Behind Hitler's Lines (48 page)

THE SAME STATUE OF SAINT JOSEPH, OVER A HUNDRED YEARS
old, is still where Joe found it on his first revisit to Poland in 1988. Only one of the twelve sisters from 1945 was still alive, but his story remained part of the convent's history, and he was welcomed like a living legend.

“I've given the convent some money because I owe them so much. The mother superior, who was also a nurse, spoke some English, heard my story, looked at my wounds, and assured me I'd receive care—and added that it was a small miracle I'd found the convent because it had the only medical skill in Warsaw that could help me. The miracle wasn't small at all. When I look back it was as large as any of the miracles that preserved me in World War II.”

The sisters praised God that Joe belonged to Saint Joseph parish in Muskegon, for it could have been only the hand of God that guided him to the convent of his patron saint and namesake. As a healing order they were swamped with people to care for in wasted Warsaw. Though the sisters were openly religious, the Soviet occupation hadn't bothered them at all, probably because the experiences of these women had been so horrific even in comparison with that of the Russians. The sisters didn't want to talk about it; they were still grieving, but perhaps an American could help tell the world about the wartime of Warsaw.

Most of all they wanted Joe to know how beautiful the city
had been before the Germans. The worst of the destruction occurred during the August-September 1944 uprising when guerrillas, called the Polish Home Army, seized strong points, holding them for two months against Wehrmacht forces stunned by their strength and determination. Many streets were still cut by antitank ditches they had dug. The sisters said the entire city had been aflame, with smoke hanging over it like a giant parachute canopy. Rains finally put out the fires.

The convent of course had been mobbed with casualties. The Germans might have spared it because their wounded even SS, were treated by the sisters—who were then raped by some of the patients when they recovered.

Warsaw was once home for a half million Poles. During the uprising Hitler sent in two panzer divisions and one SS division under General Bach, plus swarms of bombers. Most of the Polish dead were crushed by bombs in their cellars. Those who escaped did so through sewers. General Bach stopped this by throwing in poison-gas grenades. He was hanged as a war criminal. The sisters thought there were fewer than a hundred thousand inhabitants left in Warsaw. There appeared to be many fewer.

The Polish Home Army had been betrayed by Stalin, who stopped his advance on the east bank of the Vistula, as close as Arlington is to Washington, D.C. The uprising received no support except from British bombers who flew all the way from Italy to drop in supplies. The Americans offered a hundred B-17s, but Stalin refused to allow them to land on Soviet airstrips. That's what Roosevelt got in return for Sherman tanks delivered at great peril and price in lives by American merchant mariners. What Stalin wanted was for the Polish non-Communist resistance to be exterminated by the Hitlerites; he got what he wanted. When he decided it was time to take Warsaw (about six weeks before Joe arrived) it cost him fifty thousand casualties, but what did he care?

Yet the Poles Joe spoke with didn't hold a grudge against the Red Army, which was dutifully following Stalin's orders not to help the uprising. Major had said something about
waiting on the Vistula, and knowing her, Joe is sure, if ordered, she would have charged across to help anyone fighting the Hitlerites. In his presence Russian troops had never bitched about bad commanders—Stalin being the worst— some of whom were as incompetent as the World War I generals whose troops were slaughtered by the tens of thousands. Probably Joe's buddies in Major's battalion just didn't want to air their feelings in front of a foreigner—certainly not within earshot of the commissar—but Joe thinks they just felt that any commander who gave them the opportunity to kill Hitlerites was good enough.

The Red Army made amends to the Poles by paying back the Hitlerites in kind. Across from the convent was the shell of a burnt-out four-story building where dozens of bodies protruded from windows. SS prisoners had been herded and locked in. Fuel oil was poured till it saturated the roof, lit by flamethrowers. Joe was staring at this huge crematorium when an emaciated Pole sidled up. He had been some kind of scientist at one time, then an inmate of Auschwitz. In a cackly voice, he began to speak like a docent:

“Body fat turns liquid at high temperature, then the skeleton comes apart like a boiled chicken. They were writhing, you see, and that helped separate the bones.” Some had jumped and many had fallen as they burned. Their scorched limbs strewed the street like offal dumped from a slaughterhouse, but left there, for there was no odor from the scorched jumble of remains. “The skulls—look closely—they're all cracked. That was from the heat too. That plastic is then-brains. But no eyes. They all popped out. See those big smiles? High heat does that. Everyone in hell is grinning.”

