CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE JOE OF OCTOBER 1944 SORT OF SCARES JOE TODAY. A LOT of him in III-C was still a kid, a kid who had gone through a lot, taken a lot, and dished it out, but still a kid who saw just about every chance as a good one. What drove him hardest was neither the Nazi murderers nor the Russians murdered but rather what his mother had said when he left home for the induction center in Kalamazoo: “Never do anything to make your family ashamed.” Joe felt they might be ashamed if he didn't escape, and sure they'd be proud if he did. He was quite wrong—all the Beyrles prayed for was that he survive the war.
Withal he was on the escape committee, one of five men whose combined age was barely a hundred, whom Coleman designated as his most mature and cautious judges of risk, of what could work and what probably wouldn't. For Joe the best way to learn more, to gauge the lay of the land, was to get outside the wire where the stone road and railroad intersected at III-C. For that purpose he volunteered for work details in the countryside.
On one such detail, hunger got the best of him. A farmer's horse-drawn wagon loaded with potatoes went by close enough that the krieges conspired to liberate a few spuds. The Americans tried a diversion. Several went up to the guards and created confusion while others plucked potatoes off the wagon and stuffed their pockets, shushing the farmer with cigarettes. This kind of misbehavior was not rare—such pilferage was one of the reasons men volunteered for work details—and usually was punished with no more than kicks and curses, but this time the senior guard was a good friend of a former mole who had been punished by the Americans.
He shouted, Feuer! (“Fire!”). One man was hit, fell under the wagon when the horse bolted, and died when his head was crushed by a wheel. Joe was about to catch a spud when a bullet entered his right shoulder. It passed through the muscle without striking bone, but with an impact harder than the shell fragment in Normandy. It seemed his arm was blown off—it was so completely numb that he was surprised to find it still attached. The pain came on like flame dissolving ice.
“What I had to do was conceal the blood because guards grabbed anyone who was wounded,” Joe recalls. “Another guy who was hit ended up in solitary and died there. I packed some dirt to stop the bleeding and with good luck was marched back to the compound with the krieges who hadn't been caught. I could have got an Oscar for pretending I wasn't in pain because I sure was. A guy next to me saw that and started telling nonstop jokes. I think the guards thought my expression was because of how bad the jokes were. The POW chain of command did not approve of what we'd done. I wouldn't have either if I'd had Coleman's job. We'd got a man killed for just a few potatoes.
“A kriege medic came around to my hut and secretly patched up my shoulder so the krauts never knew. Schultz saw something was wrong with the way I couldn't use my arm, but he didn't try to find out about it. But he knew. I was trying to lift my arm when he came by and said, ‘Too much crap shooting, Joe?’ He punched it in a friendly way. I winced, got the message, and felt I owed him. The only way I had to do that was to stop harassing him.”
Harassing Schultz had been an amusement. Each morning at roll-call formation there were hundreds of krieges milling around as Schultz and his guards counted heads. Joe was among those who would move down in back of the formation, pop up, and be recounted so the count was screwed up. Schultz usually took this sort of prank good-naturedly, more so than the krieges who wanted to get out of the cold and back to their huts, but after Schultz overlooked the shoulder wound Joe convinced his fellow pranksters to lay off for a while.
Joe's injury set back the escape plan he had devised with Brewer and Quinn. While they waited for the wound to heal (it never did completely), two fortunate events occurred: American krieges were issued winter clothing, and Joe won seventy packs of cigarettes in crap games.
His jump boots were so worn and torn that the sole at the toe had separated from the shoe, leaving a big gap that soaked his feet whenever it rained and making the sole flap. So though it meant looking like a leg, Joe was glad to put on standard GI brogans delivered by the Red Cross, along with thick GI overcoats, wool socks, and trousers.* Those were the clothes he would wear for the rest of the war. The fact that they were American uniform items would save his life.
