Page 17 of Hell to Pay
Honestly, one doesn’t know what to wish for anymore. Outside of the palace, things seem very bad, with queues for food everywhere, the shelves nearly empty, and scrawny children scavenging for spilled coal on the railway tracks. On the tram home from school on Friday, a shabby old man stood on the forward platform in the cold—it was an icy, windy day, quite miserable—when a rough-looking fellow, a workman in a cloth cap, opened the door and said, “You’ll catch your death. Come inside.” The man—bearded, with deep-set eyes in a sunken face—stared at him with the oddest expression, and I realized he was wearing the star and wasn’t allowed to ride inside, and that he didn’t dare disobey. One sees so few Jews on the streets now, one forgets. I wonder where they’ve gone? Evacuated, we hear, but to where?
Can peace, even a losing peace, be worse than this war? Mother says the Russians would definitely be worse, but when I ask how, she tightens her lips and won’t say. Honestly, could she remember that I’m very nearly an adult now?
What a difference between that entry and Joe’s next letter.
January 9, 1945
Dear Dad,
Well, I guess you know by now that we’re across the Rhine, but they sure didn’t make it easy. I can say I’ve been in it now. It’s not what I thought it would be. More confusing, for one thing, but I’ll try to make some sense of it here.
The brass knew the Germans were trying another counterattack, it seems, not ready to give up what they’re calling “The Battle of the Bulge,” for the shape of the advance. They thought, though, that the main push would be to the north, up toward Strasbourg. We were mighty surprised, then, the day after Christmas, to find ourselves faced with tanks and artillery manned by SS troopers. They’d crossed the Rhine in the dead of night, and we weren’t prepared for them, with no tanks of our own and no artillery support.
We did what we could, though it wasn’t much use. There we were, lying in the snow, shooting at tanks with rifles. One SS officer poked his head up out of the turret and shouted, “Surrender, surrender, you damn fools.” In English, if you can believe it. He got his arm shot off for his trouble, and no, we didn’t surrender. We pressed forward, with the guys shouting, “Hubba! Hubba!” It was rousing to hear. We couldn’t wait until morning, when our position would be even worse, so there was nothing for it but to fight our way through the town, though we weren’t expecting the scrap to last for days.
I don’t mind telling you that it was a mighty close-run thing. Our ammunition was low, and our casualties were high. Don’t tell Mom this, but you remember Alan Menckel, the fellow I told you about, whose family has the department stores? He fell right next to me, barely an hour in, shot through the chest. I’d been joking with him the night before, telling him that the Allies hadn’t got it done yet, but now the Jews were here and we’d show them how. He did his best, all right, and so did the rest of us. “Hold at all costs,” they told us, and we held.
Remember how I said the radioman wouldn’t be in the thick of it? Well, that’s not how it goes. Even the cooks and clerks were out there with us. I saw Gus Samuels, who dishes up a mean stew, on a machine gun, giving better than he got right up until he was hit.Wounded, though, not killed—he jokes that he’s as tough as Army beef, and I’d say that’s about right.
By the end of the first day, every one of our officers had been killed or wounded (don’t tell Mom that one either), but First Sergeant Biggs stepped up to lead us, and can you ever say he was brave. And at midnight, we still held half the town.
Well, it went on pretty much like that for four more days, until yesterday, when we were relieved with about two-thirds of us having dropped—most, luckily, wounded and sent back through the lines. You should see those medics work to keep them alive. One of them, Norm Roberts, was a conscientious objector. The other fellows gave him a hard time at first, but when the bullets start flying, there’s nobody braver. I can’t tell you how many wounded men Norm’s dragged to safety, because I didn’t see them all, but I’m guessing he’ll get a medal for it.
What’s surprised me most is how the Germans just keep coming on. If they’re supposed to be beaten, nobody’s told them. I heard that anybody who runs or hangs back is shot on the spot. I guess that puts some steel in your spine, but I’d rather do it for Alan and Gus and the rest of the guys, personally.
