CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE CELL WAS ABOUT SIX FEET BY EIGHT, NO WINDOWS OR can, and it smelled like the last prisoner had died in there. Joe was shackled to the wall by a hasp, halfway between kneeling and standing, semiconscious and praying to die before they started in again. It was a prayer that reversed every value in his life, but he thinks God understood.
Overhead hung a grimy lightbulb that never went out; it reminded Joe of himself, weak and dim. At least once a day he was dragged upstairs, shackled in a chair, told to confess or be shot as a spy, then tortured till his screams became too hoarse to hear. The Germans doing this wore white shirts they managed to keep spotless despite spraying blood. Back in his cell, left without food or water, Joe would revive, hearing himself groan as if he were another person.
This went on for maybe four days. When he came to one time two men in Gestapo uniforms were bending over him. They gave him water and said they'd help do something for his dislocated shoulders.
“They picked me up. There was an almighty pain, then I passed out again. When I came to this time my arms were back in their sockets but the pain was out of control and I screamed and prayed out loud. They said in a couple of days it wouldn't hurt so much. I'm pretty sure they were Gestapo medics; their job was to keep me sane for the next session. They left me with scraps of black bread on the floor and a pan of water. I couldn't use my arms but crawled over and ate and drank just with my mouth.”
Joe was not hoping or praying anymore, just cowering and shaking, trying not to think of the next time the cell door opened. There was nothing in his stomach, but he'd vomit bile whenever a guard walked by to peek in on him as part of a routine suicide watch. Intermittently between torture, memories came back like some substitute for hope: good memories like family gatherings in Muskegon, baseball and basketball games he'd done well in, the camaraderie at Toc-coa and Camp Mackall, the good times with Bray and Van-derpool. It seemed Joe was reviewing his life, the best parts of it, in preparation to die. He was ready to go as if death would be his cherry jump and he was eager to get it over with; he would feel content if only he could die quickly.
In that state he was taken to a much bigger cell. It was like a hallucination. Quinn and Brewer, their faces the size of basketballs, were slumped in chairs, and a third one was for Joe. This was it, he was sure. They'd be given a last chance to confess, then, if lucky, get a bullet in the head. Okay, commence fire. He'd done his best, been true to his country, church, and family. He'd hold his head high when a Gestapo goon shot it. Joe had surrendered, surrendered everything, but only to God.
The hallucination continued. A Gestapo officer studied the three as he walked around smoking Joe's cigarettes while waiting for the goons who had originally captured them to arrive. Joe couldn't figure out why they needed to be present for the execution—German procedures and witness records, he supposed, or perhaps a mock trial.
The hallucination grew extreme when a German soldier stepped in, followed by a second, machine pistols across then-chests, and stood at attention beside the door. Through swollen eyes Joe glanced at his buddies, tried to smile, and mumbled that they rated a firing squad.
The Gestapo group stepped back, pretending to ignore the soldiers. Joe became fascinated by the contrast in uniforms— black for the Gestapo, gray-green for the Wehrmacht—and gaped when they ended a brief conversation and started to look daggers at each other. In the tense silence he could hear Brewer wheezing through a broken nose. It seemed to Joe that there could only be a disagreement about who would execute the execution. He was thinking about some last words to tell them in German.
“Something like I regret having just one life to give for my country,” Joe says. “A lot of Americans had already given theirs. I was ready to join their ranks on the other side of life.
“My German was pretty good in those days. Today I can't even order off a German menu. I understand the words, but they don't come out. But when you forced me back into that cell I understand what went on as if it had been in English.”
A Wehrmacht lieutenant colonel strode in. He exchanged formal heel clicks and Heil Hitlers with the Gestapo officer. There was an unresolved point of protocol about who ranked whom. That struck Joe as very funny, and he started heaving in his chair. He looked over at Quinn and Brewer, but they didn't have any idea what was going on.
Essentially the colonel, with due respect, requested that the three prisoners be turned over to his custody. Entschuldigung bitte aber nein, said Gestapo (“Excuse me, please, but no”): they're admitted paratroopers, and where they were caught their mission could only be assassination and sabotage— typical jobs of spies—so, with equal respect, in the name of Himmler, the Wehrmacht's request must be denied and the spies retained.