“With my right arm out of action, rolling dice with my left hand seemed to bring luck. Shorty had said always use my left hand—I should have remembered that before. Anyway, I wasn't going out on any more work details, so there was time to circulate around the compound to a lot of crap games. There were at least two big ones every day. The winners got together for playoffs that drew plenty of spectators, including Schultz sometimes. Even when I wasn't rolling I'd bet on the guy coming out. Those were the best odds, no side bets, and slowly my cigarette fortune grew. One afternoon I felt my hand was hot and doubled up for four straight passes. Quinn came over, then Brewer. I crapped once, then made two hard points and went seven-eleven twice more. The nicotine addicts looked at me like I was Rockefeller. Quinn took my winnings away before I was tempted to gamble for more. Brewer had been counting too. Sixty was the number of packs we felt was necessary to bribe our way out. We now had a ten-pack cushion.”
Thus it was time to present their plan to the escape committee, from which of course Joe would be recused. It met in the shed where Red Cross parcels were distributed, known as the PX. The cover for the committee to be there was that it was Coleman's auditing group to make sure krieges got what was coming to them. The escape committee played that role well because honest distribution was of prime importance to everyone. They spent much more time counting parcels than they did hearing escape plans.
On the day of a proposal, security was posted around the PX to warn of any guards who might come through the area. A rough wood table was cleared of Red Cross parcels, then the presenter laid out his plan. The committee hunched over on their elbows to hear what the low voice had to say. Now Joe was the presenter, but the other four members of the committee didn't treat him any differently.
“My plan was simple. We would offer one of the night guards twenty packs if he let us cut the wire while he was walking his post. Then we'd go through when his shift changed so he wouldn't be blamed. A train went by III-C every night. We'd hop on it like hoboes. No, we weren't sure where it was going, but since this is Poland, all railroads probably led to Warsaw. Warsaw was hundreds of miles east. East was where the Red Army was coming from. We'd noticed how fewer Russkies were being brought into III-C. That was a good sign they were winning.
“We'd leave the train when we figured it was close to the Eastern Front, then hole up and wait for the Russians to overrun our location. Along the way we'd have plenty of cigarettes to buy cooperation from anyone who could help us.”
As he finished his pitch the power generator failed and they were sitting in the dark. Someone laughed and said that wasn't a good sign, but Joe said yes, it was, because the plan was to break out on a no-moon night in early November.
Out of the darkness came very sober questions: had Joe identified a guard to be bought? No, but there were a couple he'd chatted with and they had been corrupted before. One had even offered, for a high price, to slip Americans over to the next compound to have sex with their choice of Russian female POWs. Someone on the committee knew a better candidate. Joe was glad to leave bribery to him.
Faint light came back on, and the committee decided that the deal, if Coleman approved Joe's plan, should be ten packs' down payment, ten more after the three escapees were gone. How many days' worth of food was needed? All the supply committee could afford, Joe answered. The committee said don't expect more than a few potatoes, apples, and Red Cross biscuits. That should be enough because the three had saved up a bagful of Spam, cheese, and chocolate.
What about reprisals, Joe was asked. Reprisals? The commandant had never stated a reprisal policy because no one had ever escaped from III-C. Reprisals were a big kraut bluff, Joe argued, because a commandant, to hide it from his superiors, wouldn't want to announce an escape, much less advertise it through reprisals (which, it should be added, were condemned by the Geneva Conventions, which commandants were reviewing with increasing interest as the war turned hard against Germany).
Did Joe have any alternatives if he couldn't link up with the Russkies? No, he didn't, except that by turning north they'd eventually reach the Baltic Sea, where there might be a chance of getting over to Sweden, cigarettes for a sailboat. Did they need weapons? Joe wasn't prepared for that question. Sure, it would be great to be armed, ideally with Schmeis-sers, but firearms cost the highest bribe of all. There probably weren't enough cigarettes in all of III-C to buy a pistol. Joe said the three had shivs and were satisfied with that. It was nice though to hear the committee even mention the possibility of getting a firearm. They were sold on the plan, the first ever to win a single vote. “Okay, Joe,” the chairman said, “we'll ask Coleman to approve.”
