Behind Hitler's Lines (33 page)

By then hut commanders knew the home state of all their men. If someone didn't go to his regional meeting, he became a suspect. There were only a few like that, checked out thoroughly and found to be just lone wolves, men who chose to go through the kriege experience by themselves. They did so very well, and none turned out to be a security risk.

The regional group that uncovered the mole was from Ohio. It took days of innocuous but very specific questions put casually: “Hey, anyone from Senator Taft's hometown?” Like the needle on a gyrating compass, suspicion began to home on a man who said he was from Cleveland but didn't recognize the name Bob Feller. How about the mayor in 1942? No response. What high school did you go to? He had an answer for that, however, he didn't know any of the icecream parlors in the neighborhood. What do you hear from home? Nothing. No mail? No. Why not? No parents? No girlfriend? They didn't write him. He had a Polish name, something like Websky, but couldn't say anything about the part of Poland his ancestors came from. This seemed like a pretty tough requirement to Joe, who couldn't have said much about Bavaria either.

After increasingly less friendly questioning, this Websky owned up. He'd lived in Cleveland for four years with an uncle from Lithuania before returning to East Prussia, where he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. He clerked on the Eastern Front for two years, then felt lucky, because of his American English fluency, to be pulled out in 1944 to serve as an intelligence staffer in France. It was quite possible that Websky had worked at the chateau where Joe had had his head bashed in, but he was not allowed to ask because Coleman designated a prosecutorial team to handle Websky's case and they provided him Fifth Amendment protection. However, he made the mistake of acting as his own counsel. His defense was that he couldn't turn down the mole job, he didn't have a choice, and if he didn't produce results, it was back to the Eastern Front, this time as an infantryman.

That was too bad, but the committee didn't have much choice either. His hut commander was briefed and provided a
stand-in for Websky at roll calls after Coleman ordered a secret court-martial. Joe asked, how can we court-martial a guy who's in the enemy army? Coleman's answer was, you know what I mean—have a trial and make it fast. It was fast indeed as a six-by-six hole was dug under a hut. What took inordinate time was the question of whether the hole would be Web-sky's execution site, grave, or both. He was given the choice of a shiv in the heart, a club on the head, or being strangled.

“He didn't choose, he just started praying out loud, going from English to German, whatever came to his head. One trooper volunteered to club him, two to strangle. We chose the strangler, who was less eager for the job. I didn't watch the execution because I volunteered to be on security when it happened. I didn't say so, but I would have liked to have clubbed him, the way I was clubbed in the chateau. Getting rid of a cockroach like Websky also made me feel better about a chance to escape.”

There was a lively debate within the committee about how to dispose of the dead man. Joe was angry because the question should have been answered before Websky was executed. What's the problem? said Coleman's staff. Just leave him in the hole. The committee objected: dammit, when Schultz misses Websky, any fresh dirt in the compound will be dug up. We can't tamp down the earth enough to fool the krauts—they'd had a lot of experience in uncovering British tunnels.

Coleman sided with the committee, one of his most important decisions. Websky was dismembered and fed into latrines like Heinz. When the latrines were routinely emptied for use by farmers, the committee had a quiet party catered by extra rations from Coleman.

“Before long we knew that Schultz knew what had happened, but there was no reprisal. He had lost a dog and a mole, probably caught hell from the commandant, but he still showed respect for what we were doing.”

THE COMING OF WINTER
was on everyone's mind, more than anything besides food. Before it permanently froze, Russians
had dug under the ground with scraps of wood tossed over the fence to them by Americans. Three or four feet down it was not quite so cold as on the wind-chilled surface. The Russians were digging their graves, but why freeze before dying? Unless you wanted to die, or felt that if you died today, you wouldn't have to die tomorrow. Across the wire Joe understood what the Russians were saying by digging: do what you can, do what you want to do. God understands. He'll call you when ready. God's always ready. This subliminal message struck Joe because it was transmitted by voices of what the world thought were godless Communists.