Regretfully there is a contradiction, the colonel replied— these Amis have been confirmed as stalag escapees, so they could not be recent parachutists.
A clever Allied ruse, was Gestapo's answer; from the International Red Cross the OSS knew there were three paratrooper POWs named Beyrle, Brewer, and Quinn. It would be a simple matter to have IDs forged for their impersonators. Furthermore, Beyrle didn't even have Ami dog tags, so he will be executed first.
Unlikely, said Wehrmacht. From the Berliners they contacted you know that the three asked for nothing except help to escape. Does this sound like spies, assassins, or saboteurs trying to accomplish their mission? This brought a sniff from Gestapo—who indicated that he understood these matters much better—and assurance that further questioning would confirm the three to be dangerous spies. The colonel was invited to attend their interrogation.
Entschuldigung, but so far your thorough interrogation has resulted in little more than gradual execution. These men wore American uniforms. (They were presently stripped to their underwear.) Even if they had parachuted over Berlin, they are protected by the Geneva Conventions like the Allied bomber crews.
It surprised and disappointed Gestapo that his counterpart was unfamiliar with Der Fuhrer's “Commando Order”—in effect since the Dieppe raid in 1942—which required immediate execution of behind-the-lines combatants like these three, no matter how they came to be behind the lines. If the colonel was reluctant to accept Heinrich Himmler's jurisdiction, there certainly could be no disagreement about Adolf Hitler's edict.
The lieutenant colonel looked at his watch, perhaps estimating what time remained between the daylight American bombings and the nighttime bombing by the British. Both, at this point in the war, were as certain as a chronometer.
Enough, he said; jurisdictional questions can be reexam-ined later. You have my personal assurance that these three will be available for further interrogation by the Gestapo when we hold them in maximum security. Here is my receipt for them. Please unshackle the prisoners from their chairs. The two Wehrmacht guards produced handcuffs so that the Gestapo irons could be left with their owners.
Hallucination now became a scene fantastic for its reality. The prisoners were his property, said Gestapo. The steam of shit, said Wehrmacht, then cooled off enough to promise that the three would never set foot outside a stalag again. Joe couldn't tell who had the upper hand. It went on like this:
GESTAPO: They're mine! You were not invited here. I must ask you to leave now.
WEHRMACHT: With pleasure, and with our prisoners. GESTAPO: You defy the highest authorities in the Fatherland! This will be reported.
WEHRMACHT: Show them my receipt… and transfer these three to me.
GESTAPO: What nerve. You say they're yours but admit you lost them! Such laxity. No one escapes from the Gestapo. [Indeed, kriege escapes became so frequent toward the end of the war that Hitler turned over jurisdiction of the stalags from the armed forces to Himmler, who ordered recaptured escapees to be summarily shot.] WEHRMACHT: With authority of the Abwehr I'm prepared to use force.
GESTAPO: Use it against the Bolshi! What soldiers are you who cannot defend the Fatherland's frontiers?
The lieutenant colonel was a veteran of fighting against the Bolshi (Bolsheviks), as the Russians were called, and limped from a serious wound they had inflicted. Gestapo's remark about defending the Fatherland incensed him. He unhol-stered a Luger. His guards brought their machine pistols to horizontal. The Gestapo goons were unarmed except for truncheons.
“Shoot 'em!” Joe yelled like a drunk. “Mal halten!” the colonel shouted back, and Joe shut up as Quinn glared at him through the puffed slits of his eyes, a silent message that there could be no worse time for Joe to display his Most Obvious Temper. Because the Wehrmacht had won. A goon came over and unshackled Joe from the chair, then a soldier cuffed his hands in back. He, Quinn, and Brewer were on their feet but so shaky they had to be helped into convict clothes. The Wehrmacht shoved them out the door as roughly as the Gestapo had shoved them in.
They were in a staff car, three Americans in back, the lieutenant colonel next to the driver, who drove slowly with just cat's-eyes blackout lights. The colonel was smoldering.
“I could tell he was pissed,” Joe recollects, “mostly at the Gestapo, but also at us for causing all this trouble. I thought it would be a good idea to approach him. He'd been our 'rescuer' and would probably have a lot to do with what happened to us.