The plan went into motion. Within a week a guard on the right shift had been bought, one so cooperative he offered advice that on moonless nights the commandant required extra security; however, with the recent cloudy weather every night was dark so the one picked was as good as any. Joe told the go-between to slip this guard another pack and ask him about the dogs and if he knew the night train's destination.
The answers came back that it would help if dogs were barking all night. That had already been taken into account. Sometimes they barked a lot, other times not much at all, but it seemed that the darker the night the more they barked. And it didn't matter much: krieges and dogs had become so familiar that they ignored each other. Nevertheless Joe took the guard's advice and asked that barking be aroused (perhaps by a small scuffle) around the huts on the far side of the compound from where the three would be going out. Coleman vetoed such a distraction because it meant bringing more krieges into the plan. Joe didn't argue—he expected to be through the wire before the dogs picked up a scent.
The erratic floodlights were more of a concern. The train went by between nine and eleven. The maximum electric load on the generators was at around six o'clock, so that's when they hoped to slip out, while the lights were dim. The bought guard would be on duty as the escapees were cutting wire, so the more light then the better. He wasn't much help about the destination of the train—it came up from Breslau, he knew, because there was a girl there whom he'd visited on a two-day pass. The camp also got some supplies from Breslau. Where the northbound train went from III-C he didn't know, but he assumed it was east because everything on wheels was being used to bring up war materiel to try to stop the Russians. He did mention that when the train came south it often contained transportees to a place called Auschwitz.
“We weren't going south, we'd never heard of Auschwitz, and the last possibility on our minds was leaving a kriege camp and ending up in a concentration camp,” Joe says.
“But that happened to some POWs who had H [for Hebrew] on their American dog tags. Before D Night, Jewish troopers in the 101st were advised to change the HtoPor C, and I think most of them did. Rosenfield in my battalion didn't. He said he'd lived a Jew and he would die one. He paid. The Nazis didn't treat his wounds when he was captured in Normandy. They sent him to Buchenwald, but luckily his convoy was ambushed by the FFI and he got away.”
The last part of the plan was how to abort or postpone. A candle would be lit in a hut doorway if the bought guard had his shift changed. That meant not to go out and cut the wire. If something went wrong after it was cut, there was no turning back: they'd be escaping during the next guard's shift, and he definitely wasn't in on the deal. Word that came back through the escape committee was the bought guard and his relief were rivals for a local girl—indeed that the bought guard may have planned it so that the other guard would catch hell when the escape occurred on his watch.
“There were potential squealers and double-crossers on both sides. We were playing the odds like a crap game, the best odds we had. Quinn, Brewer, and I didn't talk about it much. For one thing, we couldn't let the other guys in our hut know we were up to something. They'd only know when we slipped out right after curfew. It's not that we didn't trust our hut mates, it was that we didn't want to have to trust them.”
The wire cutters were two long shivs bolted together, strapped to Quinn's thigh. One by one the three went to the door, watched, listened, and slipped out without looking at their hut mates. If anyone had asked why, the answer was the squirts. Indeed they sat in a latrine, pants down, in case a guard came upon them. It was the latrine where they'd stashed a board from the ceiling of an unused hut, a board to help them through the wire if necessary. Before total darkness, the three separated. If one was caught, the other two could head back to their hut. Back and forth individually they slunk from the shadow of one hut to another, giving one another an all-clear signal after each move. It reminded Joe of some night maneuver at Toccoa.
“I felt Colonel Sink was nodding,” Joe recalled. “My parents and Sister Angelique were also watching and supporting in the background. The plan was working. We couldn't hear any barking except over at the Russian compound, where the most vicious dogs always patrolled. I had this feeling that Schultz had called them off from our compound, that maybe he was in on our escape plan or had wind of it.”
