Behind Hitler's Lines (35 page)

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.