“The only lieutenant colonel I'd ever addressed was Wolver-ton. I thought about him when I very respectfully asked, in German, from the backseat if he had been in combat. He turned and smiled and began talking a mile a minute, faster than I could understand, but yes, he'd seen plenty of action while invading Russia. He wanted to know about Normandy. I told him a little and how I'd been hit by friendly fire while a prisoner. He nodded and said he'd lost most of a shin near the town of Demyansk, and the foot was frostbitten in the winter of 1941-42.”
The colonel related that he was now commanding garrison troops in Berlin. Joe could tell he didn't think much of the job but that it sure beat fighting Russians in the snow for the third winter in a row.
“Where were you trying to go?” the colonel asked casually, “if you'd gotten out of Berlin?” The question caught Joe short, and he immediately felt compromised when he answered, “East.” The colonel nodded slowly as the staff car crept around bomb craters and rubble. “We soldiers must do what we must do.” Joe felt great respect for him, almost as great as his gratitude.
Somewhere in Berlin they arrived at a garrison headquarters. Here the three were not enemy celebrities the way they were with the Gestapo; instead they were a problem. The old question of categorizing paratroopers came up again, and initially Joe's destination was to be Luft Stalag III at Sagan, in kriege circles reputed to be a country club. Wherever he was to go, the Wehrmacht cleaned him up first, reviving the eradicated pleasure of just being alive.
There was a perfunctory interrogation. The three confessed that their escape had been from III-C (known in Berlin as Kustrin). For some reason the Wehrmacht knew they had escaped but not from where. Perhaps the III-C commandant had not reported it. Anyway, tough luck, Joe was informed his destination is changed—no Luft stalag—Kustrin was where they'd be returned. It was a long ride bound and blindfolded but in a way it was going home.
It had been a terrible attempt, though it had started so well. Luck and judgment had not been good, but the only thing in Joe's mind was that he was still alive.
“We'd survived the Gestapo,” he says. “As little as I knew about them then, I still realized that not many of their prisoners ever did survive. God had saved me in the strangest way. He'd never left me, even in Gestapo headquarters, so there was nowhere on earth outside His presence. I'd screamed for Him to take me. He hadn't because He knew better. That was like a personal assurance that God would forever watch over me, and watch what I did too.”
Rolling through the gate at III-C made them forget their gratitude. They sat in the staff car for a long time while the Berlin Wehrmacht officer chewed out the commandant, who immediately sentenced the three to thirty days in solitary confinement on bread and water. That was mild treatment compared with the Gestapo, but extreme cold had settled in Poland, likely to be fatal for anyone in their weak and broken condition, and the treatment could become worse if they were closely interrogated about the escape.
On the grain train they had decided, if captured, to deny anything about the escape committee, the middlemen in the bribe. Actually the three didn't know the name of the bought guard, so they couldn't identify him no matter what was done to them. That fact worried Joe a lot because their whole cover story revolved around an exclusively three-man escape. A skilled interrogator would immediately see that if there were only three, which of them bribed a guard?
Quinn, Brewer, and Joe were dumped in separate cells so they couldn't coordinate their stories, but spontaneously they came up with the same one: no one was bribed; they just took a chance in cutting the wire. Joe's interrogator didn't believe that but tossed him back in the cell. It was a cagelike box about five by six feet with straw on the floor and lice in the straw Cold lice that were glad to have a warm body to infest. The box was shaped so that a man could sit but not lie down or stand up. At night the temperature was below zero, so he had to keep moving or freeze. Joe's thrashing for warmth slowly subsided; he began to experience delirium and lose feeling in his extremities.
Concurrently the psychic impact of the Gestapo ordeal began to probe into his mind like deepening shadows, the forecast of imminent death. Logic confirmed it: he was dying, indeed should have already been dead. But he refused to let the Gestapo of Prinz Albrecht Strasse kill him after they had had their chance. Joe began a retreat to an internal place where they could not touch him, where he was inaccessible to their cruelty.
“There was a 'skylight' about the size of an envelope above my head,” Joe recounts. “There was so little sun it was hard to tell day from night except for the temperature. It didn't seem I could get through thirty days of this. The pain I'd gone through in Berlin had weakened me more than five Atlanta marches. It was like ice forming around a candle. It kept flickering. I saw how it melted wax and the ice would back up, but with more water the ice got thicker. I was watching all this in a dream that kept coming back, watching in a detached sort of way, the way I had watched the fight between the Gestapo and the Wehrmacht.