When they reached the shadow of the last hut it was time to really put it to the touch (“sort of like a cherry jump”). Joe crawled under a trip wire and quickly out to the fence and began working on it with the cutter. There were four strands closest to the ground, three above them, two more above that, then a weave of barbed wire they could never cut. If they had to get through that tangle of wire, it would be with the ceiling board.
Joe was determined to sever the lowest four strands before letting Brewer take over. The wire was rusty but tough. The wire cutter was clean but not so tough. Pushing his hands together over and over put severe strain on his wounded shoulder.
“It must have taken me five minutes to cut that first strand minutes as long as hours. I don't have flashbacks anymore, but when I did they were about that first strand. I could even feel pressure in the palms of my hands.”
No one had a watch, so it seemed they couldn't do enough cutting before the guard shift changed. Joe's right shoulder began to tremble so much he could cut no more. He signaled back to Brewer, who crawled up and took over. His look said that Joe had stayed at it too long. Brewer had the third strand cut before Joe got back into the shadows. Brewer whistled for Quinn, who thrashed up and went after the next layer of wire. Joe was still panting when they gave him the okay sign: everything that needed to be cut had been cut. Unhurriedly his buddies molded candle wax to connect the cuts.
“That took forever. The wire kept popping out of the wax. They gave up, glanced over at me, and shrugged. Only about half of the wire had been reconnected with wax. When they crawled back they looked with me, and I said I couldn't see much difference from the rest of the wire except a little droop in the bottom strand. They appreciated that because I wouldn't tell them anything except the truth just to make them feel better. We'd agreed not to fake anything about what we saw or felt.”
In the shadows, teeth clenched, they waited for the bought guard to stroll by across the fence. Yes, it was him; they could tell by his limp while he was still far away. The guard knew what to do—nothing—and did it well. When he came back he gave the signal, by pissing, that his shift was over in five minutes. Beyrle, Brewer, and Quinn were more than ready, but the bought guard had insisted that they not escape on his shift. He would linger as long as possible with the new guard giving the escapees between two and three minutes to crawl through the cut, reseal it, and get into the woods alongside the rail track. The moment the bought guard buttoned his fly and turned his back, Joe crawled like a starved python, but he was third to the wire.
“We went through, through the fence, and resealed the wire with time to spare. It was the planning, the preparation, the ‘execution’ as they say in football, that got us out of Sta-lag III-C. So we were out, free to some degree. That was a thrill! It was like leaving home for the first time as a teenager. III-C was something to get away from, someplace to leave to be on your own. Old British krieges had told me to throttle back, wait it out, take what comes and live with it. Good advice, but not for us.”
Outside the fence was a patch of scrub pine, the beginnings of the forest Joe would walk through in 1992. In 1944 he had about four hours to wait for a train, time for the three to grow closer in a suddenly transformed environment where hope and fear were in nearly equal balance. In a few hours they had gone from hut mates to soul mates. However, Joe recalled, “I should be able to say much more about them than I can, but I can't, I just can't, and don't know why. We were all Airborne and had been together for months, but I don't even remember their first names, their units, or where they were from. I'm not even certain if ‘Quinn’ is right. Something erased all that. There's an empty pit there in my mind.”
They were like mountaineers brought together for the first time to conquer an unclimbed summit. In the compound they had not been a threesome. Brewer and Quinn were buddies, more so than Joe was a buddy with anyone. He respected them; they respected him. Their lives now depended on one another. That was enough of a level to work at—more could have been distracting.
This detachment, the interpersonal distance, contrasts with Joe today, who is an easily approachable and congenial fellow, the ideal seat mate on an airliner. Want to talk? He's a ready listener. Want him to talk? Joe is a broad-gauge conversationalist. Rather read? That's fine too. Joe reads slowly. He will not let himself misinterpret a term or miss a nuance. His World War II library fills most of the Beyrle basement and claimed a lot of his time while he painstakingly mined the background ore and lore of his experiences for this book.
