Page 68 of Hell to Pay
April 14, 1945
Dear Dad,
They told us today that Roosevelt’s dead. What a shock! We had an impromptu service right here in the street. Flags were produced from just about every state, and I wish you could’ve seen the quiet that came over everyone. I can’t quite believe he’s gone. (We had riflemen on all the rooftops and in all the windows so nobody got any ideas about hitting us when our backs were turned.)
These young guys we’re fighting against, though—some of them won’t even surrender. Oh, most of them give up all right, but some seem to deliberately choose death instead. I know we have to win this war, but it sure seems like a waste. They’ve seen their whole country wrecked, and a whole lot of other countries, too, and for what? Hitler wanting to be king of the world?
Every house now has a white flag—a pillowcase, a ragged undershirt, anything. That changed pretty quickly from what we saw inMannheim! I’m guessing that our crossing the Rhine, and then the Main, too, took the heart out of the civilians. You’ll be seeing more maps there than we are here—we mostly see only what’s in front of our noses and count on gossip for the rest—so you’ll know what kind of progress we’re making, and where the Brits are up north and the Red Army in the East. We’re closing in, that’s for sure. There’ll be a day soon when I can say, “Deutschland ist kaputt. Alles kaputt.” I’m ready for that day.
As for us, it’s East we go. I wonder if the fighting will ever get easier. How long before the German troops realize they’ve been had? I talked to some of the prisoners last night. They were convinced that when the U.S. and Red Armies come together, we’ll fight each other and leave the Germans alone, and they’ll be able to stab us in the back! I told them that Roosevelt, Churchill, and Uncle Joe (Stalin) know how the world works a little better than that, and I wouldn’t count on that theory. (I guess Truman’s President now, but that can’t make much difference.) Oh—there’s also a secret weapon that’ll be unveiled on Hitler’s birthday next week, and it’s going to turn the whole tide of the war and send us scampering west again. Some of them seriously believe that, or say they do. That’s some propaganda operation they’ve got. Wrong is right, bad is good, losing is winning. Crazy stuff. You can hardly blame some teenage kid for being confused.
Time to sleep. We’re moving out again tomorrow.
Love to Mom,
Joe
There was no diary entry from me for the next week or so, but I didn’t need one to remember the journey.
Once I’d bought train tickets to Nuremberg, on the day when the nuns said we absolutely, positively, must leave, my wallet held only a few marks. Enough to buy food for a day or two, perhaps, after two months of wandering. Then what?
A woman on the train with a headscarf and two chickens in a cage said, during a general discussion—how much more freely were people talking now! The Gestapo can hardly arrest everyone—“The Americans will have to feed us when they come, won’t they? They can’t leave us to starve.”
“That’s exactly what they’ll do,” a man opposite her said. “Feed us? Why should they? Would we feed them in their place? Hardly. We’re the enemy.”
The woman said, “Rubbish. My cousin in Frankfurt says that they’ve set up aid stations there, that they get soup and bread each day. The soup has meat in it, too, not just potatoes. There’s a law somewhere that says an occupying power must feed civilians, she says, and it must be true, or why would they be doing it?”
The man snorted. “Pure nonsense. Feed yourself or starve. You’re not going to have a problem, not with chickens. Nor is anybody with a farm. You may as well own gold bars. What’s the price of eggs on the black market now?”
“I’m sure I have no idea,” the woman said stiffly.
“It’s the people in the cities that will suffer most,” the man said, “whatever the Americans do.”
“When the foreign laborers are sent back to their own countries,” the woman said, “things won’t look as pretty for us as you imagine. The vegetable farms around my place? That’s who’s doing the planting now. Well, how can it be otherwise, with the boys and men all gone to war?”
“The slave laborers, you mean,” another man said. He had a dark, saturnine face. “Send the Party members and the SS out to work on the land, then. That’s what I’d do if I were the Americans.”
“Then you do agree that they’ll do something,” the woman with the chickens said.
“Oh, they’ll do something,” the dark man agreed. “But we may not like it.”
Somebodyhadto do something, I thought, appalled, as we descended the train at the Nuremberg station into utter devastation. Block after block we walked, always west, the direction from which the Americans would be coming. They were rumored to be very near. The April sun was the warmest it had been yet, and Dr. Becker and I were both carrying our coats. My arm ached with the weight, and I had to keep shifting the coat. And I was still carrying the lighter one!
Poor Dr. Becker looked on his last legs, while my stomach had forgotten all its previous adjustment to low rations, lulled by the comfortable living at the Langbeins’, and was informing me that it was well past lunchtime. We’d rashly eaten the last of Frau Langbein’s provisions this morning, along with the tea and single slice of bread with jam given to us at the convent. She’d packed hard-cooked eggs in there along with everything else, and we’d shared the last two: half apiece. Now, we didn’t have so much as a crust of bread. We’d thought we could buy it in Nuremberg. How foolish that hope was looking now!
On we walked past the wreckage of building after building, only a narrow path cleared through the rubble. A crew of women—laborers from the East, I thought, from their identical shapeless smocks—were passing bricks hand to hand in desultory fashion. Was this the cleanup, then? It was little enough. We came to a ruined house where a young woman with a baby on her back was digging in the rubble, and I stopped and said, “Good day.”
She looked up hopefully, registered us as refugees with no more to offer than she had herself, said, “Good day,” and went back to her digging.
“Is it all like this?” I said. “Nuremberg?”
She sat back on her haunches and stared at me. “What did you expect? Isn’t all of Germany like this?”
“So bad, though?” I asked. “Where has everybody gone?”
She waved a weary hand. “Here and there. Some stay where they are. See, there—” She pointed down the street. “The higher floor? See how it’s still furnished?”
I looked. Yes, there was a bed and table in one room, a kitchen in another. Intact, tablecloth and all, like a dollhouse—the front cut away.
