Behind Hitler's Lines (42 page)

The couple spoke together, then the farmer told Joe it was the SS
Einsatzgruppen
he was worried about. They roamed the area looking for deserters and hanged them. That or worse would be the farmer's fate.

“I didn't understand his German completely, and he had trouble with mine, so they may have thought I was a deserter from the Wehrmacht, someone with a strange accent from another part of Germany.

“I started to just push my way in and grab a couple of chickens, but this couple was probably armed—I would have been in their situation. I went back to the loft for the night, too hungry and cold to sleep, but maybe I did because there were these weird dreams about people and places that were fantastic and ridiculous at the same time. I'd wake up and realize the dreams were crazy, but when I dozed off they'd come back.
My rational mind was saying go away, but the dreams kept returning.”

The next morning a few Russian artillery shells fell on the woods. As fog lifted like a curtain, from the loft Joe could see into open fields. Out there tiny figures formed into clusters. The Red Army at last! Behind them, artillery flashes. The figures joined with vehicles, which came on over the snow till they were less than a mile away. Then Joe could tell they were scout jeeps and half-tracks mixed with an infantry platoon. They were greeted by a little antitank fire, then some machine guns and small arms that didn't do much except spread out the clusters. Though this fire originated only a few hundred yards in front of him, Joe couldn't tell from where because the German positions were so well concealed and camouflaged.

A Russian vehicle hit a mine and puffed gray smoke. Poorly aimed shells were fired at the Wehrmacht positions on the wood line. A German antitank gun scored on a half-track, then Joe heard a few engines start up and saw some kraut infantry drop back into the forest. Their fire had dispersed and held up the Russians, but the Wehrmacht had had enough fighting for the morning. Joe felt they were conserving ammo.

He could hear shouted commands as Germans assembled and boarded vehicles. They hurried when artillery sprayed them with tree bursts. Splinters were also hitting Joe's roof and he wanted out of that loft, but this was too good to miss— like watching a damn good war movie. Though he admired how the outnumbered defenders were putting up a good fight, it was the Russians who were coming, whom he would have loved to rush out and meet. But Joe could have been mistaken for a German, so he dug down in the hay and continued to watch the farmhouse, sure the Russians would occupy it.

Ground fog was suspended between lifting and drifting. The Germans had used it to get away—the sounds of their vehicles were gone. From the other direction Joe heard a few engines tentatively advance and perhaps a gun turret swiveling. Otherwise an anticipatory silence hung like the fog, as if to mark the exchange of control over a small, unremembered farmstead on the Eastern Front. He will remember forever
the first armed Russians he ever saw, moving warily and quietly to surround the farmhouse. He recognized parts of their uniforms though the shadowy forms of the infantry were bulky with winter gear, in huge contrast to their emaciated comrades back at Stalag III-C.

The squad leader hung a demolition charge on the doorknob and set it off while his men covered the door with submachine guns. Joe heard the farm couple's voices. The squad leader yelled,
“Kumfrau!”
(“Come out, woman!”), and out they came with their hands up. They were asked if anyone else was around. Joe sensed the opportunity to come down at that time, but he didn't.

The squad leader told three of his men to investigate the house. As they entered, other Russians came up and started talking to the squad leader. Pretty soon a few scrawny chickens flew out followed by the three men herding some thin hogs. That made all the Russians happy, but right away they pleaded with the squad leader. The scene reminded Joe of how Currahees distributed the lord's brandy in England. The problem in Poland seemed to be that higher-ranking Russians would be here soon, so the livestock should disappear right now.

The squad leader thought about it, and what he decided satisfied his men. One of them was wounded slightly, one badly. They took care of each other—there were no medics— and were very close buddies. Both of them were less concerned with their wounds than with the livestock. The slightly wounded one found an axe by the woodpile. That settled what to do. With a nod from the squad leader the farmer and his wife were blasted with submachine guns, which cut them through the middle like a chainsaw. They recoiled against the wall of their house. Some viscera stuck and froze.