“God stayed with me. After serving half my sentence the cell door opened as it did for Paul in the Acts of the Apostles and a guard rousted me out. He pointed to a pan of warm water and told me to wash up. I stripped and was shivering but didn't mind as I rubbed off the grime and filth. He tossed me a set of underwear and a wool GI uniform with no markings. I was marched out of the punishment block, shoved into the old American compound, and that was that. I was assigned to a hut. Quinn and Brewer were already in other huts, acting as if nothing had happened.”
What had happened was a visit by the Red Cross, one of their semiannual inspections allowed by the Geneva Conventions. Records of the stalag bureaucracy revealed that the three were being punished in solitary for the offense of escaping. The Red Cross representative pointed out that escape was not a crime but rather a duty of POWs, citing chapter and verse from the Geneva Conventions. The commandant reluctantly conceded the point, so the three were released. The Red Cross visit had been postponed from October.
“If it had occurred then, we'd have had to complete our sentence. God stepped in once again. Whenever I'd called to Him like Job, He responded as if to say, 'Believe it!'
“Back in the compound, back in a hut, was a very strange experience. My countrymen treated me like a leper: they gave me extra care but also isolated me. Word came down from Coleman to discuss the escape with no one. I received special rations from the PX, but a kriege would accompany me whenever I left the hut. It was like a quarantine. I could understand why the escape committee had to be protected. I was no longer on that committee and not allowed to talk with them at first. I had trouble understanding why because we should be debriefed for information that could help future escapes.”
From his new hut mates Joe learned why the virgin escape from III-C had been resented in some quarters. The morning after there had been a lockdown of the American compound. No one could leave his hut except for the latrine, roll call, and to pick up meals. The three were gone about two weeks, and the lockdown had continued till recapture. Some krieges fumed at how Joe had changed their lives for the worse. In a way he understood why. They'd had no vote on the committees that had approved and supported the escape plan, which resulted in collective punishment. True enough, Joe concedes, but then tries to remember a saying attributed to Colonel Ewell of the 101 st: Though the U.S. Army is that of a democracy, the army itself is not a democracy.
“What I really couldn't understand was Quinn's and Brewer's attitude. They kept very much to themselves and away from me. They'd been assigned to different huts. Maybe I had something to do with our separation. I'd been the only one of us who'd had his shoulders dislocated. American medics came around to put hot compresses on them and gave me some ointment, which helped relieve the pain and swelling. Maybe Quinn and Brewer had not suffered quite as much from the Gestapo. Maybe they'd told more than I did. I never asked them and never knew. It wasn't something to talk about, even with your wife after the war.”
Maybe they were told how Schultz came around and took Joe aside. He put an arm around his shoulder—Joe winced because it was still filled with pain—and counseled him like a father: “Joseph, be a good boy now. The war will be over soon, and you can go home to your family.”
Slowly recriminations and suspicions faded as stalag life returned to normal and the three were debriefed about the escape. They were not much help in describing the surrounding area because it had been late evening when they got away, and a lot of memory had been erased by torture.
“III-C began to improve as RC parcels came in every other week. I was paired with a mucker, Johnson, the kriege who had safeguarded the cache of cigarettes I'd left behind. My 'will' was that if I didn't return, he was to get half and the other half go to the escape committee for however they wanted to use it. Their honesty was guaranteed because none of them smoked! Cigarettes kill people these days, but back then they saved a lot of lives.
“I was having nightmares when hut mates had to grab me in my bunk, but I felt much better as Thanksgiving approached. Only Americans celebrate it, but Coleman convinced the commandant that it would be good for everyone if this was allowed to be a special day. We krieges had little to be thankful for, the Germans less, and the Russians least of all, but we all had our hopes, and hopes are helped along by gratitude.”
There were some kriege artists who did pictures of turkeys and Pilgrims. Schultz granted an advance IRC allowance of evaporated milk, canned corn, and corned beef. “Before you take this be aware that you'll have less food for Christmas,” he told Coleman.
Those ingredients went into a kettle, where they were stirred seasoned with mustard, and steeped. The soup-stew that came out was the best-flavored food Joe had tasted since capture. He was much more thankful than in England a year before when the Screaming Eagles had plump turkey, cranberry, stuffing, and all the trimmings.
