Behind Hitler's Lines (24 page)

Rosie remembers: “Keating was just a Nazi in an American uniform. He was a big help in their effort to divide us [by nationalities]. Brits and Scots played soccer against each other. That was also supposed to split them but the games become very popular for the bored guards to watch. How about another spectator sport? we asked, and got permission to put up two hoops and soon the krauts liked watching basketball too. They'd never seen it before. There were three American teams. Mine was called the Clipped Wings because four of us were Screaming Eagles. There was also a Canadian and a Polish team. The Poles didn't know anything about the game—couldn't even shoot a layup—but they sure learned how to play basketball like a demolition derby, and that's what the krauts liked to see. The Poles went after a rebound like it was a food parcel.”

In the strange world of stalags, the strangest relationship was that between Poles and Germans. The earliest Polish
POWs (1939) were long gone, gone to their deaths from the firing squads of Nazi
Einsatzgruppen,
because Hitler regarded Poles as nothing more than Slavs, same as the Russians, an undetectable notch above Jews, and they were all programmed and sped to extermination.
^*
But the twenty thousand or so Polish soldiers who somehow managed to reach Great Britain had there been formed into units under the aegis of the British, and wearing British uniforms, they acquitted themselves magnificently in North Africa, Italy, and Normandy. To these latter Polish prisoners stalag authorities accorded Geneva Conventions respect, nearly equal to that of other Allied krieges.

Rosie recalls: “To beat the hard-rebounding Poles, I recruited Pat Bogle for our team. He, Bradley, and I became a mucker trio. That worked real well because Bogle and I were smokers and Bradley wasn't and could barter his cigarettes for food. Bogle and my contribution was to star in the basketball league so our team won the championship prize of three packs each. I guess that made us professional athletes!

“Basketball also got me promoted. When I was captured my rank was PFC. Joe says IV-B was all NCOs, but there were EM there too. They were sent out on work details to farms, factories, and road repair. That meant digging up bombs the way we did at Alengon. The only reason you'd want to leave camp on a detail like that is if you were trying to escape. Otherwise you'd come back every night so worn out you couldn't get up next morning. Some guys were literally worked to death that way.”

The Man of Confidence at IV-B, Sergeant McKenzie, kept all kriege records. He also played on the Canadian basketball team with a few Americans who had joined the Canadian
army before Pearl Harbor and were captured at Dieppe. McKenzie wanted to keep the league active because he was winning a lot of bets on games. That way he became a cigarette millionaire. He could have bought his way to Switzerland if he'd wanted to, but he stayed because of his responsibilities.

“Enlisted men had to pull work details, but NCOs didn't,” Rosie says. “That's according to the Geneva Convention. So—to keep me in camp and on the basketball court— McKenzie changed my records to read ‘corporal.’ I may have been the only American to have been promoted in a stalag!”

With no athletic ability, Gintjee's distraction was recording routine:

An inflexible curfew was enforced each night at dark. Anyone found outside the huts, the Germans announced, would be shot. There was also “warning wire” three feet from the barbed wire. Crossing into this zone was a capital offense.
Krieges queried the MOC as to whether the shooting policy was for real. He replied that anyone who wanted to could be the test case, and he'd see that he got a postwar posthumous decoration for bravery.

Meanwhile, British uniforms were issued to everyone in rags. Gintjee stayed with his tattered jumpsuit, though the hole in his pants grew larger. What he was losing through his bowel did not concern him as much as petty theft in his hut, mostly from the tiny bread ration some krieges stashed to eat just before they lay down for the night, when without distraction thoughts focused on food and hunger prevented sleep.

“This is a cardinal crime because bread means rest. The less you have of one the more you need the other. The Nasties are curious about how we'll handle the problem. We're pretty sure the thieves are Americans. The Man of Confidence got wind of this and told us there had never been that problem with Commonwealth krieges. I'm sorry to say that he's probably right. He also says if we catch the thief he can make his death look accidental. Muckers are now sleeping in shifts so the hut is never empty.”

Gintjee was detailed for “camp fatigue” with thirty-four other EM. Tools were piled on the athletics field: shovels, rakes, and two pairs of pliers. He was able to grab the pliers and spend the day pulling nails from crates while fellow krieges shoveled and raked. They thought one job would be to level the field because of a big mound in the middle that spoiled soccer games (played with a patched-up bladder). That didn't happen. They learned that the mound was a mass grave for Russians and the Nasties didn't want them dug up. There was a second cemetery, begun with a test of the curfew policy. One night Gintjee heard a single shot. It killed a Dutchman who went outside his hut to pee.