Machine guns took care of anyone trying to get out. Thus the forces of Hitler and Stalin imitated each other. That had troubled the sisters, but they expresssed no sense of equivalence because it had been the Germans who had set the scales of immorality on the Eastern Front.

As soon as Mother Superior examined his wounds Joe was taken to the infirmary, a structure half above ground, half below. The lower half had been for protection against bombs
and shelling. There he was given a cot among many elderly Poles and a few children, all malnourished. There was no doctor, but a nursing sister treated everyone expertly, better than anything Joe had seen with the Russians. She didn't speak English, didn'tneedto, as she cleaned and packed Joe's groin and knee, manipulated his shoulders, salved his hand and even checked his head. It surprised him that she indicated the head wound was more serious than the groin; indeed, in the long run it was.

“After a few days of treatment another sister told me that I could now have a hot bath,” Joe recalls. “Oh, happy day! Upstairs was a big iron kettle heated by a scrap-wood fire. My dressings were waterproofed, and another patient helped me into a four-leg tub that had once been in a house. You can't imagine how warm and comfortable I felt after months of deep bitter cold. After a good wash I soaked till the water cooled. There was only burlap from sandbag casings to dry off with, but I was given clean underwear and my clothes. They'd not been washed, but the sisters must have done something to them because they smelled fresh.”

While Joe got better a number of old Polish men visited told him about their relatives in the States, and brought his ambitions up to date. The former American embassy was rubble; it had been for years. The American consulate in Lublin had been taken over by the Soviets, who set up a rump Communist government. It was not recognized by the United States, so if it was medical help Joe needed, he should stay here with the sisters.

He'd have gladly stayed until Americans eventually found him, but he felt he could only stabilize his health at the convent, not improve it. Joe was also aware of taking up space and resources that could be used by more needy patients. He talked this over with Mother Superior, who said, “Then you must rejoin the Russians. They have transportation from here to Moscow. There is surely a big American embassy there.”

“I'll be very sad to leave,” Joe told her.

“We will be glad, not to see you leave but because you will
go where you should and can regain what you have lost. We wish that for everyone who comes here.”

Joe says, “I promised to pray for her convent, she blessed me, and we parted in tears. Mother Superior died in the 1970s before I got back to Poland. She is surely in heaven because she'd done so much for people suffering in hell.”

The only sister still living when Joe returned forty years later was so old herself that she didn't remember much at all. He presented himself and told her his story. Yes, she recalled the story but looked Joe up and down and said she didn't recognize him. Nevertheless they enjoyed a long embrace. She felt as fragile as a bird in his arms.

IN
1945
THERE WAS
a big Soviet headquarters right across the frozen Vistula. Joe was driven there in a horse cart. All the permanent bridges had been destroyed, so the crossing was on Russian pontoons. The man who delivered him was old and gaunt; he worked at the convent for food. The sisters had provided Joe with black bread, jam, and some sawdust sausage; he gave it to the driver for his help. They embraced, Joe painfully got off the cart, and the driver clucked to his horse and turned back to Warsaw.

“I gave him my picnic but still had what was most valuable from the convent—the sisters' promise to pray for me each morning at mass. They'd done their part for my salvation, now it was up to me to complete the last leg of my journey from Normandy to freedom.”

The Soviet headquarters was in a medieval building with a courtyard. As Joe was in a combination Russian-American uniform the guard looked at him curiously and assumed he was a veteran of the Polish Home Army. There were very few of them left. Joe presented Zhukov's passport and was ushered right into the HQ. An English-speaking officer invited him to sit down and offered assistance. This was a logistical base, he said, and most of the activity was to push supplies up to the front. Joe told him he needed to get to Moscow as fast as possible for medical treatment. The officer asked to see his
wounds, then said the only transportation to Moscow was trains.

Any chance of a flight back there? Joe asked. The officer went off to some office to check. A Red air force major returned with him and informed Joe that the planes were not pressurized. That might not be good for a head wound. Joe hadn't thought of that. The two officers left and came back with a high-ranking doctor, who looked Joe over, heard his medical history, and seconded the advice against trying to fly to Moscow. The planes hopscotched all over, the air force officer added, and were often diverted in flight as higher priorities came up. There was no telling when it would get there. The consensus was, Better take the train. With luck he'd reach Moscow in two weeks.

“I figured out that meant the train would average about sixty miles per day. We'd almost
marched
that fast to Fort Benning! Two weeks in a rolling field hospital didn't sound like it would be good for my health, but what choice did I have? I just hoped there wouldn't be too much screaming and dying, the kind that drove me out of Landsberg, but I didn't want to offend the Russians by showing what I thought of their medical system. It would be insulting, as lightly wounded as I was, to object to riding with comrades who were worse off.

“I said it would be a privilege to be on a train with such men. The officers congratulated me, and we shook hands all around. They asked how I'd obtained the letter from Zhukov. Every Russian who looked at the letter asked me the same question.”

Joe was put on a train that night. It was worse than he'd feared. His car was for ambulatory patients, about sixty feet long with about seventy passengers, including officers up to captain and enlisted men of all ranks. The officers took more than their share of space, the choice space next to the two woodstoves. They took the seats and left the benches for the enlisted men. NCOs didn't have much status either.

“This surprised me because communism was supposed to make everyone equal. On an American train like that the worst wounded would get the choice space. That's what we'd
done on the forty-or-eight after the terrible strafing of the train to Stalag XII-A. The Russian military caste system was worse than the British. I've heard that was because it started with the Czarist army, when the officers were nobility, the soldiers serfs. But it carries over even today. When I attended a Russian veterans' reunion in 1992, almost all the members were former officers. Maybe the enlisted vets had then-own organization, or maybe not enough of them survived to form one.

“Looking back I see that the American Airborne was very democratic; very disciplined but also very democratic. That may have been because, though we were all volunteers for the Airborne, many of us had been drafted (or barely escaped the draft like me) from all walks of life, so just being an officer didn't mean everything.

“I remember a Bing Crosby song after the war, 'I've Got My Captain Working for Me Now.” That must have been a dream for many GIs, that a typical CO was nothing special, and under peacetime conditions he'd need something from GIs who no longer needed him. Can't argue with that, or agree with it either. The truth was a mix.

“Off-duty we'd sometimes socialize in the 506th (that is, drink) with officers, but that didn't lessen the respect for rank when everybody started training the next morning. In the 101st Airborne Division Association there is no officer-enlisted divide at all.”

Against his democratic principles Joe accepted special status as an ally and took a seat near a stove. All the officers wanted to hear his story and see the Zhukov letter. In return Joe asked if anyone knew Major. The answer was shrugs— there were so many women commanders toward the end of the war. In this way, his fellow passengers pointed out, the Red Army was more democratic than the American.

The train to Moscow made innumerable stops. The Russian rail gauge was wider than in the rest of Europe, so during the Germans' conquest of the USSR they had to tear up all the Russian track and replace it with their own. They did this of course with POW and slave labor. During the German retreat
the track was destroyed again. Most of Joe's stops were for track repair and replacement of the original gauge. That was now being done by German POWs from what he could tell.

Joe mentioned to an officer on the train that, uh, it didn't seem the Red Army was taking a lot of prisoners anymore. That's right, was the reply, because so many had been captured previously there were enough to work on the railroad— like the lucky ones Joe had seen in summer uniforms toiling in subzero cold. No more than one in ten POWs of the Russians ever got back to Germany, and that wasn't until the 1950s.