“The Russians stood there till the bodies stopped twitching,” Joe recounts. “Then the axe man started chopping them up while the rest of the squad went off to find wood and build lean-tos. I think the reason they didn't occupy the house was because officers were sure to boot them out.

“From my uncle I knew something about butchering, and
this Russian was an expert. A dozen chops, and in no time the German couple was food for the hogs they'd fed yesterday.” That changed his thoughts about rushing into the Russians' arms. Maybe they were too heated up by the recent skirmish; two were wounded, maybe some had been killed. “You don't want to surprise soldiers, soldiers of any army, right after they've had casualties. I stayed in the loft and got down in the hay. I was colder and hungrier than ever but knew that night would be my last as a fugitive!”

During the night Joe heard tanks in the farmyard. They sounded strangely familiar, and indeed they were Sherman tanks—the first ones he'd seen since England. A generator went on out in the darkness. Its throb was the last thing he remembered until the next morning, when the farmhouse had become the command post of an armored unit. Some headquarters troops stayed around while the rest of the outfit pushed west.

Joe watched them carefully to pick the right time and man to approach. That would be the senior NCO, whose first order of the day was to slaughter the hogs. Ghoulishly, Joe wondered if there would be any parts of the two Germans left. There were, but just the bones picked clean. He waited till the Russians had cooked up some pork and had a good breakfast of back fat and
kasca.

“I didn't want to disturb them during chow. When they were finished I took out my last pack of cigarettes—Lucky Strikes, pretty wet—and came out of the barn with my hands way up.

“
'Americanski tovarish!'
['American comrade!'] I yelled and walked toward them, keeping a big friendly smile on my face.

“Someone told me that must have been like ET meeting Martians. Nobody knew what was happening. I'd counted five Russians. Two of them raised their weapons; the others, including the NCO, just stared at me. The Russians are great starers. If they're interested in you, they'll just keep staring.”

These Russians were very interested in Joe. They let him walk up as far as he wanted to go, which was about two arm's
lengths from the NCO. Joe halted and repeated,
“Americanski tovarish,”
then the NCO gestured for him to be frisked. Joe had the Luckies in his left glove as a welcoming present. They didn't notice it, and Joe was allowed to put his hands down. He extended his right hand, the NCO decided to shake it, and then all the Russians started talking.

They examined Joe's GI overcoat with its American Eagle buttons. That seemed to convince them that he might really be an American. Joe gestured to his mouth and made chewing motions. Oh, sure—have some
kasca,
the grain-and-pork soup simmering in the farmer's iron kettle.

“I used one of his big bowls and refilled it many times. Then I was full, very tired and pretty happy. They were happy too when I passed around my Luckies. While they went about their business, I curled up warm in a corner. My nap wasn't very long. Officers had been sent for, and soon they arrived to check me out. The battalion commander rode in on a Sherman accompanied by her commissar.

“I was still slumped in a corner and didn't get up. In winter uniform I couldn't tell that the CO was a woman. It was the commissar who spoke some English. He asked me who I was, and I slowly got to my feet. It was a relief to tell him my name, rank, and serial number, tell someone other than a German interrogator. The commissar asked me my unit, where and when I was captured, my hometown, and lots of other personal data. I was glad to give him all the answers—they would help inform my family of what had become of me. I had never received a single postcard from them, though they had sent many.”

Joe lay around, washed up, kept eating and napping for the rest of the day. There were so many visitors he stopped noticing them, but it wasn't till the next day that the CO came around again. She had a name five syllables long, so Joe just called her by her rank, Major. Major was a stocky, weather-beaten officer who had the complete respect of her troops. She announced that Joe was to go to higher headquarters for processing. She opened her arms, looked at him hard, and
hugged him harder, then said,
Proshchai tovarish
(Good-bye, comrade), for now he must leave for the rear.

For her farewell Major had not just the commissar but a translator too. Joe asked him what was going on. Well, he thought some American POWs had been liberated back in eastern Poland, so Joe would join them.

“‘But I wasn't a liberated POW,’ I said.? was an escaped POW”

“'So what?”

“'So I want to stay with this outfit.”

“'You do? Why?”

“‘To fight the Nazis, fight them with you.’”