Entry 108 began with the exclamation: “A God sent issue of fifty cigarettes per man!” Krieges took this as confirmation of news that the invasion of southern France had linked up with the Normandy invasion, so Nasty was nicer. A British chaplain immediately went around asking for each man to donate ten smokes to the Russian compound, where they
were dying by the hundreds from typhus. From what he saw, they looked no more than twelve years old, and all maimed in some way: a twisted hand, a nose on the side of the face, legs that stuck out to the side at 45 degrees, a missing ear, a toothless mouth. The chaplain ended his appeal for cigarettes with the confession that it was difficult to consider these victims of atrocity as fellow humans, and even more so the monsters who had done it. Without complaint, nearly all the Western krieges donated ten precious cigarettes to be tossed over the fence. “For every Keating,” Gintjee scribbled, “there are a hundred guys who take pity on those worse off.”

After morning roll call Gintjee made it a habit to wander over to the Polish compound and admire one of the most ingenious contraptions in camp, a little stove made from German cocoa cans, with cups and saucers fashioned out of the tin in Red Cross parcels. The Poles auctioned them for souvenirs but had few sales till Gintjee made a deal to monogram them with solder, resulting in a hugely profitable collaboration. Something to
take home
from a stalag revived hope that home was out there, waiting and attainable. How far, how long, only the outcome of the war would reveal, but a souvenir from IV-B suggested inevitability.

Gintjee's mucker was John Marshall, whose souvenirs were buttons from uniforms. His ambition, pursued daily, was to acquire at least one button from every country represented in camp, including Germany and nations most krieges didn't know were even in the war, like Serbia and Albania. Slowly—one thing available in abundance was time—Marshall sewed them on his coat, like the weavers in a myth Gintjee tried to recall. In time Marshall became a camp celebrity. Krieges and even guards stopped him at all the compounds, studied his button collection, and sometimes donated or proposed trades. The buttons became too much for his coat, bulging his pockets and the bags he carried like some vagabond. His trove grew to hundreds of buttons, and the collecting kept him occupied and engaged. But a message came down from the Man of Confidence to Gintjee: was his mucker collecting buttons or losing his marbles?

There were krieges at IV-B who had slipped into that second category, most famously the RAF sergeant who had to be escorted at all times by another kriege or he'd head for the wire. At different times both Joe and Gintjee had that job, coveted because the Scotsman's tale was fascinating. He should have been in a Luftwaffe stalag, so he said, but since he was the very first kriege to be captured in the war, IV-B's commandant wouldn't approve a transfer. McKenzie asked him to negotiate with the IRC to have the original kriege exchanged in Switzerland for some German psycho prisoner held in England, but again the commandant refused. The Scotsman was so confident of his immunity that he claimed the guards wouldn't shoot him even if he went for the wire. That's why he had to be accompanied by volunteers like Joe and Gintjee.

“The benevolent krauts,” wrote Gintjee, began distributing a quatro newspaper named
OK Kid!
The editorial policy, of course, was propaganda, but the effect was informative and an entertaining distraction. “They couldn't have imagined what a pastime it was for us to read between the lines and guess what might really be going on in the world. We have to do it through articles like ‘What the Atlantic Charter Really Means’ (a Jewish conspiracy), and ‘Formosa Victory’ to show how the Japs were winning the war in the Pacific.”

A favorite was the Goebbels editorial saying democracy may be okay for some people but Europe has always preferred dictatorships like the Bourbons, Hapsburgs, and—no surprise—Hitler. The only disturbing feature of
OK Kid!
was Keatingesque essays by krieges about life in American slums. Readers were divided by these accounts. “Why not?” one of Joe's muckers shrugged, “if it gets you a parcel. We all know it's bullshit.” McKenzie felt otherwise, and anyone in IV-B who contributed material felt his wrath. Gintjee recounted:

The Americans' greatest influence in IV-B was gambling, which for krieges of other nationalities there had been scant interest previously. With energetic ingenuity and imagination, crap tables and roulette wheels were improvised. Gint-jee felt gambling was an appeal to the spirit that tomorrow we may die or next month be liberated, so what the hell, it's only cigarettes—let's get some excitement in our lives, win or lose in an egalitarian contest. That became a campwide attitude expressed in raffles, numbers rackets, and gruesome betting on how many American bombers would be shot down the next day.

Gintjee also made observations as an economist. When there was a bonus issue of cigarettes from the IRC it did not make everyone happy. Creditors with tobacco fortunes saw their net worth reduced when debtors paid off in devalued smokes. The British especially grumbled about such volatility and how widespread gambling upset the equilibrium that had sustained them before the Americans arrived. What if McKenzie became a debtor to Keating? It was a question hard to answer.