In that way the Russians, their incomprehensible longanimity and endurance, began to haunt him. For Joe this had a double effect, reinforcing his gratitude, as with the terribly wounded in the boxcar, to be relatively better off; and forging a bond with Nazi-haters even more inspired than he. A somewhat mediating figure for him at that time was Schultz, working for the Nazis yet not one of them.

Though Schultz seemed to overlook Websky's disappearance, the commandant did not. Several moles were inserted into the compound. They couldn't have been more obvious if swastikas had been painted on their foreheads. The only question they consistently answered correctly was that Roosevelt was president. What invariably slipped them up was the location of the Grand Canyon. They always said Colorado.

With their cover so flimsy it wasn't healthy for new moles to stay in camp long and soon they were transferred, probably to other stalags, where they'd try again. Joe admits to taking part in a farewell party for one of them. It's a GI tradition that when a barrack thief is discovered he's wrapped in a blanket so men can pound on him without being identified. Then the thief is bounced down the stairs of the barrack. There was only one floor in kriege huts, but compensatory punishment was found. It was Joe's only opportunity to do unto the Germans, at short range, as they had done unto him, a satisfying experience of revenge without guilt.

Schultz said nothing about the mole batteries, indicating his wish for things to return to normal, the waiting to see how
the war would end. Joe wasn't about to wait. With two good men willing to break out with him he felt it was past time to put it to the touch again.

“My last pre-escape conversation with Schultz went like this: I felt a little bad about Websky though he'd caused a lot of pain and grief and deserved to be where he was. Schultz took me aside and suggested we say a rosary together for Websky. Why? I asked. His answer was that it could be possible for all of us to find a way to escape more horrors from this war, one way or another. How each of us do it is between us and God. That's not a bargain, that's a proposal. We never know if God will accept it. That's why we pray, he said.

“My young mind was stunned to hear that. I had mixed my prayers for personal survival with prayers for the end of Germany. For sure the second was more important to the world than the first. Several miracles caused me to survive, and Germany was crushed. My prayers were answered in one result. Schultz's were not, in fact just the opposite, but I think God listened to him as much as me.”

THE JOE OF OCTOBER 1944 SORT OF SCARES JOE TODAY. A LOT
of him in III-C was still a kid, a kid who had gone through a lot, taken a lot, and dished it out, but still a kid who saw just about every chance as a good one. What drove him hardest was neither the Nazi murderers nor the Russians murdered but rather what his mother had said when he left home for the induction center in Kalamazoo: “Never do anything to make your family ashamed.” Joe felt they might be ashamed if he didn't escape, and sure they'd be proud if he did. He was quite wrong—all the Beyrles prayed for was that he survive the war.

Withal he was on the escape committee, one of five men whose combined age was barely a hundred, whom Coleman designated as his most mature and cautious judges of risk, of what could work and what probably wouldn't. For Joe the best way to learn more, to gauge the lay of the land, was to get outside the wire where the stone road and railroad intersected at III-C. For that purpose he volunteered for work details in the countryside.

On one such detail, hunger got the best of him. A farmer's horse-drawn wagon loaded with potatoes went by close enough that the krieges conspired to liberate a few spuds. The Americans tried a diversion. Several went up to the guards and created confusion while others plucked potatoes off the wagon and stuffed their pockets, shushing the farmer with cigarettes.
This kind of misbehavior was not rare—such pilferage was one of the reasons men volunteered for work details—and usually was punished with no more than kicks and curses, but this time the senior guard was a good friend of a former mole who had been punished by the Americans.

He shouted,
Feuer!
(“Fire!”). One man was hit, fell under the wagon when the horse bolted, and died when his head was crushed by a wheel. Joe was about to catch a spud when a bullet entered his right shoulder. It passed through the muscle without striking bone, but with an impact harder than the shell fragment in Normandy. It seemed his arm was blown off—it was so completely numb that he was surprised to find it still attached. The pain came on like flame dissolving ice.

