The Swiss Courier: A Novel (22 page)

James Joseph Marx, a bombardier with the 446th Bomb Squadron, 331st Bomb Group, U.S. Army Eighth Air Force, reminded Bill of the kid in school who wanted to be friends with everyone but didn’t really fit in with any of the groups. He’d been interned in Davos since German flak destroyed the right engine to his B-24 Liberator back in January. When the Yank bomber veered into Swiss airspace, they were inexplicably attacked by a pair of Swiss Me-109 fighters—Messerschmitts painted with a red square and a white cross on the tail assembly. Under a rain of .50-caliber fire, J.J.’s pilot buddy had managed to drop his wheels—a universal sign of distress. Then the crippled bomber successfully bounced onto the runway at a military airfield outside of Lake Constance.

Bill knew everyone’s story, just like everyone else knew his. Those things were easy to talk about—the missions, the dogfights, the escapes. What they couldn’t talk about so easily were their hopes of leaving this place. After all, they were in Davos “for the duration,” an open-ended time that no one knew how long would last.

“This place isn’t so bad . . . all things considered, although the hotel could use a paint job.” J.J. jerked his head toward the peeling paint on the white colonnades fronting this grand five-star establishment as well as the faded red carpet leading to its lackluster lobby. The Palace Hotel, one of the village’s fourteen hotels that had been transformed into lodgings for the interned pilots, had fallen into disrepair after Europe plunged into total war—and turned off the spigot of tourists.

“Yeah, I guess things could be worse. I’m not complaining.” Bill adjusted his khaki cap against the afternoon sun. “We don’t have to work. Three squares a day, my own bed, a bathroom down the hall. We even have some spending money in our pockets.”

The American internees received their full flight pay, converted into Swiss francs, every ten days from the U.S. Legation in Bern. The $7 or thirty Swiss francs from each paycheck could be used to supplement their Red Cross packages or even buy something more frivolous—like Swiss watches, cameras, or a pair of skis. What the money could
not
be spent on was clothes. The Americans had to wear their regulation GI uniforms at all times so that Swiss authorities could tell them apart from the locals.

Beyond the cheese-heavy diet, their biggest problem was idleness. The Hague Convention of 1907 prohibited obligatory labor, so many of the internees turned to sports as an outlet for the constant ennui. The British pilots favored football, but not the American kind. Several teams of various abilities played against Swiss club teams that ventured into the high country to give the
Engländer
a good match on the soccer pitch. During winter, American airmen took to ice hockey since Davos had an outdoor rink.

Last winter, Bill remembered,
all
the Allied pilots were crazy about downhill skiing in Davos, where the world’s first J-bar ski lift opened in 1934. Many pilots had never strapped on a pair of wooden skis and bear-trap bindings before arriving in Davos, but bombing down the hill seemed somewhat appropriate for this boisterous crowd. The Yanks and the Brits weren’t interested in learning the stem Christie from their exasperated Swiss ski instructors—many of whom were their armed guards off the piste—but in schussing as fast as they could. Bill winced at the memory of broken femurs he had witnessed, but smiled at the reminiscence of Andreas and Willy Mueller helping him safely snowplow to the small warming hut situated at the bottom of the long Parsenn run. But it just didn’t seem right—enjoying himself, snow skiing while his girl waited tables six days a week and his friends died in battle.

J.J. leaned close and whispered, “A couple of us guys are thinking of making a run for it.”

“When?”

“Tonight. After the movie. You want in, Palmer?”

Bill paused. If you were caught escaping, it was an automatic ninety days in a Swiss penitentiary camp. There were several, but Wauwilermoos outside of Lucerne carried the reputation as being the worst of the worst. The drafty wooden barracks were populated with Swiss murderers, rapists, and robbers. Prisoners slept on clumps of straw. The outdoor privy was nothing more than a long plank of wood—with six holes—erected over a trench filled with effluent. The prison compound was surrounded by double rows of barbed wire, and guard towers stood sentry in each corner. Rifle-toting guards patrolled the perimeter with vicious attack dogs. Occasionally a Swiss guard released a Doberman or German shepherd on an unsuspecting prisoner for the sport of it.