Between Thanksgiving and Christmas kriege morale was up, the Germans' down. There was now a clandestine crystal set in the American compound, tuned to the BBC. Coleman sent around couriers, like confidential town criers, who memorized the news and delivered it to every hut. The news was all good. The Russians were coming on like an avalanche, and the Allies had breached the Siegfried Line in some places. Nothing but the Rhine and the Oder looked like major obstacles from here on out. Krieges started talking about a stalag reunion at Times Square this time next year.
Joe's morale improved with his recovering health but had setbacks whenever he saw cords of freeze-dried corpses carried out of the Russian compound. With the spring thaw they'd become the reason for the wavy earth pointed out by the Polish farmer in 1992.
“Dear God, how can we give thanks when there is mass murder going on right across the fence? What if they're Communists, not Christians—what does that matter? They're humans, God's children. Having gone through some suffering like theirs, I felt close to them. Hardly anyone else did though when we got extra of anything there was a way to get it over the fence and we shared it with the Russians. But to us they were a different species, people to be pitied but not too much because to relate to them was hard on the emotions. We wanted to preserve our emotions like a stash of cigarettes. The easiest way was to make the Russians separate, almost the way the krauts did.”
Christmas was coming along, and everyone looked forward to it, something like the old-time feast days in England. Krieges knew they'd hardly feast, but Christmas was something they had in common with the Germans.
To general surprise the Germans became arrogant and turned up their noses. The commandant, with Schultz nodding beside him, reminded Coleman that Thanksgiving had been the Americans' luxury so there would be nothing extra for Christmas. The clandestine crystal set soon explained the change of German attitude. It was Hitler's surprise offensive, the kickoff of the Battle of the Bulge.
“Suddenly there were truckloads of new POWs coming in. They went to the 'new' American compound. Remember it was only Normandy POWs in the 'old' compound of III-C. Every American who came in after that went to the 'new' Physically the compounds were the same. The krauts were smart to separate us. We could have given the new guys some confidence and tips on how to survive and endure.”
Joe was shocked at how the new POWs looked, and he didn't shock easily. They were young but not strong, battle-rattled and forlorn, blitzed. Immediately Coleman worked to establish contact with them, identify their key people, bring them on board. Schultz was alert to this effort and doubled the guard to prevent it, but before long messages were exchanged with the new guys. When trucks unloaded new POWs, Joe went to the fence looking for 101st patches. There were few, and no faces he recognized.
“The cold in the Ardennes actually helped us in Poland. Piles of winter gear came in with the new POWs. Schultz liked us old guys. I was able to add a layer of wool shirts and pants and make a thick pair of mittens and a warm stocking cap. Actually a kriege who had been a tailor made them in exchange for my last stock of cigarettes.
“Johnson, my mucker, provided the packs for that trade. My pre-escape 'will' turned over half my stash to him and he had rights to keep it, but he didn't. He is another face, another of God's children I should but can't remember to the point of regaining contact with him. I'm too old now. Too much life has happened since then. This is my thanks and tribute to him.”
Initial German success in the Bulge changed something in Joe's outlook. The krauts were crowing. Their propaganda was saying that the Allies would break up. The BBC was saying that Montgomery would have things under control, but the krieges weren't believing it, not after Market-Garden.
With things going badly in the west, the Western prisoners— so the rumor went—would reverse status with the Russian POWs, whose army was still coming on hard from the east. When there's not much information, people in confinement can believe speculation like that. What they knew was that no status could be worse than that of Russian POWs.
“So Christmas was a big deflation for us, a big inflation for the krauts. The fest food didn't taste nearly as good as at Thanksgiving. Over at stalag headquarters we could hear German drinking songs. Around midnight they ended with ‘Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht.’ It's like Beethoven. How could a German have written such music?
“It was the day after Christmas, and all through the huts only the rats were stirring, but so was I. Over at the fence I saw Quinn. I looked around for krauts. Couldn't see any except in the guard towers, so I went over to him. We had to be careful because if any of the three escapees were seen together, Schultz would investigate. He had some good human qualities, but he also had a job, which was to prevent escapes, especially after ours.”
Joe and Quinn acted like tourists who didn't know each other, watching Niagara Falls. Ten yards apart and looking in different directions, they talked out the sides of their mouths. Quinn didn't like to look at the Russian compound, so they reversed views. How's Brewer? Joe asked.
