As far as I was concerned now, philosophy was a study for sissies with their heads in the clouds or up their asses. Learning a trade might be the best way to go. Damn, I had become an old man in a junior’s body.
The next morning, after a hearty breakfast of catfish and potatoes, I hugged and kissed Mrs. Novak and Arthur goodbye with tears in my eyes, grabbed my knapsacks, and headed into town. Ilse and Carlos were anxiously waiting in front of her house. I put one of my knapsacks over my shoulder and the other into the stroller.
None of us was concerned that our provisions were bending the rear axle. Carlos and I grabbed the rope and Ilse got behind the stroller and raised her arm like a coachman cracking his whip.
“Vorderman und Seitenrichtung,” (Line up, front and side) Carlos mumbled in his coarse Spanish accent.
It was the only German he knew. It was what the Kapos bellowed every morning when we marched out the gates. I turned to Ilse.
“Okay Kapo, let’s get rolling.”
This was the first time that I heard them laugh.
Outside Wustrow we turned off the highway to Reinsberg and followed a road that would take us to a train station, the first leg of our journey to Berlin. Except for the carcasses of a few German tanks, the road was deserted. In an outlying field, a Soviet soldier was tilling the ground with a plow pulled by ten German women.
Ilse whispered to us to move faster.
We went around a bend and I looked back. The hill where I left Stella was gone. What unforgettable memories she gave me.
Memories that my imagination embellished while I laid in those infested bunks, dug those ditches, froze during those roll calls, and withered with hunger. Stella had given me strength when I was at the end of my rope, and in those months that rope nearly slipped from my grasp every day. I had a good grip on the rope now, and it was going to get me home.
EPILOGUE
It took us three days of walking and hitching rides to reach Berlin.
Although the sector had been carpet-bombed, by some miracle Ilse’s apartment building was still in good shape. Carlos and I visited the newly opened French Information Office. The officer in charge wouldn’t issue Carlos a visa, advising him to return to Franco’s Spain and apply there. Okay. The only way to the Spanish border would be to either sprout wings or cross through all of France, and the only thing Carlos could have applied for in Franco’s Spain was his death certificate. It was reassuring to see that stupid bureaucrats survived the war unscathed.
Two days later Carlos and I said goodbye to a tearful Ilse, and ten days after that we managed to reach the American zone. We hopped on an Army truck with some GIs from Texas to get to a Red Cross train. On the way to the station Carlos was in his glory, chatting up the Spanish-speaking soldiers. I thought of butting in with the story of how Carlos became a Red Army coat hanger, but he just had too big a smile on his face. Maybe I had finally mastered biting my tongue.
The Red Cross train, stuffed with soldiers, displaced persons, and Red Cross nurses, snaked through Holland and Belgium. Eight days later I was in a Paris military hospital, where I finally wrote my parents that I was alive and would be home soon. Four weeks after the letter, a friend of the family arrived to see why I was still in Paris. My parents were quite upset when the friend phoned and said the reason was a young waitress, which was not quite the truth. I was in no hurry to get home because I was afraid of what I would find, or more exactly what I wouldn’t find, in my hometown.
The train to Nice was crowded with Allied servicemen heading for a well-deserved furlough on the French Riviera. I rode in first class, courtesy of the French government, and was the only civilian in the dilapidated compartment. I sat next to a husky, barrel-chested U.S. Navy officer and remarked on all his medals and battle ribbons. The officer replied, “If Hirohito doesn’t throw in the towel pretty soon, I may still see some action and then I’ll run out of space on my chest.”
I stood alone on the Nice train platform that had been the starting point of my odyssey. There was no welcoming party for me.
Wanting to put off the inevitable tears, hugs, kisses, smiles, and questions as long as I could, I made sure no one knew I was arriving home that day. On the way to the streetcar stop I passed the Hotel Excelsior. What room had Stella and her parents been locked up in before the Nazis marched them to the train? I wondered. The hotel windows were broken and bullet holes pockmarked the walls.
“The Resistance killed some of those bastards when they stormed the building during the liberation,” an elderly gentleman with a red rosette of the Legion of Honor in his lapel volunteered.
He noticed the tattoo on my arm, shook my hand, and saluted.
Walking up my street, I found my apprehension compounded by the sight of our front yard overgrown with weeds. The front door was ajar and the doorknob was missing. I entered the vestibule and then the living room, both rooms bare of furniture. What had happened? A noise came from the dining room. My father was eating at a ramshackle table. We stared at each other in silence for a very long time. He raised himself painfully from his chair. Tears were running down his cheeks.
“You just missed Claude.” He said in a trembling voice.
My mother came in from the kitchen. She stood open-mouthed in the doorway and dropped the pan she was holding.
I was home.
At that time I had no desire to put my ordeal down on paper, no need to purge myself of Nazi-induced nightmares. Frankly, I’d re-acclimated rather nicely to my former life in Nice. I attended a branch of the University of Aix-Marseille so I could finish my philosophy degree (even though I still believed it was all crap), and took a night course in jewelry making (something practical). My parents had weathered the war relatively unscathed except for having our house looted and occupied by Gestapo goons.
Claude had avoided the Gestapo and the milice and had become somewhat of a hero in the Maquis. Carlos was now working in a thermometer factory in nearby Menton. Bernard was gone. Like so many in France and throughout Europe, he was unaccounted for, and the likelihood of ever learning his fate was nil. His mother was hysterical. Bernard was her only child. Every time I went to see her, she’d ask if I was positive I hadn’t seen her son in Auschwitz. Finally I just couldn’t take it anymore and stopped coming by.
In August 1945 a picture of the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima was framed and hung in the office window of the Nice newspaper Eclaireur. A few months later, the doctor who’d been treating my father’s cancer with radiation and loads of arsenic advised him to go to America, where they were fighting leukemia with the radioactive fallout from A-bomb tests. When our visas finally arrived in 1947, I was working part-time for the French army as an interpreter for German POWs and had been offered the position as head interpreter in Normandy. I would have gotten officers’ pay, but I couldn’t abandon my parents at this critical juncture. So we flew to New York City, then made our way to Santa Monica, California.
For me, America was a happy-go-lucky place where there was no bitterness and animosity toward neighbors who’d collaborated with the enemy, no postwar food rationing, and no embarrassment from being occupied by “the god with a moustache.” I was riding the buses and streetcars and walking the sidewalks of the country that had liberated mon pays (my country). I was in the land of giants.