Compared to
Wauwil
, as the pilots called it, life in Davos was a Roman holiday. The airmen were free to wander around the village, go window-shopping, even take tea with a local family. More than a few Swiss mothers angled to marry off their eligible daughters to an American pilot if romantic sparks kindled into a blaze. Bill recalled that J.J. enjoyed hanging out with Corinne Busslinger, whose beauty queen looks had won her the title of Miss Schweiz before the war.

The interned pilots were free to do pretty much anything they wanted—except escape. The Swiss military took a dim view of wandering beyond the chalk-marked boundaries at each end of Davos; the penalty for getting caught was swift and sure: extradition to one of the penitentiary camps like Wauwilermoos.

“Isn’t tonight awfully quick?” Bill had heard the success rate was less than 20 percent.

“Didn’t you hear the news, man? Patton’s headed for Paris, and France is about to be liberated. All we have to do is get to the French border.”

“Yeah, but what’s your plan to get there?” Bill knew that Geneva, a likely jumping-off point, was 275 miles away.

“We walk to the valley and pick up a train near Chur.”

“But that’s more than thirty miles!”

“Okay, so we have to rough it for a couple of days. We’ll be all right once we get to the Rhine valley. My buddy Sam speaks German like a pro, and I’ve been learning from the locals.”

Bill shot a knowing look.

J.J. looked a bit embarrassed. “You heard about Corinne, I see. She told me the Swiss Army grunts thought someone would make a dash for it during the First of August celebration, figuring they were distracted. That didn’t happen, so they’ve let their guard down.”

“How much money do I need?”

“A hundred francs would do it. You have that?”

Bill nodded.

J.J. gave his buddy a light tap on the shoulder. “Then think about it. We’re not leaving until the movie’s over.”

“What’s showing at the Davos Kino?”

“Humphrey Bogart in
Casablanca
. I think I’ve seen it five times. Nice film and all that, but if I hear Bogey saying, ‘Here’s looking at you, kid’ one more time, I’ll lose my lunch.” His Bogart impersonation was rather respectable.

Bill laughed. “Yeah, that might be enough to send anyone over the chalk line.” He tried to act as if he wasn’t intrigued by the idea—in case he didn’t go along with the escape attempt— but the chance to rejoin his unit and perhaps receive Stateside leave to visit Katie and his family seemed more appealing by the minute. “I’ll think about it.”

“You think all you want.” J.J. patted Bill’s shoulder. “Listen, Sam and I are meeting up behind Heiz Bakery at the end of town. If you want to be a hero, be there.”

Gabi’s hands scrubbed the slightly oblong potatoes with a golden yellow skin under a stream of cold water, but her mind wasn’t set on her task. Instead, she thought about her new assignment across the border in Germany and the fabricated identity card hidden under the red woolen socks in her dresser. Her stomach felt loaded down with rocks, but she hummed to herself as if she didn’t have a care in the world.

Ernst Mueller, with a sheaf of papers in hand, breezed through the spring-hinged kitchen door. “I thought I smelled raclette. Good choice for dinner tonight.”

“I’m glad you approve, especially since we had raclette two nights ago.” Thea smiled.

Gabi watched her mother size up what remained of a half wheel of raclette cheese from the Valais region of southwest Switzerland. A small crescent of the firm, buttery cheese was all that remained—maybe 250 grams. “I think we can stretch another meal, don’t you, Gabi?”

Gabi stopped washing the small, firm potatoes known as
charlottes
. “You’re counting Eric, I hope.” She dried her hands on a dishtowel. “Let’s see . . .
eins, zwei, drü, vier, fünf
. . . ,” she enumerated in Basler dialect. “We should have enough potatoes and cheese, and if we don’t, we’ll have to remember that millions on this continent are wondering what they’ll eat tonight.”

