An American Tank
“So there was this shelling going on all night long. And Friday morning, then we saw this tank, an American tank was coming close to this gate of the sanitorium. So, we, like idiots – I mean the war was still going on – we thought if we tell them, whoever it was, who we are, of course they would save us. We came out to that road and there came this big tank and whoever it was, an officer or soldier man, and he came out of this tank and with this, this rifle of his and whatever he said. Anyway, he spoke in English I suppose. We didn’t know a word of English. He must have said, ‘Well, if you are not going to disappear right away, I’m going to kill you.’ It was insane on our part of course.
“On the next day another one came with a tank and requested to speak to the head of that hospital. In the beginning, I think, you know, from the heat of the battle, they were all very rude, the Americans – I mean to the Germans. There came this Dr. Hauser, who was actually a very decent fellow, and this American officer who kept spitting all the time, just spitting as far away as he can. But later on they all behaved very well.”
“And there is another thing. A few weeks before the liberation when the Allies were approaching, there was a time – of course Mussolini was on the side of Hitler’s. But there was this one – of course Mussolini was hanged much before. He was caught, and then he was released, and then he was caught again and hanged. And Italy was out of the picture. But I think when Mussolini was still alive, I don’t know if you heard of it… There was this General Badoglio in Italy who was fighting against Mussolini and against Hitler. And he organized this, it was called Badoglio’s army, it was supposed to fight the Nazi’s. But later we find out, because we knew those Italians – really, they were kids who hardly had any training or anything, either just out of school or out of college. And they were taken prisoners by the Germans. We didn’t know about it. And they were there in this Weissenburg, or nearby.
“There was this one big POW camp where one wasn’t supposed to go near, but it was for British and French officers. And sometimes when you walked around you could see them playing ping-pong, or sunning themselves, or whatever they did. But those POWs from Badoglio’s army, somehow, I don’t know, I don’t know where they kept them, there were not many of them, maybe a hundred, I don’t know exactly.
“One fine day before the end of the war, it was maybe two or three weeks before the end of the war, the Germans decided they were not going to keep them anymore. They let them loose, they just let them go. They couldn’t go back to Italy: the war was going on and those poor boys, they really didn’t have anywhere to go. So a few of them drifted into our sanitorium. Of course, the Italians, they have a sense of humor, and they are gifted. All of them sang, really all of them had beautiful voices. I still have a soft spot for the Italians. In fact, I had a boyfriend there too. I mean for this short time, for a few weeks. Each one of us had one of those.
“When they came there, they were very hungry. There was a shack on those vineyards. When you walked around there was this empty shack among the vineyards. So we told them that if they want, they didn’t have where to sleep or anything, that they should go into this shack. There were maybe five of them, six of them, I don’t remember, and they should stay there. And during the day, if they want to, they can go up to our room.
About that Friday, when you were liberated…?
“So this Friday when they came, we told those boys to get out of the shack and go to our room and move around freely, the war is over for us. And the Americans made a DP camp in this POW camp. That day on Friday we were still working. But then Saturday morning we decided, well, now we are free, to hell with them. I mean, that’s it. We had no idea, but you know you were sort of drunk with the sense of freedom. The Germans had lost the war.
“Then we had very difficult times. We didn’t know where to turn and what to do. Suddenly we were suspended in a vacuum. But those first few days we laughed, and we cried, and we hugged, and those Italians were singing songs to us and, of course, they were so grateful for our feeding them. So next I remember… Saturday morning, of course, we didn’t go down to work. And there came this nurse to our room and she said, ‘What’s the matter, why aren’t you working?’ And did we give it to her! It really, maybe it was her, she was terribly afraid. She was such a coward, she kept on saying all the time, ‘What are you all going to do to me?’ We didn’t have any sense to do anything to her.”
No one ever knew that you were Jewish at this sanitorium?
“No. Well, Dr. Hauser did. He was really a very decent fellow. And when we came from this DP camp, which was organized in this POW, before we left for Stuttgart we did come to him to sort of say goodbye. You see, he was very nice. He was not a Nazi man. One knew that his wife was, but he would never say… You know the Germans were always greeting each other with ‘Heil Hitler.’ He never said, ‘Heil Hitler.’ They would say to him, ‘Heil Hitler.’ He was really not a Nazi. After the war he told us when we came to say goodbye to him, what he said…
“Of course, there we had an awful lot of Polish friends because there were all those Polish peasant boys that were working. They grew tobacco, and they grew wines there in the vineyards. And they worked with those farms there, a whole group.
“And after all this, afterward he said that he thought that we are somehow a little bit different. But what are we doing in Germany? He suspected that we maybe are doing some underground work: that we are there under false pretenses. But it didn’t occur to him that we are Jewish. He was the head of the hospital. He was a very nice man, a very nice man, Dr. Hauser, I remember him. And we always appreciated that he would never say, ‘Heil Hitler.’ I don’t know whatever happened to him.
“So that day when that one nurse came in – she was a coward. Not only that, but there was all this propaganda that the Americans are cannibals, they are going to cut them up in pieces. What they were doing to others, they were told that the Americans and the British are going to do to them, or the French. The French took Stuttgart. Stuttgart was not very far from us, but then they moved back two weeks later and the Americans went into Stuttgart. But most of those French troops that took this part – then they moved back – most of them were Moroccan units, and people were saying then when we came to Stuttgart that they were really quite dangerous. They were raping the German women right and left.
“After a week or so – we were just loafing around, we didn’t do anything. We went down to the kitchen, we helped ourselves to some food. We came up, our Italian guests were waiting there. We ate, we… And another thing, it was springtime, and one didn’t always behave in an exemplary manner, when I think of it. You know the Germans have all those fruit trees on the road, they have those cherries – those bings, the white, the Queen Anne’s, which we call here. Of course, these trees belonged to somebody. But all those slave laborers, everybody… I don’t think there was a cherry left for any German that springtime. We just stuffed ourselves with those cherries, I remember, which wasn’t really very nice, but who cared. At that time, we were so… You know, when I think back, those few days were like, were really intoxicating.
“The Americans suddenly found themselves with hundreds of thousands of millions of slave-laborers and I don’t know if they were prepared. Anyway, at this Weinsberg, there was this big barracks, and the American military turned it into a displaced person’s camp after two or three weeks of occupation. We were there on the spot because there was this big POW camp for French and British officers, and of course, this was evacuated. The Germans had evacuated the POW’s, the French POWs, before the Americans came close. So they decided they are going to make a displaced person’s camp there, and then repatriate everybody.
“Some heard about it. We were still living in our room in Weissenburg – Weissenhaus, this was called Weissenhaus – the complex of this sanitorium. And we heard that there is a camp and there were rumors that within a month everybody has to go to this camp and to repatriate you. That they are assigning barracks according to nationalities: French in the French barracks; Italians in Italian’s barracks; Belgium in Belgium barracks; Poles in Polish barracks. And so, of course, we are the Poles, so we are supposed to go to the Polish barracks.
“So, Marina, who is now in Florida, one day she said, ‘Well, let’s go down and see what’s happening there. Then we’ll see. Do we want to move to the camp or wait here until a few more weeks would go by and we’d find out what’s happening in Stuttgart,’ because we had friends in Stuttgart – Genna had a sister. Stuttgart was a big city, and then we didn’t even know yet that there are Jewish survivors of concentration camps. I mean for all we knew, we might have been a few girls, might have been the only Jews who were left in Europe.
“One day we did go down and walked around and investigated. We looked. Fine. And we walked out. We walked out of the camp, and a couple of minutes later an American on a motorcycle is running after us and he says we have no right to walk out. We belong to this displaced persons camp. We cannot go anywhere anymore, we are here. And he takes us. They themselves didn’t know what they are doing. And he takes us back and arrests us. He takes us to one of those barracks and he puts me in one room under key, and puts Marina in the next room under key, and there we are. We were sort of talking through the wall and saying, what’s going on here? We survived the war with the Germans and now with the Americans we are under arrest.
(To be continued)
