Page 100 of Hell to Pay
Joe
“So when did you actually see him again?” Alix asked. “Grandpa? It’s funny—I always thought of him like that, like he was born old. I never imagined him as a young man. How old was he when he wrote that?”
“Nineteen,” I said.
“He seems older,” Sebastian commented.
“A serious mind,” I said, “and a great deal of responsibility. To answer your question, I saw him a few months after he wrote that letter. When he came to Nuremberg.”
“Wait, how?” Ben asked. “If he was in Austria, and about to go to Japan?”
“Dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that’s how,” Sebastian said. “Which ended the war in Japan.”
“Oh,” Ben said. “But they still didn’t let them go home?”
“Wait,” I said. “Next letter.”
August 20, 1945
Dear Dad,
It’s strange not being able to talk to you and Mom, or able tocelebrate the end of the war with you. I imagine you two at the Concordia Club with the Goldbergs and the Lowensteins, raising a glass of champagne and talking about your sons coming home, looking forward to the day when you can take down the blue stars from your windows. At least I hope they’relooking forward to that. You haven’t told me about any of your friends’ kids buying it out here. I hope that’s because they haven’t, not because you don’t want to upset me. I sure hate to think about any of them going west, but I guess it’s not realistic that everybody would come home safe.
That’s morbid, you’re thinking, and not celebratory enough, but this thing has taken a lot out of people. I don’t even know how to explain it. Some of the guys are jumpy. Twitchy. They can’t sleep, and every Jeep backfire makes them hit the deck. The CO reassigns the guys like that so they don’t have to carry a weapon, now that we’re not in battle. Smart of him. The strange thing is, it seems worse now than when we were actually fighting. The way I’d put it is—when you’re right in the thick of it, you don’t have time to develop any complexes or anything. You don’t think, you just act, because if you don’t, you’ll die. Maybe afterwards, when your mind has time to sort of catch up, you go a little loopy, because the stuff you’ve seen is too much to deal with, at least for a while. Probably it gets better with time, I don’t know.
Don’t think that I’m in trouble that way! I’m still OK. Most guys are OK. Quieter, probably, and maybe with more on their minds than your average 19-year-old, but they haven’t gone around the bend. It’s not necessarily the skinny intellectual types like yours truly who have the worst problems, either. Seems like the big burly guys, the ones who’ve always been tough, get it worse. Maybe that’s because they’re not used to being scared, I don’t know.
Anyway—we did celebrate all right the day Japan surrendered! It felt like a bigger deal than when our own war ended. Partly becausewe weren’t exhausted like we were back then, and hadn’t lost any of our own recently, and partly because now, it’s actuallyover.I mean going-home over, all-the-way over, and that makes a difference. Although they have this point system for demobilization—they have to have some way to make it fair, I guess, and there are only so many troopships—and guys like me who joined up in 1944 are going to be at the end of the line. There’s been some grumbling about that, but what are you going to do—that’s the Army.
I’ve got something to tell you along those lines that you’re not going to like, or maybe you will—I’m not sure which. I’m going to put it in the form of a conversation, because that’s what it was.
It started when I got called into the CO’s office. We’d just got word that we’d be sticking with the supervising-POWs work until the Army thought up something better for us to do—painting all the rocks in camp white, maybe—so I couldn’t think what it was about. I’m not much of a troublemaker.So after the initial salute and so forth, when I’m standing at ease in front of his desk—the Army doesn’t care for men sitting down when talking to a superior officer—he says, “I understand you’ve done a good job for us, Sergeant. Not so much as a radio operator, though you’re adequate, but doing a fair amount of German translation, and some Yiddish. That right?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, wondering what the heck this is about.
“Well, I’ve got a request here,” he says, holding up a piece of paper that he of course doesn’t let me see, “for your transfer back to Germany.”
“Our unit, you mean, sir?” I ask, wondering, first, why he’s tellingme—colonels don’t normally give their orders sergeant by sergeant—and second, why on earth we’d be heading back to Germany while the POWs are still here. I’m also thinking that I’d prefer to servesomeplace that hasn’t been bombed into oblivion, although my preferences carry exactly zero weight.
“No,” he says, “not your unit. You specifically. You’re being promoted to Staff Sergeant, too. Congratulations.”
I’m swearing inside now, as you can imagine. My familyleftGermany. For that matter, so did I. Why would I want to go back, especially now? It’s not like it’s going to be any kind of Jewish vacation destination anytime soon.
“Sir?” I manage to say.
“Nuremberg,” he says, and puts the paper back down on his desk, folding his hands over it.
“Nuremberg, sir?” I repeat blankly.
He sighs and rubs his eyes behind his glasses. I don’t imagine commanding a unit over here has been a lot of fun, either. “The U.S. Government,” he says, “in its infinite wisdom, has agreed with the other Allied powers to hold a series of criminal trials at Nuremberg, the prosecution team and judges to be provided from all four nations. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s the U.S., the Soviet Union—though they’re no kind of experts on justice—Britain, and France.”
He pauses, and I say, “Criminal trials, sir?”
“War crimes,” he says. “Committed by the top brass. The defense counsel will be German, so it’s fair, and more importantly, so itlooksfair.”
“That doesn’t seem usual, sir,” I venture to say. “After a war. At least I’ve never heard of it.”
“That’s because it’s never happened before,” he says. “The idea is that ‘there oughta be a law,’ so they’re trying to make some. You’ve heard of the United Nations?”
