The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (48 page)

sympathetic Army major whispered to Kathryn Hulme, “they’re beginning to forget already that these are the little guys we fought the war for.”
50

Masset sent off an anguished telegram to UNRRA headquarters declaring that this militarization of the camp would shatter morale; “we see the ideal of UN- RRA mashed under an army boot.” Masset, with the help of a new Army camp commander, managed to soften much of these orders. But similar inspections continued. Masset noted that as of late November, Wildflecken had been inspected twenty-seven times in sixty-six days by Army officials. Every shortcoming was examined under a microscope, while sufficient supplies to improve the conditions were rarely forth- coming. In late November, Colonel R. J. Wallace of G-5 (Third Army) in Munich arrived for an unannounced inspection, and after searching for two hours found one of thirteen kitchens to be untidy, with sawdust on the ground, a discovery that led him to abuse a Polish kitchen worker who spoke no English. Director Masset, perhaps reaching a breaking point, wrote a stinging, furious rebuttal to UNRRA regional headquarters. The shortcomings of the camp, he wrote, were the result of UNRRA and the Army’s failure to provide sufficient clothing, cleaning supplies, food, fuel, transport, and supplies to a huge encampment, while the immense

labor of the UNRRA staff went unappreciated. “Alone,” he wrote of his co-workers, “these few isolated ones, deprived of leaves, deprived of mail and with no re- plies to their official appeals, with no moral or material aid, managed somehow to maintain an organization” whose only shortcoming was a slightly messy kitchen. “ You could certainly never realize how much has been corrected, created, ameliorated and innovated in this camp since our arrival.”
51

The inspections slowed only in December, with the ar- rival of fifteen feet of snow that effectively cut off the camp from the outside world. Life in the camp changed in winter. Kathryn Hulme recalled that in the barracks, “the Poles were settling in for their winter in Slavic style. They nailed windows to stay shut until spring, bound babies like papooses in endless unhealthy yards of woolen swaddling clothes, and swung ever burdened clotheslines in the crowded interiors to produce, as our medical people say sadly, the proper incubating steam for swift transmission of respiratory diseases.” Each blockhouse was subdivided into rooms, in which families had been thrust pell-mell and in which they had arranged a kind of village order. Rooms were usu- ally partitioned into cubicles by means of trunks, pos- sessions, and Army blankets strung along a line. These “khaki labyrinths” were “the last ramparts of privacy to

which the DPs clung, preferring to shiver with one less blanket on their straw filled sacks rather than to dress, comb their hair, feed the baby or make a new one with ten to twenty pairs of eyes watching every move.” The rooms smelled the same: “a synthesis of drying diapers, smoked fish, cabbage brews and wood smoke from wet pine. It was not an unpleasant smell once you got used to it. For us it became the identifying odor of homeless humanity.”
52

Christmas 1945 in Wildflecken brought new surprises. The DPs arranged a week of dances and merriment, enhanced by Christmas parcels of Red Cross luxuries that the UNRRA team arranged into packages for each camp resident. Everyone got the same share of long- unavailable treats: chocolate, cigarettes, tea, coffee, sugar, biscuits, raisins, and liver paste. The value and rarity of these luxuries cannot be overstated. “It is hard to believe that some shiny little tins of meat paste and sardines could almost start a riot in the camp,” wrote Hulme to her family, “that bags of Lipton’s tea and tins of Varrington House coffee and bars of vitaminized chocolate could drive men almost insane with desire. But this is so. This is as much a part of the destruction of Europe as are those gaunt ruins of Frankfurt. Only this is the ruin of the human soul. It is a thousand times more painful to see.”
53
And yet, with exquisite cruelty,