But when it comes to what must have been a most intimate connection with Brewer and Quinn, they who went through the worst part of his life with him, the memory tape has been erased. Or so spotted that their pictures degenerated like Dorian Gray's.
AFTER SWEATING THROUGH the wire, the three were damp and cold in the woods, waiting for the train. In a soldierly way they reviewed what to do when it came along or didn't. Though the escape committee had arranged stand-ins for morning roll call, they knew that if the train wasn't running that night they'd have to start up the tracks on foot and hope to catch another one somewhere. If that happened, their odds of getting away approached zero, but to improve them they planned to split up if search dogs were heard. Maybe with different scents in different directions one could get away. Brewer spoke some German. Quinn said the two of them would stick together. That was okay by Joe. On potato details he'd picked up a little Polish, and ever since the escape plan was approved he'd spent time over by the Russian fence to learn some of their language.
The wait in the woods was like D Night in England: they had prepared in every way, and what happened next was up to God and fate. They exchanged addresses of parents, repeated them in the frosty darkness till each became a potential locator of the other's next of kin. Such thoughts Joe pushed away, saying let's get our dobbers up—we're about halfway home, we did the hardest part, breaking out of the stalag. A million Russkies were coming, and the krauts didn't have enough troops to look for three little Amis.
They imagined the sound long before they heard it. The locomotive didn't toot as it sometimes did; instead it huffed and puffed. That night the boiler was on overdrive to climb the slight grade where they were waiting. From the steam jets and slow progress, they guessed this train must be very long and loaded, easy to board. It went by at the speed of a fast walk, so they had their pick among the cars. First came the coalers, then flatbeds carying Mark IV tanks. Almost at random, the escapees swung onto an unsealed boxcar. As they heaved open the sliding door, it seemed like a rolling j ackpot.
It was half full of grain, no doubt for horses, the prime movers for Germans on the Eastern Front. So this train must be headed east, confirming a key assumption in the escape plan, and the grain was a bonus, something to munch while saving emergency rations. They had to munch slowly, removing husks like tiny pistachio shells. The grain was hard and tasteless, but if it kept horses going, it could do the same for fugitives.
In addition to emergency rations, the supply committee had provided a primitive compass but without luminous points, so Quinn had to push the boxcar door open in order to read it. After trundling along in a northeasterly direction, the train heaved to a halt at a junction. After some jolting detachments, switching and reattaching, it moved off again—southwest, Quinn murmured. Around midnight the tracks made a new sound, the same sound Joe had heard going over the Oder for the first time. Now he was recrossing it, slowly drawn back into Germany.
The train went along the southern edge of Berlin. Joe found the rail yard fifty years later, still big, bleak, and in the worst section of town. In 1944 it was heavily cratered, a junkyard of twisted track and derelict boxcars. Joe's train arrived before dawn, then their car detached and shunted to a siding.
“What if we'd hopped another car, one right by the tanks that were sure to be going to the Eastern Front?” Joe reflects. “We took the grain car out of instinct, I guess. It must have been wishful thinking. I've learned that when instinct is right, it usually comes as a surprise. The boxcar instinct was no surprise, it was ‘Hey, let's grab this one—looks like the best one coming along.’”
Stupefied to silence, the three contemplated how their situation couldn't be worse: they were smack in the center of Hitler's Reich, its capital, at maximum distance from friendly forces, with huge German armies to get through in either direction. Joe had prayed so hard, kept his faith, but been rewarded with disaster. There was no answer but destiny to why they ended up in that boxcar, only the certainty that they couldn't stay in it till Berlin fell to the Allies.
Back in England they'd heard something about a German resistance movement, and as krieges they'd learned there had been an assassination attempt against Hitler in the summer. Their only hope now was to try to find Germans in the resistance. Yeah, said Quinn. How do we do that? Just walk down Main Street in Ami uniforms and yell, “Hey, anyone want to help us? We're going to win the war, you know!”