Getting along. He wants out.
So do I.
The Bulge had affected all three of them. They decided to investigate possibilities.
“That was how our second plan was hatched. We knew it would be unsupported because the escape committee couldn't take another chance with us, but what we came up with did require the help of other krieges. Just thinking about escape again made us feel better about ourselves—sort of like a rodeo rider who has to get right back on a horse after he's bucked off. What we'd learned was that if this time we failed, we also died. The first thing we bartered for was small sharp shivs. We wouldn't be taken alive and tortured again. Knowing that calmed us. We were much less nervous planning our second escape than we were before the first.
“We started off by approaching a few krieges we trusted offered them cigarette rewards for cooperation but were turned down. Only one of them told me that if we were crazy enough to try again, he 'd help just so we would hurry up and get away or get killed and stop upsetting stalag life! I thanked him because we'd need whatever help we could get for any reason.”
Fights between krieges broke out now and then, not big fights, just a few fisticuffs between men irritated over little things that in other settings wouldn't have mattered. Such fights didn't bother the Germans much; in fact they would watch for a while—it was something to relieve monotony— before breaking them up. A fairly big fight was needed for Joe's plan, something significant enough to get the fighters punished. It took a while to identify a kriege who would take that risk. Worse than that, if the fight turned out to be a distraction for an escape, the punishment would be much worse, surely a month in solitary.
“Luckily there was one guy, the one who wanted us gone, who'd take that risk after we explained what might happen. His nickname was Weasel, not a very popular animal and not a very popular guy either. The more Weasel thought about our plan, the more he liked it because there were a couple of guys he hated who always went around together. They were a pair of bullies, and Weasel was their favorite target. He was willing to get in a fight with them, even though he'd get beat up, so long as they were also punished by the krauts.”
Weasel's cooperation was the best aspect of the plan; however, Brewer was afraid that a staged fight would make the Germans suspicious, that they'd sense something was fishy. No, Joe argued. Just talk with Weasel and you'll know that this will be a very authentic fight. To reassure Brewer, Quinn made Weasel a blackjack for which he was grateful even though using a weapon in the fight would probably mean harsher punishment.
“From my sketch of III-C you can see there was a fence between the exercise area of the old American compound and the Germans' administrative complex, which included the infirmary. After the Red Cross visit that saved us, the guards kept a stretcher at the gate in that fence; maybe the Geneva Conventions called for something like ‘immediate first aid must be available.’ Anyway, that stretcher was a key to our plan.”
The other key was a farmer's wagon that serviced the German mess hall every afternoon around the time krieges were walking laps and milling around the exercise area. On Tuesday and Friday the wagon came into the outside gate with three huge barrels full of cabbage, turnips, or beets. Brewer had observed that when the wagon departed the barrels tipped a little, showing they were empty. Whether or not they were empty made every difference for the go-or-no-go decision. They had to be empty or nearly so because one of the three would be in each barrel.
“It was on a Tuesday in January 1945 that we put it to the touch again. Quinn, Brewer, and I were the foolhardy boys. We were relying on Schultz, not on his cooperation but on the reactions we expected from him. He was a humane man in an inhumane army. If we escaped, he'd catch hell. His army had created hell on earth, so it was no problem for us to see him go to hell. He had his job, we had ours.
“This is what happened. Brewer, who usually walked around the exercise area, started jogging. He sounded gung-ho, upbeat, so people would notice how he was putting out. Then he staggered and clutched his chest. Quinn and I ran over to him. Quinn had been watching where Schultz was and then yelled for the stretcher. Schultz took notice and ordered the guards to open the first gate so we could carry Brewer to the infirmary. Quinn and I ran over, grabbed the stretcher, and rolled Brewer onto it. The main infirmary was on the German side of the interior fence. The guards let us through the gate, and we headed right for the infirmary. Between there and the exterior fence we dumped Brewer out and the three of us hid in a crawl space. Just then, just as we'd asked, Weasel started a fight. This turned Schultz's attention from the medical emergency to the brawl that was the biggest one ever in III-C. We couldn't see it but we heard it, and it was more than we'd hoped. This was in late afternoon, it was nearly dark, and the guards in the towers were focused on the ruckus in the compound. Timing of everything could not have been better.”