I can hear you asking, “Were you scared, son?” Well, yeah, you’re scared, but you’ve got no choice, do you? They’re shooting at you, so you shoot back. I can also tell you that, even though you might think you wouldn’t be hungry with your life on the line like that, boy, are you ever! Those K-Rations, when we got a chance to eat them, tasted better than they had any right to. And do you ever have to go to the bathroom, too, once the worst is over. Nobody tells you that during basic training either.
You never saw anything as wrecked as that town, though. I don’tthink there was a building left whole in the place. Most of the civilians evacuated before the shooting started, but the ones who stayed mostly bought it in the crossfire.
I don’t imagine I’ll want to do this as a career, but I guess I’m glad I’m here. Turns out we’ve got the guts for the job, and I believe we’ll do it. For now, though, we’re all mighty glad to have an old schoolhouse to sleep in, one with an actual roof and even a few toilets, and to be able to write a letter and have some hot meals. Gus is still dishing them up, even with his arm in a sling. What a guy.
Love to Mom,
Joe
I, too, seemed to become more thoughtful, at least occasionally. How difficult it is to remember how one felt back then.
15 January 1945
We’ve been getting air-raid warnings at last, and traipsing dutifully downstairs and back up again at least four nights in seven, but no air-raids come. We ask each other, “Do you think it’s another drill, or is there any real danger?” Nobody knows, but if we’ve gone this long without being bombed, is it really likely to happen now? The Wehrmachtdoesn’t seem to think so, as Father says they’ve moved our entire antiaircraft battery east, where it’s needed more. They should know, shouldn’t they?
We’ve become serious about setting up our air-raid shelter, though. Really, it’s just the cellar under the kitchens, furnished now with benches and chairs and a table and oil-lamps and candles in case ofthe electric going out, not to mention metal buckets of sand and water for incendiary bombs, a larger tub of water for soaking blankets in to smother any fires—It was a real wrench to Mother and Frau Schultz to sacrifice perfectly good blankets for the purpose—and a stirrup-pump to spray water on the flames. They’d have to be some very small flames, though, as the stirrup-pump is no fire hose. We each have our rucksack, too, with goggles and gas mask, and are drilled weekly by the Air-Raid Warden, Herr Freihart, a pompous little man with pale eyes and a Hitler mustache, who wears his Party badge at all times and clearly enjoys issuing orders to the King and Queen. Mother and I loathe him, but Father merely looks amused.
There are still some bottles of preserves on the cellar shelves, and Mother has decreed that each night we’re forced down there, we can eat a jar of preserves. That doesn’t go far when it’s shared among seventeen people, but so starved are we for sugar and fruit that we savor every bite and almost wish for another false alarm.
Sitting down there last night, I thought about the article inThe Reichon New Year’s Day. By Goebbels, as usual, and titled “The Führer,” who has remained strangely invisible and unheard from.
“If the world,” G. said, “really knew what he has to tell and to give, and how profoundly his love goes out to the whole of mankind beyond his own nation, then at this hour it would bid farewell to its false gods and render him homage.”
Have you ever read a more absurd thing? Mother said, most sarcastically for her, “If Hitler weren’t such a poor Catholic, the Pope would surely make such a man a saint.” But Father said, “Perhaps Daisy should tell us what she thinks. After all, she’s sixteen now, able to decide for herself.”
I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to be very clever, but I wasn’t sure how. At first, I merely said, “But surely I am influenced also.”
“By your lessons at school,” Father said. “You must create a little distance, as I’ve told you, a free space in your mind where ideas can be held up to the light, examined, and weighed against a ruthless reality, which has no partisan leaning. Independence of mind is one’s most valuable possession.”
“No,” I said, and I don’t know where this boldness came from. “By you and Mother. That’s the standard I try to use, but that’s influence too, is it not?”
“Ah,” Father said. Gravely, but not angrily, and the tightness in my chest eased a bit. “That’s well observed. Perhaps you will have to widen that space, hmm? And let our words be weighed and measured as well. So—before I tell you my thoughts, what are your own?”