JOE'S ANSWER BROUGHT HIM
an invitation to a summit meeting at the White House fifty years later where President Yeltsin presented him, and him alone, with four decorations: the Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Great Patriotic War, the Medal for Valor (Armored Forces), and the Russian equivalent of the Purple Heart. In the Rose Garden, as his family watched, Joe reciprocated with D Day crickets for Yeltsin and Clinton.

About fifty other veterans, of both nationalities, took part in the V-E Day commemoration. Two were American women who had ferried aircraft from Alaska to Siberia during the war; a dozen more were truckers who delivered supplies to Russia from the Persian Gulf. The other Americans had taken part in the famous linkup of Eisenhower's andZhukov's forces at the Elbe River.

The Russian vets were all emigres by way of Israel. One of the conditions of their release from the USSR had been that they surrender any decorations won during World War II. Yeltsin promised return of their medals and restoration of honors.

In the Rose Garden that day Joe was uniquely recognized as being the only vet on either side to have
fought
against the Germans on both the Western and Eastern Fronts, so his decorations were not only more numerous but different from
any of the other honorees'. The difference was that the medals he received were for combat—and were scarred and previously owned. This recycling was perplexing till the Russian attache explained the reason:

In Soviet times veterans of the Great Patriotic War were buried, or more often cremated, in uniform with all their ribbons; but these ribbons represented their medals, which remained government property and were thus reclaimed by the state upon the recipient's death, to be recycled. What Joe received could have first been worn on the chest of a tanker in the battle of Kursk, an infantryman at Stalingrad, or a partisan in the Pripet Marshes. What was no doubt the product of callous bureaucratic policy instead became a mystical legacy, for no one who received a handed-down medal was to know who had won it by earlier heroism. In Joe's case and Joe's alone the legacy would remain in his family, not with the state, a state now interred in history with the ideology of communism.

WHEN MAJOR UNDERSTOOD
that Joe was volunteering to serve in her battalion, she broke out the vodka. The previous night he 'd had a little but cut with grapefruit juice. In the Red Army the two always came together with the rations. Major decreed that for this occasion, this celebration, there would be no grapefruit juice: vodka was to be taken neat. There was more alcohol and emotion in the farmhouse than Joe could take in. He remembers only that his name was resolved. What should he be called, now that Joe was in her outfit, Major asked. Just by my first name, he answered groggily, easy to remember because it was the same as Stalin's. Her troops thought that was a good sign, and canteen cups were bashed all around. From then on he was known as Yo.

His new comrades wanted to know why, why if Yo had a free ride to the rear did he want to stay at the front—where the average life expectancy for a junior sergeant in the Red Army was less than a week. There was no way to explain, so Joe used a single word: Nazi. The commissar corrected him.
Nazi
wasn't politically correct, it was an acronym for National
Socialists. The Soviet Union had the only true socialists, so the right term for Germans and everything German was Hitlerite: Hitlerite cows, Hitlerite woods—the Oder River was Hitlerite. To take or destroy everything Hitlerite was the best reason in the world to fight. Joe had no trouble using the term, and felt that every German who did not fight Hitler was a Hitlerite.

“Celebrating my induction into Major's tank battalion, many of my new comrades got sloshed. Because of my weak condition I had a low tolerance for their 120-proof vodka. I'd pretend to drink but keep it in my mouth, then go out as if I had to pee and spit it out. I did that so many times they must have thought I had a very small bladder.

“During my induction artillery was prepping the Hitlerites, but what the hell, World War II could wait, said the translator. The longer we waited the longer we'd live! That called for another round. The vodka was so strong it made my nose run. Major ordered attention and announced that if Yo was now a fellow soldier, what kind should he be? She really knew which buttons to push. The tank drivers said I should be a driver—of course, because the tanks were made in Michigan! The gunners shouted no, an American should shoot American shells! The recon sergeants shouted louder that I should be a scout because I'd already been behind Hitlerite lines. A scout is what I wanted to be, what I thought I'd do best. I knew something about the terrain to the west and what the Hitlerites had there—not much, from what I'd seen.