In the boxcar there was plenty of time to debate. Quinn counseled patience. He felt the car was sure to be picked up sometime and taken somewhere, and anywhere was better than here. Horse feed probably wasn't the Germans' highest priority, but eventually it was sure to be moved to where there were horses, and that meant out of Berlin.
Brewer and Joe didn't feel that way. They couldn't live on grain that made them itch and sneeze so much someone walking by could hear them. By a 2-1 vote it was decided that they would prowl around the forlorn rail yard, “check out the area.” Quinn vehemently disapproved: Okay, he said, if this were Poland where everyone hates the Germans, but this is the capital of Germany, where everyone hates us. As if to emphasize his point, a flurry of bombs dropped on the city.
If bombers were going over, they might be targeting boxcars, Joe argued. Some bombs fell closer, and Quinn agreed to get out till the air raid was over. They slipped into a culvert and scanned the rail yard. It was huge, about five miles wide and three miles long. They roamed back and forth for two or three days, their bag of rations depleting. At some point they got into the sewer system, a miasmic maze promising to lead somewhere better but mocking them to try to find a way.
The vast yard showed few signs of life, no trains moving in or out, till late one afternoon they saw an old man shuffling between train cars, checking grease fittings of the journals. He proceeded slowly and after an hour sat down to gnaw on black bread and baloney. Joe urged that the yard man be approached directly, no matter what the hazard. The three were in American uniforms, very motley ones. Should they pretend to be refugees? No, said Quinn, that story wouldn't last. Go right up to him, Brewer whispered, and tell him who you are. They studied the yard man for another half hour. He was hunched in the cold, a gloomy figure slowly munching as if his mouth had insufficient saliva.
Joe came up behind, called him Kamerad, and asked for help. The man's jaw dropped and so did his sandwich when Joe told him he was an escaped POW. Go away—Kamerad didn't want to hear anything like that. Joe gave him three cigarettes, which he grabbed but repeated that he wouldn't continue talking for fear of being shot. By the Gestapo? Joe asked sympathetically. The man nodded.
Joe left it at that and silently watched Kamerad trudge away. The next morning they saw him in another part of the yard, again checking journals. Joe emerged and asked for food and water. Kamerad wore a dingy overcoat and wool cap with a visor shadowing his eyes. This time he was willing to talk a little. He was forty years old and not well, he said— dysentery, the cause of his medical discharge from the Wehr-macht. Water? He pointed to a leaky cistern. Food—nein, it is very scarce. Ami bombers … Joe gave him a pack of Lucky Strikes. Well, Kamerad would check with a friend who might be able to help. He left before dark, and Joe's unease increased because he'd not been able to see Kamerad's eyes as they'd talked.
The fugitives had another debate about what to do. They didn't think Kamerad would be much help, but he was all the hope there was for now. If he betrayed them, it would probably be soon, so they entered a switch shack to watch for police. What's our plan, Quinn asked, if the krauts close in? Joe said he'd make a break for it. That might attract the cops because Kamerad would have told them of only one Ami on the loose. Brewer disagreed—word would be out by now from III-C that there were three escapees. No, Joe informed him, the commandant wouldn't want that kind of bad publicity. Quinn grew angry; they had agreed not to bullshit one another, and now here was Joe trying to make them feel better, feel safer. But hell, if Joe was to be a decoy, he should rest up. He and Brewer took turns on watch that night. The morning brought another question, whether or not to consume the last rations. They did so with little debate, for from here on there was no doubt that they would have to barter cigarettes for food or die trying to steal some.
Kamerad returned the next evening and wandered around with some apparent confusion till Joe whistled at him from a culvert. Kamerad seemed relieved and said he'd take Joe to a friend who had some food, then lit a candle to see that Joe had enough cigarettes to complete the deal. Suddenly he realized Joe wasn't alone; two other American faces had been illuminated by the candle. He stepped back and became very upset. Joe told him they'd be generous with cigarettes and leave as soon as they got a supply of food. Kamerad was still shaky, but he led them away from the yard, over twisted tracks and past bombed-out buildings. It was the kind of wet-cold night that makes a person shrink in the fog. In the distance there were lonely sirens and occasional probing searchlights.
“If this was the way the master race was living, I felt there wasn't too much to worry about winning the war. That was my twenty-one-year-old attitude when I thought we'd found the anti-Nazi underground.
“Blackout was seriously enforced. We had to feel our way into a four-room house with thick walls, then Kamerad lit a couple more candles. On a table was Brotchen, sausage gristle, and some weak beer. After months without alcohol, it put us on our heels.”
Kamerad left, saying he'd be back to collect the promised cigarettes. Quinn went to a window where he could watch anyone approaching the house. In the middle of the night Kamerad returned driving a wagon pulled by a very skinny horse. Joe told him where their boxcar was if he needed horse feed. The three climbed in and Kamerad draped a tarp over them. They took turns peeking out. The ride was slow, jarring, and took over an hour. They were crossing Berlin but never heard a voice or vehicle.
“FIFTY YEARS LATER I tried to locate the route, but nothing was familiar,” Joe relates. “What I wanted to find was where the wagon had taken us. It was a solidly built three-story house in a residential area. I suppose bombs got it after our visit. Good riddance.”
Kamerad left them in the basement. After a while an old woman came down the stairs with some black bread, cabbage, and a dark liquid she called coffee. She demanded that Joe confirm what she'd provided, then promised to be back for the cigarettes. They checked out the basement, looking for a way out if needed, but there was only one stairway and no windows. That made them so nervous they couldn't nap. In the evening three men came down the stairs, introduced themselves by their first names, and asked Joe to repeat the story he had told Kamerad. Upon examining the kriege dog tags, the Germans were convinced and said relax, they would help the escapees move west. Had anyone helped them so far? Only Kamerad, Joe replied. The three Germans looked at one another and nodded.
“In the next minute flashlights blinded us. Eight goons rushed down the stairs with guns we couldn't see. They didn't use them except as clubs because they wanted us alive. We struck back, slashed at them with shivs, and got in some good licks before we were knocked down and held down. The one I was fighting stank like nothing I'd ever smelled before. There were some awful odors in the stalags but nothing like his.
“If God created humans, he didn't have anything to do with the Gestapo,” Joe says. “Or the Japs, Stalin, Pol Pot, Osama— creatures from hell. They're here on earth, but the world wants to deny it or forget it. After tying us up they beat us till they were tired and we were nearly senseless. For young guys like us that took a while. All the time, the goon who spoke English was shouting, ‘Spies!’ Brewer had stuck one in the gut with a shiv. He kept bellowing Schlagen, schlagen!—beat us some more—then he'd moan and cry like he was the only one hurt. They helped him up the stairs like some wounded hero.
“By then we could only grunt when we felt the blows. The leader must have realized we were being beaten to death. He stopped it. The next thing I remember is being hauled up the stairs in my underwear.”
Joe's memory fades in and out here as it did after he'd been clubbed into his six-day coma, but reconstruction establishes that the escapees were loaded into two cars and driven deeper into Berlin, evidently to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Al-brecht Strasse.* He went to that address in 1992. It had been totally annihilated by bombs, but there's a gruesome sort of museum underground.
“The roof of the Gestapo building had bomb holes that went down three stories. We were pushed up a long flight of stairs. Looking back I can see how we were a pretty big deal for the goons, probably the only American infantry to be captured in Berlin. The goons were met by some officers in black uniforms who slapped them on the back. Did we go up or down from there? I can't remember, just cells with big locks that looked like tombs. Along the way the three of us were separated, each to a cell.”
IN DESCRIBING HIS PREVIOUS experiences, Joe's narration had been measured and deliberative, even when uneven. The Gestapo hours came out shatteringly different, like the exci-sion of a vital but cancerous organ. He was in inaccessible mental territory, dredging up a pain too deep to scar, a place he'd recoiled from revisiting, where his thoughts crossed a galactic space, expressed with a lag and voice change like that from a space capsule.
“I'm still lost in this part. I don't want to describe it because I refeel things. That's one of the things they did, dislocate my shoulders so when they stopped I'd refeel the pain just as bad when the bones went back into their sockets as when they came out….”
Fifty-five years later Joe finds detachment, merciful disconnection, in metaphor. One is a slow night shift on a production line. Gestapo headquarters was a factory in hard times but still turning out a necessary product. Once the production line had dominated and terrorized the world; now it was just a domestic industry. The old hands missed the glory days from not so long ago. They went at Joe with a vengeance, for he represented the vengeance of the world on Germany.
His doctors say Joe has a high pain tolerance, but if he'd known what was coming, he would rather have rolled under the wheels of the grain car and never regretted not being able to relate what happened in Berlin. The worst of it, as he sees it now, was not the agony at the time but what has been taken away forever, an element basic to being a man, a human.
“I'd resisted interrogation before, better than most. Under the Gestapo I was not being interrogated, just tortured, extremely tortured for the pleasure of the torturers. They kept accusing me of being a spy, parachuting from a B-17, but they knew that wasn't true because they had invented the story. They wanted a confession for their records but really couldn't have cared. After a while I didn't even shake my head.
“They used their boots, truncheons, whips, and things I won't remember. The physical senses are an electrical system. The goons knew from lots of practice how to extremely stress but not short it out. Pain built up, beyond where pain had ever gone.”
Analogies are vastly inadequate, missing the indescribable, indispensable elements. They resemble a theme taken by jazz performers for branches, variations, and sequels, forcing departure from physical sensations to mental constructs. Yet it was all sensations, thoroughly, previously tested in satanic evaluations. What they did sensitized and amplified every nerve in the full spectrum of agonies, repeating like an endless kaleidoscope, professionally modulated by expert torturers with unreachable mentalities. Joe was a subject for them, a laboratory animal. What he felt, he screamed.
“Sometimes I heard myself scream, other times I was sort of watching myself scream. Many times I was that scream.
“My mug shot from XII-A shows me glowering. They knew I was tough and stubborn. They were looking for a weakness, something like my shoulder wound. I was stripped so they could see how it was healing. They reopened the wound and probed around. And they had a favorite shoulder torture. They hung me up backwards, hoisted and dropped me till the shoulders dislocated. Releasing the ropes brought equal pain in reverse. The combination blacked me out for the first time.
“When that happened I heard other voices screaming like mine. Most were in German but also other languages. Whether it was my imagination or other cells I heard, it was a chorus begging, calling out to God. The walls absorbed it.
“From then on I must have been screaming in and out of consciousness. They were good at noticing that, bringing you up to passing out, then backing off a little to bring you up again. When I thought they could do no more they always found other ways. I saw them like looking through the wrong end of a telescope—they were shrunken heads from South America. They were in no hurry because what were hours for me were just minutes for them.
“I felt exactly what they were doing, felt it but at the same time watched. It was a terrible zone. That's the end point of terror. You don't get through it; you survive it or you don't, and if you do, you wish you hadn't. I was witnessing while having my body twisted and destroyed. It was burning and freezing at the same time. I was broken down into coals. I survived but was never made whole. And I was one of their luckiest prisoners.”
* Under the Geneva Conventions POWs were to remain in military uniforms throughout captivity (a provision violated most noticeably by North Vietnam). It was for their nation to supply new uniforms, through the IRC, when the original ones wore out. The United States did so readily, but impoverished nations like Albania had none to provide, so their prisoners got nothing.
* A source for this was a Nazi newspaper that trumpeted the capture of three “parachutist spies,” alleging that they had jumped like pathfinders to guide bombers onto targets in Berlin. The Gestapo's vigilance, of course, was praised.