And indeed the wagon was where they'd hoped, with nothing on it except the three barrels—and they were empty. Just before the wagon rolled away they scrambled into them. Many tense minutes waiting to clear the stalag. The horse started up. Joe heard the driver—who had been a big question mark in the plan—cluck to the horse. Fortunately he had been away watching the fight and they were able to slip into the barrels without his noticing. Joe's barrel had carried beets. There was something about the dark red stains on the wood that made him think some blood would spill. The wagon was also moving faster than it had during previous weeks. The driver evidently wanted to get away from the guard towers that might open fire at the brawl.
Leaving III-C on the stone road, the wagon went down a small incline and also made a right turn. At top speed the left front wheel hit a pretty big stone. Joe felt the jar, then his barrel started to rock. He crouched down lower to stabilize it, but it tipped. The driver reined in. The barrels went over and crashed into a ditch. The three spilled out. The driver saw them and yelled. Bullets started cracking from the gate watchtower.
They were up, running zigzag into scrub pines. The rifle fire was joined by a machine gun. Bullets struck Brewer on Joe's left, Quinn on his right. The sound was like a hard slap. They'd agreed beforehand that if anyone was hit, the others shouldn't stop to help. So Joe ran on. He had a feeling that they would survive their wounds and be treated back at the stalag. Joe was anaerobic and couldn't think any more about them except that if he got away, it would be escaping for them as well as himself—the way he'd thought about Bray and Vanderpool when learning they'd been killed.
The next few hours were the most intense of his life, as adrenaline fueled his flight, and mind and muscle worked together as never before. There was a goal ahead. What exactly it would be, how far or how hard, didn't matter for now, but it was out there, up to Joe alone to reach, and within his reach.
Dogs had been the main concern for this phase of the escape plan. They were soon on his trail, big ones like Heinz. He heard them. They barked and snarled and yowled when they came upon Quinn and Brewer.
“My high school training as a miler came in handy here,” Joe recollects. “While the dogs were making the most noise I gained some distance, maybe a quarter mile.
“What I wanted to find was a stream, and I did. It had a sheet of thin ice with fast water underneath. Big question. Break the ice and get my feet soaked and freezing, or cross the stream on rocks? Throwing off the scent was more important, so I stumbled down the stream for a good ways before jumping off to the side into a smaller stream, which after a hundred yards I left for solid ground.
“I could no longer hear dogs or see lights behind me. My feet were numb. I knew they were the most important part of my body at this point, so I took off the brogans, dried them as best I could, and massaged my feet off and on for the rest of the night. The experience in solitary was valuable that night. I had a good sense of what my body had gone through so far and what needed to be done to keep it going. Fuel, food was most important if I didn't already have frostbite. I had no idea where I'd find food.”
What he found in the next few days was almost as good— barns with grain for fuel and hay for some warmth. Joe holed up in hay with at least a foot of it over his face for concealment.
He was in Poland, but the part that had been repopulated by Germans. There was sure to be a local alert for an escaped prisoner, so he never went near the scattered farmhouses. During that week Joe probably covered no more than thirty miles. Then he started to hear artillery fire, big thundering volleys way to the east.
“For me it sounded like a welcome from God.”
HATRED
See how efficient it is,
how it keeps itself in shape—
our century's hatreds.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.
It is not like other feelings.
At once both older and younger.
It gives birth itself to the reasons
that give it life.
When it sleeps, it's never eternal rest.
And sleeplessness won't sap its strength; it feeds it.
Gifted, diligent, hard-working.
Need we mention all the songs it has composed?
All the pages it has added to our history books?
All the human carpets it has spread
over countless city squares and football fields?
Let's face it:
Hatred knows how to make beauty.
The splendid fire-glow in midnight skies.
Magnificent bursting bombs in rosy dawns.
You can't deny the inspiring pathos of ruins
and a certain bawdy humor to be found
in the sturdy column jutting from their midst.
Hatred is a master of contrast—
between explosions and dead quiet,
red blood and white snow.
Above all, it never tires
of its leitmotif—the impeccable executioner
towering over its soiled victim.
It's always ready for new challenges. If it has to wait awhile, it will.
They say it's blind?
It has a sniper's keen sight
and gazes unflinchingly at the future
as only it can. WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA