The Boy Who Went to War (19 page)

The ship sailed through the night, docking in Southampton at the break of dawn on the following day. Wolfram and the other prisoners were escorted off the ferry in the early-morning sunlight and led down on to the quayside at exactly the moment when the English harbour staff were heading to work. All reacted similarly to the newly arrived Germans, turning their heads to stare, but no one said a word. It was so different from what the men had experienced in France, where villagers had shouted abuse and thrown stones.

Their guards on land were a different matter, however. On board the ship they had been civil and courteous, but here in Southampton they were overtly hostile, screaming at the men, calling them pigs and insulting them in German.

They were almost certainly Jewish immigrants who had fled their homes in the wake of Nazi persecution. Having been given refuge in Britain, they now vented their rage on the German captives in their charge.

The prisoners were ordered to strip naked and their clothes were taken to a special oven to be heated to a temperature that would kill all the lice and fleas, while the men were led to a shower block where they could at last wash away weeks of sweat and grime.

First, they were told to put all their personal belongings into a little bag with their name and number on it. An officer told them to report anything that went missing while they were in the showers.

A few of the men, discovering that items had indeed been rifled, duly reported it but soon realised their mistake. The guards were furious, yelling at them: ‘How dare you – how dare you complain?'

The prisoners were completely bewildered by this. Why had they been told to report missing items if they were just going to be abused?

After two nights camped out on the Southampton quay-side, the men were told to gather their belongings and prepare themselves for a long train ride. They were to travel at night so they would have no idea where they were going.

The journey seemed to take a lifetime, for the train kept shuddering to a halt in the darkness. Wolfram slept fitfully, even though he was exhausted. When dawn broke and the train started moving again, the men were told to close the curtains and not to look out.

After few more uncomfortable hours they finally arrived at their destination: a prisoner-of-war camp at Driffield, near Hull, on the north-east coast of England. It was a makeshift establishment, a tented encampment laid out in a field. With eight men to each circular tent, it was so crowded that they had to sleep with their feet pointing into the middle. When it rained, the tent leaked.

Wolfram was constantly hungry for the canteen staff never produced enough food, but one unexpected treat came in the form of real coffee. None of the men had drunk it for years; Wolfram had last tasted it in Nikolaiev, in November 1942. Now, there was an unlimited quantity and they drank so much that they all got stomach ache.

The worst element of life at Driffield was the constant boredom. There was absolutely nothing to do. One of the men brought out a deck of playing cards but that amusement soon wore off. Wolfram had a little pocket knife and started to carve chess figures out of lumps of chalk. He had only enough time to make three pawns before it was announced that they were once again on the move.

This time, their destination was infinitely more exciting. They were being taken to New York.

 

Pforzheim had undergone many changes in the three months since the Allied landings in Normandy. The summer vacation had been become permanent as schools and universities across Germany were closed.

The teachers were sent to work in factories producing weapons, where children were also given jobs. In the Rodi family, fourteen-year-old Frithjof and his two older sisters were required to go to work each morning, Frithjof to make clockwork pins for anti-aircraft grenades. When the clock started ticking, it was fired skywards into a convoy of planes and would then explode, sending fragments of metal everywhere.

Anyone who was too old to be conscripted into the army had to serve in the munitions factories. At the same time that Wolfram was being transported to Driffield prisoner-of-war camp, his father, Erwin, was told to report for duty in a weapons factory in Pforzheim. He was not there for long. As summer gave way to autumn, he was drafted into the Volksturm or Home Guard and posted to Alsace, where he was placed with a small group of men his age whose job was to construct defences on the frontiers of the Reich.

Each morning, Erwin and his comrades were woken at dawn and handed pickaxes and spades. For the next ten hours, they were required to dig deep trenches and construct earthen embankments high enough to stop a tank. It was tough physical labour for old men and quickly took its toll. Erwin had never been physically strong, even when young. Now, aged fifty-seven, he was in poor shape. After a few weeks of back-breaking work and very little food, he was close to collapse.

It was extremely fortunate that the head of the Eutingen Volksturm group happened to be Max Weber, a friend and close neighbour. Aware of the debilitating effect that such hard exertion was having on Erwin, Herr Weber wrote a special letter, permitting him leave of absence.

Erwin arrived back in Eutingen to find Marie Charlotte struggling to find enough food to feed herself and her daughter, let alone the various house guests. As time went on, meat, dairy products and vegetables had become more and more scarce; now, total war was constantly disrupting supplies from farms to markets.

The shortages affected families in Eutingen, Pforzheim and every other town in the area. In the Rodi household, one of the daughters, Gisela, was put in charge of food. The family nicknamed her their Minister for Foreign Affairs. She would regularly head into town and try to stock up on essentials like flour and cereals, which would be placed in a huge wooden cupboard that the family called the
mehltruhe
or flour trunk. Even so, the Rodis, like the Aïcheles, could not have survived without the fruit and vegetables they grew in their garden.

The family's eldest son, Peter Rodi, was two years younger than Wolfram and had so far escaped being drafted into the army. Now, however, after a brief stint in Poland, he was conscripted into the infantry and sent to Montbéliard, in eastern France, where resistance fighters were proving a new and menacing threat to national security. Many of these fighters had joined the French Forces of the Interior, formed in the aftermath to the Normandy landings. They would turn out to be an effective fighting force, despite their poor discipline, and the German army in France would come under increasing attack in the autumn of 1944.

In the weeks that followed Peter's departure, the family received no news as to his whereabouts. His mother used to tune in to the BBC every day to get the latest information on the fighting. The news was always announced by a loud and distinctive
bumb-bumb-bumb-bumb
sound. Whenever people heard that noise, they instantly knew that someone was listening illegally to the BBC.

One morning, a few weeks after Peter had left home, two men from the local Nazi Party turned up unannounced at the Rodis' house. The family had by now become so accustomed to listening to the BBC that they had forgotten that it was punishable by several weeks of harsh treatment in Dachau.

Martha Luise had left the radio on by mistake and, as the Nazi officials stood in the hallway, there suddenly came a loud
bumb-bumb-bumb-bumb
. It was the BBC news.

Fortunately the men passed no comment and, equally, Martha Luise managed to keep her cool. Calmly turning to her daughter, she asked her to switch off the radio.

She found it rather more difficult to keep her composure on discovering the reason for their visit. Peter, the officials told her, had been involved in a shoot-out and was missing in action. It was unclear whether he was dead or had been taken prisoner.

Many months were to pass before the family heard that Peter had been captured and was being held by the French. It was even longer before they learned the details. The moment of his surrender, heavily outnumbered and outgunned, had been extremely tense. His captors had lined him up against a wall with two others and pulled out their guns. Peter was convinced that they were about to be executed.

The three Germans stood in abject fear as the French soldiers joked among themselves and played with their pistols. Then, unexpectedly, the Frenchmen started to laugh. The mock execution had been nothing more than a little joke. Satisfied that they had made their three captives sweat, they put away their guns and led them off to a barn where many other men were being held prisoner.

They were eventually transported to the citadel in Besançon. For fully eight days they had nothing to eat. With just one tap for water, there was always a massive queue of men made desperate by thirst. On the ninth day of their captivity, they were given bread and a cauldron of watery soup.

Peter and his fellow men were first transferred to Camp de Thol, a prisoner-of-war camp close to the town of Pont d'Ain, then, shortly afterwards, moved once again, this time to Genissiat, just a few miles from the Swiss border. Here, they were to work as labourers on the construction of a new hydroelectric dam across the Rhône.

Although the barracks were marginally better than in Camp de Thol, with at least beds to sleep on, there was never enough food for young lads doing hard physical labour and they were famished from dawn until dusk. Meals consisted of
pois de champs
– hard, brown peas. If the men had chewed them, they might have got a little nourishment, but being ravenously hungry they wolfed them down in a matter of seconds. An hour later, the peas came out exactly in the same state as they had gone in.

The French had suffered four long years of occupation and saw no reason to treat their German prisoners anything other than harshly. The lads worked for at least eight hours a day, shovelling sand and mixing cement. It was back-breaking work, especially on such a meagre diet. There were few rest breaks and the guards overseeing them would beat anyone they felt to be slacking. On one occasion, Peter was so exhausted that he could no longer summon the energy to lift his shovel. He pretended to faint in order to give himself a few minutes' respite. When the guard realised that he was faking, he hit him.

The chill mountain air, hard labour and wretched gruel quickly took their toll. One morning, Peter noticed that ulcers had started developing on his feet and arms. Soon after, his legs began swelling from hunger oedema, a swelling that then spread to his face. It was not long before he was in terrible shape; he was beginning to waste away from a lack of protein.

The non-existent hygiene also contributed to the miserable state of these weary and hungry men. Because they were unable to wash, their skin erupted into livid rashes and sores. Each morning, when they had to walk up a hill to their workplace, all the French girls would hold their noses against the stench of their unwashed bodies.

After a further week of hard labour, Peter was declared unfit to work. His oedema had worsened to such an extent that he was no longer able to pick up a shovel. He was taken back to the camp in Pont d'Ain and sent to the camp infirmary. It was where people went to die: the entire place stank of death.

There were thirty prisoners in the infirmary; each night one or two of them would expire. Peter knew when someone in the neighbouring bunk had died because the lice would leave the corpse as soon as the warmth had gone from it and make their new home on his body.

The inmates were left unattended for most of the time. A prison guard usually appeared twice a day – once to deliver a saucepan of inedible slops and once to take out the toilet pail. It was not long before Peter was little more than a skeleton. He weighed less than fifty kilograms, despite being well over six feet, and much of that weight was from water retention. As he lay there in the darkness, surrounded by groaning and dying men, he told himself that he had less than two weeks to live.

Wolfram and his comrades were transferred by train to Liverpool in the second week of August 1944, then escorted to the city docks, where a large troopship lay at anchor. This was to be their floating prisoner-of-war camp for the next fortnight as they were transported across the Atlantic.

For the first few days of the voyage the men were allowed out on deck for only half an hour at a time, but this rule was relaxed once they were at sea. The American officers assembled the men outside each morning and asked for volunteers to work on the ship. The outer hull was covered in rust, which needed scraping off. As an incentive, volunteers were promised extra rations of food.

Wolfram offered his services immediately, infinitely preferring to be out of doors, in the fresh sea air, to being confined below decks. He was roped to the side of the vessel with scraper and brush in hand, and spent hours in the late-summer sunshine, watching the frothing breakers beneath his feet.

After almost two weeks at sea, the men were once again confined to their cabins; they realised they must be nearing their destination. All were excited about the prospect of landing in America. It was as if a whole new adventure was about to begin.

One evening, an excited cry went up. Some of the men had managed to prise off the cover of one of the ship's portholes and could see that they were at long last approaching land.

In Wolfram's corridor there was a flurry of activity as everyone dashed to the porthole. Naturally, they all formed an orderly queue so that everyone could have his turn.

The sight that greeted Wolfram's eyes was breathtaking. The entire skyline of Manhattan was lit up – a sparkling, twinkling panorama of skyscrapers and lights. It was incredible to behold. The blackout had been a fact of life for so many years in Europe that everyone had forgotten what it was like to see lights at night.

As the vessel boomed its way into the harbour and prepared to dock, the men were assembled on deck and given standard landing forms that were normally intended for civilians. Wolfram found the questions on the form extremely strange, with things like: ‘What would you like to do in America?' The other men were no less perplexed, having all assumed they would be enforced labourers.

The prisoners were told that an officer would shortly be arriving to debrief them and they awaited his arrival with growing impatience, excited at the prospect of meeting their first genuine New Yorker. There was by now a real sense of anticipation; everyone felt as if he had arrived in an exotic new land. It suddenly seemed as if anything was possible.

Five minutes passed, and then ten – and then, at long last, a whisper began spreading through the ranks. The officer had arrived, wearing an immaculate military uniform that had been carefully starched and pressed. The prisoners had not seen anyone looking so spick and span for many months. You could hear a pin drop in the silence as he walked across the deck. Everyone was waiting to hear him speak.

The officer tapped his cane and prepared to address the men. The prisoners craned forward to catch his opening words. All were expecting a cool New Yorker speaking with an American drawl.

No drawl was forthcoming; he did not even address them in German. ‘
Jetzt heered emal alle här,
' he said in a Swabish dialect so thick that most of the men could not understand a word. ‘
An schreibed uuf alles en grosbuchschdaben.
' (Now all pay attention, you need to write everything in capitals.)

As he spoke, the assembled prisoners burst out laughing, some to the point where they had tears streaming down their faces. ‘Speak English,' they shouted. ‘At least we'll be able to understand you!'

For the few Swabian prisoners, it felt like a homecoming. Wolfram was trying to work out from his dialect exactly which town the officer was from. Eventually, someone said: ‘Günsburg, it's definitely Günsburg.' Then everyone started whispering this information to his neighbour:
Günsburg, Günsburg, Günsberg
.

When the laughter finally died down, the officer was able to explain what was about to happen. The men were going to be transported to Texas but first they would have to walk across New York to get to the station. He said that on no account were they to accept the sweets and cigarettes that people were sure to offer them.

The men were completely baffled. Why would anyone want to give them gifts? Only later did they learn that New York had a large German population who would turn out in force to greet prisoners whenever they disembarked. They felt sorry for their fellow countrymen, aware that many of them were conscripts with no enthusiasm for Hitler's war.

The number of German prisoners being shipped to America had been small in the first few weeks that followed the Normandy landings, but it increased dramatically in the months that followed. By the end of August, when Wolfram arrived in New York, more than 30,000 were disembarking each month. This huge influx led to a rapid expansion of camps right across the country – in Ohio, Texas and California, as well as many other states. The number of Axis prisoners on American soil would eventually top 420,000, the vast majority of them being German.

The friendly reception given these prisoners was Wolfram's first surprise. His second was the train in which they were to travel. Seven weeks earlier, in Normandy, he had picked up a propaganda leaflet with the unlikely claim that soldiers would travel in Pullman carriages if ever they were prisoners in America.

Now, he discovered that this was indeed true. He and his fellow prisoners could not believe their eyes when they saw the train. There were four plush seats in each compartment but only three prisoners. When they asked why the fourth place was kept empty, they were told it was so that they would not be too crowded.

The food, the endless resources of America and the sense of abundance left a profound impression on men who had suffered from years of rationing and hardship. When they were served their first meal on board the train, the American guards distributed brand-new paper plates and cups. As soon as the prisoners finished eating, they tried to wipe the plates clean to use them again for the next meal.

The Americans stared at them in bewilderment and asked them why on earth they wanted to reuse the plates. ‘They belong in the trash,' they said. ‘You need to throw them away.'

Wolfram and his friends expressed their surprise at such waste, only to be given a lecture on the American economy. ‘Plate manufacturers also have to make a living,' said the officers in charge of them. ‘If you reuse the plates, they won't need to make new ones and then they won't have a job.' The prisoners were amazed. It was their first contact with an entirely different way of thinking.

The three-day train journey took them on a meandering, 1,800-mile trek through seven states. Wolfram's previous long train journey, two years earlier, had traversed the monochrome snowscape of the Ukraine and Belarus. Here in America, the wooded glades of Pennsylvania and West Virginia glowed with the luminous reds and golden yellows of late summer.

After a fortnight spent at a holding camp – Camp Maxey in Texas – they were on the move again, this time to Oklahoma, in the heart of the Great Plains. As Wolfram stared out of the window for hour after hour, he was struck by the vastness of the canvas, as well as its emptiness. The train rattled along through terrain without any sign of human habitation, save for the occasional ranch that was lost in the middle of nowhere.

At last, one afternoon, a large settlement appeared in the distance, with buildings, shacks and prefabricated barracks. The men had finally arrived at Camp Gruber, a vast military training compound with a prisoner-of-war camp attached – one of thirty in the state of Oklahoma.

The camp sprawled over 60,000 acres and provided training for infantry, field artillery and tank units. When Wolfram arrived, the 42nd Infantry Division, known as the ‘Rainbow', was in the middle of training for combat. Within months it would be fighting inside the frontiers of the Third Reich, liberating Dachau and setting free its 30,000 inmates.

Camp Gruber was far more comfortable than anything that the men had previously experienced. Although there were forty-five men in each dormitory, everyone had solid beds and there was a gas heating range, which they could light if they felt cold.

The surrounding landscape suggested the frontier territory of the Wild West. The nearest settlement of any size was Muskogee, a one-horse trading settlement that was home to large numbers of Creek American Indians. The majority of the population lived in isolated farms deep in the countryside, in conditions that were basic and primitive, and years of hard physical labour had left them exceptionally tough.

These blunt-tongued settlers were the pioneering descendants of peasants from Ireland: O'Caseys and O'Shaughnessys from Cork, Kerry and County Clare. Although the families themselves were poor, Wolfram and his fellow prisoners were constantly struck by the boundless resources of America. When they had arrived in Normandy, they had been supplied with badly made uniforms that quickly fell apart. Now, they were reclothed in American uniforms that were well sewn and made out of soft material. Indeed, the only thing that distinguished them from their American guards was the fact that their uniforms had PW stencilled on them in big white letters.

The camp food was nourishing and served in plentiful portions. More pleasurable still to Wolfram, the camp's library contained books that had been banned for many years in Germany, including Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger and Stefan Zweig.

The men were told that they had been brought to Oklahoma in order to help with the harvesting of cotton, peanuts and strawberries. Wolfram was allotted to the cotton fields. Each morning he and his comrades would assemble into groups of thirty and wait at the gates of the camp for the pick-up that would drive them for an hour or more along dusty tracks to the plantations.

Each prisoner was expected to pick 150 pounds of cotton a day – a quota that most of them had reached by early afternoon. The work was made easier by the fact that they swiftly learned to cheat their superiors. They would distract the guard as each sack was weighed, adding heavy stones to increase the weight. Then, once the sack had been lifted off the scales, they would surreptitiously remove the stones and slip them into the next sack.

What they had failed to realise was that the entire van was also weighed before and after it was loaded. Nor did they know that the driver was putting his own stones into each sack in order to get paid more. He quickly twigged that the men were engaged in the same trickery as he was and expressed his annoyance.

‘We can't all be cheats,' he said and suggested that they come to an agreement, whereby everyone added a pre-agreed amount of stones.

Wolfram worked in the cotton fields until the harvest came to an end, at which point everyone started to ask themselves what they would have to do next. They were surprised that there was so little work to be done.

The prisoners were once again divided into groups. Some worked inside the camp, cooking, cleaning or making popcorn for the camp's cinema. Others, like Wolfram, joined a small team of civilians working in the tyre repair workshop.

The workshop's owner, Mr Hebel, in cowboy boots, stetson and checked shirt, might have dropped straight out of a western. Furthermore, he stank. Wolfram felt sure that he had never washed.

The civilians working for Mr Hebel were friendly towards the prisoners and frankly expressed their delight that the war was going on for so long, as it had created a lot of work in and around Camp Gruber – work for which they were paid good money.

To Wolfram, it was as if everyone based in the vicinity of the camp was on the make. One soldier, a sergeant from Texas, returned from his home leave with old tyres from his family's farm machinery, swapping them for new army tyres, which he sent back to his parents.

Other soldiers started to do the same – with the tacit approval of Mr Hebel – and it was not long before the prisoners were also involved in the scam. One of Wolfram's comrades spent all his days sitting in the tyre workshop, removing the words
US ARMY
from the stolen tyres.

Wolfram and his companions received little information about the war in those first months as prisoners. Newly arrived German soldiers brought them the occasional scrap of news but it was always many weeks out of date by the time it reached Camp Gruber.

The men themselves rarely talked of the war and their experiences at the battlefront. Nor did they speak about politics, which was considered a taboo subject and strictly off-limits. Wolfram got along particularly well with one prisoner and had many lengthy conversations with him. Yet it was not until long after the war, when he met up with the man in Munich, that he discovered that he had been a fervent Nazi. The Third Reich had created such a culture of secrecy that men learned not to talk of their political convictions, even when imprisoned.

The little news that Wolfram did hear from the battlefront confirmed what he had known for a long time: that Germany had lost the war and Hitler's defeat was inevitable. Although Allied forces were having to battle for every inch of ground, they were steadily and relentlessly advancing towards his homeland. Brussels, Antwerp and Lyons had all been liberated in September, while the Allies were also driving northwards in Italy.