just two days after the delivery of these treasured Red Cross Christmas packages, the Third Army sprang Op- eration Tally Ho on the camp: a secret raid to crack down on black market smuggling. At 6:45 A.M. on De- cember 27, hundreds of U.S. soldiers surrounded, then penetrated, the camp, checking papers, opening lock- ers and storerooms, upended bedding and chests, only to find the hundreds of Red Cross packages, which they began to confiscate. Hulme, in command while Masset was in Paris enjoying his own Christmas revels, spent hours persuading the Army captain in charge of the wholly legal provenance of this booty. Truthfully, there was a good deal of smuggling and black market dealing emanating from the camp. Even Hulme admitted she “could buy anything” in the camp’s black market, “ex- cept my mother, and sometimes I was not even sure she would not turn up!”
54
These Poles, after all, had lived via black market exchange for years in camps in Germany, and this was nothing new. A fairly active exchange de- veloped: Germans offered clothing, farm produce, and liquor for Lucky Strikes, sugar, and coffee, courtesy of the Red Cross. Yet the Poles were not entirely prepared to play fair with their old adversaries. The DPs set up a carefully choreographed scam, whereby a German who had just filled his rucksack with illicit goods from a deal with a Pole in the camp would be arrested by the Polish DP police on his way out of the camp, only to

have his recently acquired delicacies confiscated.
55

Despite the comical element to this anecdote, exchang- es between military authorities and political leaders in London and Washington show that at the most senior level, the criminal dimension of the Polish DP problem caused serious anxiety and frustration. In early Au- gust, after a series of reprisals, thefts, and brigandage by DPs in Germany, General Montgomery, commander of the British zone of occupation, wrote to Prime Min- ister Clement Attlee and the Foreign Office to declare his opinion that the behavior of DPs was “most serious. Looting, rape and murder by organized bands prevails in spite of every attempt made to restrain. In the inter- est of military security and orderly government I am determined that these outrages stop. I have accord- ingly instructed my Corps district commanders to take drastic measures including shooting at sight offenders caught in the act. Persons involved are mainly Poles and to lesser extent Russians.” The Foreign Office replied that DPs had to be treated humanely and not treated like criminals, to which Monty replied, “ The Prime Minister has not been given a true picture regarding the DP situation in the British Zone…. We are confronted by terrorism, murder, rape [and] robbery by well orga- nized and armed bands.” The victims of such crimes by DPs—the details of which are obscure—were of course

Germans, a people toward which military authorities still maintained considerable animus. General Eisen- hower’s own order of September 20 stated clearly that DPs were to be treated humanely, that their needs must be met before those of the German public, and that any restraints placed upon them, such as guards at camps, were strictly there for protection. “Everything should be done,” he ordered his commanders in the field, “to encourage displaced persons to understand that they have been freed from tyranny and that the supervision exercised over them is merely necessary for their own protection and well-being and to facilitate essential maintenance.”
56

Yet as the occupation policy toward Germans softened, so did the military attitude toward DPs harden. In De- cember, the British Control Commission in Germany argued for a firmer hand with DPs. “ Up to now, the policy of His Majesty’s Government is that Poles who are unwilling for political reasons to repatriate should not be repatriated…. The time has now come when this policy should be revised. The presence of a large number of Poles who refuse to go home and choose to be housed and fed in idleness in this country amongst a hungry German population may lead to disorders and certainly consumes a lot of food which should be used…to feed the Germans.” In late November, Eisen-

hower’s successor as head of the U.S. forces in Europe, General Joseph T. McNarney, delivered new, harsher orders to the commanders of the 3rd and 7th Armies:

Serious disorders by displaced persons, particularly Poles, require immediate change in theater policy. You will immediately place the necessary guards at such camps as may in your opinion require being guarded, instituting such pass system for the camp occupants as you deem proper…. Meanwhile, report to this HQ name and location of those camps where you have de- cided to reinstitute the use of US guards. The arming of German police to assist at once in reducing depreda- tions by displaced persons will be expedited by you in order that roving bands known to exist among DPs may be brought under control promptly.
57

In this environment of increasing tension and hostility toward DPs, UNRRA had to work creatively to prod its reluctant charges to go home, though for many in the camp, there was no Poland to return to: their ancient villages now lay in the Soviet Ukraine or Belorussia. Hulme recalled DPs staring at a large map of Poland tacked up in the camp: “ You could tell from their faces which ones came from east of the river Bug. Some of the women wept quietly while the men stared in disbelief, too keen for comment, uttering only the names of home

towns in a lost litany of sorrowful sounds: Lwow… Rovno…Stanislav….” Thousands of repatriated Poles actually began to return to Germany in late fall 1945, bearing dismal accounts of conditions in Poland and finding DP camps a more attractive alternative. One man who had returned from Poland told an UNRRA of- ficial that “there is no food, accomodation, coal and, what is worse, no work…. The Russians have taken all the machinery out of the factories and farms and sent it back to Russia.” The word circulated throughout the camps that there was no future in Poland.

By October 1946, increasingly desperate to unbur- den itself of the Polish DPs, UNRRA offered them an extraordinary incentive to leave: the promise of sixty days of rations per person upon their arrival in Poland if they went home. At Wildflecken, a gleaming, art- fully arranged display of what this much food looked like was set out on tables in the central camp canteen: ninety-four pounds of “flour, dried peas, rolled oats, salt, evaporated milk, canned fish and a small moun- tain of lard.” A family of four could take with them 376 pounds of this abundance. As a result of this largesse, the transports began filling up again. “Gradually,” Hulme wrote wistfully, “we forgot the secret shame we had felt when we had first stood beside the free food displays and had watched our DPs stare at the terrible

fascination of the bait, thrashing, twisting and turn- ing before they took the hook.”
58
Over the next few months, the camp authorities persuaded most of the Poles to board transit trains that would take them back to Poland. A few DPs managed, through family connec- tions or sheer persistence, to enter the United States or other Western countries. But a small number of DPs remained behind, embracing the temporary security of Wildflecken, and turning the place into something like home. For six more years, the camp stayed open, a quiet shelter in the Bavarian hills for the forgotten refuse of war.

Part IV: TO LIVE AGAIN AS A PEOPLE

Prologue: “ We Felt Ourselves Lost”

T

HEY WERE FOUR young soldiers on horseback who advanced along the road that marked the limits of the camp, cautiously holding their sten- guns. When they reached the barbed wire, they stopped to look, exchanging a few timid words, and throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the sprawling bod-

ies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive.”

The date was January 27, 1945. The soldiers were Rus- sians, part of advance units of the 100th Infantry Divi- sion of the 106th Corps, 60th Army, 1st Ukrainian Front. Standing that icy morning by the gates of the Buna- Monowitz camp of the Auschwitz complex, Primo Levi and his companion, Charles, silently observed the Rus- sians as they advanced. Levi, an Italian chemist, briefly a partisan, and a Jew, had survived eleven months in Auschwitz. This was his first sighting of soldiers who did not mean him harm. These Russians were “four messengers of peace, with rough and boyish faces be- neath their heavy fur hats.” Levi also observed in them something that he had never seen in his German tor- mentors: a sense of shame. It was, Levi remembered, “the shame that the just man experiences at another man’s crime; the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist.” The young horsemen evinced no sat-

isfaction at being present at the liberation of Hitler’s worst death camp. “ They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene.” In short, the soldiers stared, in disgust and bewilderment. Levi and his companion stared back.

What emotions did these liberated Jews feel? Levi tells us:

For us even the hour of liberty rang out grave and muf- fled, and filled our souls with joy and yet with a pain- ful sense of pudency, so that we should have liked to wash our consciences and our memories clean from the foulness that lay upon them; and also with anguish, because we felt that this should never happen, that now nothing could ever happen good and pure enough to rub out our past, and that the scars of the outrage would stay with us forever…. Face to face with liberty, we felt ourselves lost, emptied, atrophied, unfit for our part.

Ill, emaciated, disoriented by a year of malnourishment and trauma, Levi and his few skeletal companions were free: but freedom presented its own burden. Levi now had to face the complex task of finding a way home

across occupied, war-blackened Eastern Europe; and the still more difficult task of explaining to his fam- ily, and the world, what exactly had happened to him in the depraved Nazi concentration camp system. The trial ahead proved arduous; Levi did not make it back to Italy for another ten months, unable to find a means of transport home, unable to find shelter, friends, or security. “Liberty,” he tell us, “the improbable, impos- sible liberty, so far removed from Auschwitz that we had only dared to hope for it in our dreams, had come; but it had not taken us to the Promised Land. It was around us, but in the form of a pitiless, deserted plain. More trials, more toil, more hunger, more cold, more fears awaited us.”1