“What I had to do was conceal the blood because guards grabbed anyone who was wounded,” Joe recalls. “Another guy who was hit ended up in solitary and died there. I packed some dirt to stop the bleeding and with good luck was marched back to the compound with the krieges who hadn't been caught. I could have got an Oscar for pretending I wasn't in pain because I sure was. A guy next to me saw that and started telling nonstop jokes. I think the guards thought my expression was because of how bad the jokes were. The POW chain of command did not approve of what we'd done. I wouldn't have either if I'd had Coleman's job. We'd got a man killed for just a few potatoes.

“A kriege medic came around to my hut and secretly patched up my shoulder so the krauts never knew. Schultz saw something was wrong with the way I couldn't use my arm, but he didn't try to find out about it. But he knew. I was trying to lift my arm when he came by and said, ‘Too much crap shooting, Joe?’ He punched it in a friendly way. I winced, got the message, and felt I owed him. The only way I had to do that was to stop harassing him.”

Harassing Schultz had been an amusement. Each morning at roll-call formation there were hundreds of krieges milling around as Schultz and his guards counted heads. Joe was among those who would move down in back of the formation, pop up, and be recounted so the count was screwed up.
Schultz usually took this sort of prank good-naturedly, more so than the krieges who wanted to get out of the cold and back to their huts, but after Schultz overlooked the shoulder wound Joe convinced his fellow pranksters to lay off for a while.

Joe's injury set back the escape plan he had devised with Brewer and Quinn. While they waited for the wound to heal (it never did completely), two fortunate events occurred: American krieges were issued winter clothing, and Joe won seventy packs of cigarettes in crap games.

His jump boots were so worn and torn that the sole at the toe had separated from the shoe, leaving a big gap that soaked his feet whenever it rained and making the sole flap. So though it meant looking like a leg, Joe was glad to put on standard GI brogans delivered by the Red Cross, along with thick GI overcoats, wool socks, and trousers.
^*
Those were the clothes he would wear for the rest of the war. The fact that they were American uniform items would save his life.

“With my right arm out of action, rolling dice with my left hand seemed to bring luck. Shorty had said always use my left hand—I should have remembered that before. Anyway, I wasn't going out on any more work details, so there was time to circulate around the compound to a lot of crap games. There were at least two big ones every day. The winners got together for playoffs that drew plenty of spectators, including Schultz sometimes. Even when I wasn't rolling I'd bet on the guy coming out. Those were the best odds, no side bets, and slowly my cigarette fortune grew. One afternoon I felt my hand was hot and doubled up for four straight passes. Quinn came over, then Brewer. I crapped once, then made two hard points and went seven-eleven twice more. The nicotine addicts looked at me like I was Rockefeller. Quinn took my winnings away before I was tempted to gamble for more. Brewer had been counting too. Sixty was the number of packs we felt was necessary to bribe our way out. We now had a ten-pack cushion.”

Thus it was time to present their plan to the escape committee, from which of course Joe would be recused. It met in the shed where Red Cross parcels were distributed, known as the PX. The cover for the committee to be there was that it was Coleman's auditing group to make sure krieges got what was coming to them. The escape committee played that role well because honest distribution was of prime importance to everyone. They spent much more time counting parcels than they did hearing escape plans.

On the day of a proposal, security was posted around the PX to warn of any guards who might come through the area. A rough wood table was cleared of Red Cross parcels, then the presenter laid out his plan. The committee hunched over on their elbows to hear what the low voice had to say. Now Joe was the presenter, but the other four members of the committee didn't treat him any differently.

“My plan was simple. We would offer one of the night guards twenty packs if he let us cut the wire while he was walking his post. Then we'd go through when his shift changed so he wouldn't be blamed. A train went by III-C every night. We'd hop on it like hoboes. No, we weren't sure where it was going, but since this is Poland, all railroads probably led to Warsaw. Warsaw was hundreds of miles east. East was where the Red Army was coming from. We'd noticed how fewer Russkies were being brought into III-C. That was a good sign they were winning.

“We'd leave the train when we figured it was close to the Eastern Front, then hole up and wait for the Russians to overrun our location. Along the way we'd have plenty of cigarettes to buy cooperation from anyone who could help us.”