbed the two protesting Ukrainian women, dragged them out and flung them to the ground on the platform.
As Bingham and Kroll watched helplessly from inside the boxcar, the Russians proceeded to batter the two women to death with rifle butts for being German collaborators. It was over in seconds. The Russians had obviously been tipped off by someone on the train who recognized the women and knew their history. The stunned and sickened Bingham and Kroll were left untouched. The boxcar door rolled shut, and the train resumed its eastward journey. The pair didn’t reach Moscow. Directed by the NKVD, they eventually arrived at Odessa in the first RAMPs party to arrive at the port city for evacuation. General Deane’s contact team had arrived from Moscow just the day before and was there to greet them.
Through the rest of February, all the American kriegies who had been collected by the NKVD at Rembertów and elsewhere in Poland arrived at Odessa. Jerry Sage was among them. In Lublin, he’d tried to return to his OSS role, pursuing information about the provisional government, but he, too, had been rounded up by the Soviet spy agency. With Turkey entering the war on the Allied side in February, Istanbul and the Dardanelles opened up as transit points, and on March 5 the British steamer Moreton Bay, the first Allied troopship carrying freed Schubinites away from the Soviet Union, sailed from Odessa on the initial leg of the kriegies’ homeward journey.
Alas, for the majority of Schubinites who were still in German hands, tough times still lay ahead.