“Great perspective, Gabi,” her father replied. “The fact that Switzerland has been protected from the ravages of this war is one of the points I’ll be making in my sermon Sunday morning.” He regarded the scribble of sentences on his papers, along with tangential notes in the margin. “It’s like we’re in the eye of a hurricane, surrounded on all sides by death and destruction. But God’s protection doesn’t mean we can turn our backs to what’s happening around us. I haven’t preached on the plight of the Jews since Bern announced ‘the boat is full’ earlier this year, but did you know that the Jews were kept at arms’ length in this country for centuries?”

“Switzerland?” Gabi filled a pot with water and set it on the stove, glad to engage her mind on something else other than Dieter’s assignment. “I thought it was only in Germany that they’ve had so much trouble.”

“When the Black Death swept through Basel back in the fourteenth century, the Jews were accused of poisoning the wells because they didn’t die in nearly the numbers as the Baslers did. The city fathers attempted to protect the Jews, but the local guilds demanded their blood. Six hundred men, women, and children were rounded up, shackled inside a wooden barn, and torched. Subsequently, Jews were banned from Basel—and just about everywhere else in Switzerland. Until 1879, Jews could live in only two towns: Lengnau and Endingen. The situation didn’t improve until after the Franco-Prussian War when Switzerland loosened immigration laws relating to Jews. The great mathematician Albert Einstein, raised in a Jewish family in Munich, had no problem coming to this country in the late 1890s and was accepted at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich.”

“Andreas and Willy hope to start their engineering studies at the ETH when the war’s over,” Gabi interrupted, referring to the prestigious Swiss Technical University.

Her father smiled. “Yes, that will be nice when life can return to normal. Maintaining our neutrality hasn’t been easy for us. Switzerland has had to go along to get along with Germany. There’s a reason why Swiss newspapers don’t criticize Hitler or the Nazi regime, and it’s because our government pressures the press not to antagonize Berlin. We also do their bidding with this racial hatred they have against the Jews. When these poor wretches manage to escape into Switzerland with a J stamp on their papers, our official policy is to deliver them back into the clutches of the Germans or the Vichy government. Andreas and Willy said they heard that more than 30,000 Jews have either been turned back at the border or captured and escorted into Nazi hands. Shameful.”

“But the Turrians at church said some Jews were allowed in.” Thea glanced up as she scraped the skin off the half wheel of cheese.

Ernst moved toward the counter and leaned against it. “It’s true that some Jewish families could stay, but that was in the early days of the war,” he continued. “The cantons began charging a tax on each Jewish head for their upkeep. Organizations like the Swiss-Jewish Congress must support them, or otherwise they’re handed back to the Germans on a silver platter—just like John the Baptist’s head.”

Gabi rarely heard her father pontificate like this—unless he was in the pulpit. “You’re right, Papi. I’ll never forget the flash of fear I saw in the eyes of that Jewish family on the Mittlere Brücke, or the sight of them jumping from the bridge.”

“What the Swiss need is a reminder that God made the Jews his chosen people.” Ernst regarded one of his notes in the margin. “It all goes back to Genesis 12:3, where the Lord God said, ‘I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.’ You can go down through history and point out what happened to civilizations that persecuted Jews as a matter of official state policy. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, and the great Roman Empire persecuted the Jews. All were destroyed. Spain hosted one of the largest and most prosperous Jewish populations before expelling the Jews in 1492 on the same day Columbus set sail for the New World. Within a hundred years, the defeat of the Spanish Armada signaled the decline of Spain as a great European power.”

“So what are you saying, Papi?” Gabi lifted the pot cover to check the water.

“I fear what will happen to England when this war is over. Back in 1917, the British captured Palestine from the Muslims and offered the Jews a homeland. Within a year, England won the Great War, but once the hostilities stopped, the British broke most of their promises to the Jews. They’ve restricted Jewish immigration to the Holy Land, and during the 1930s, they turned their backs on Jewish families on this continent. I’m afraid we may have a holocaust on our hands.”

Gabi wiped her hands on her apron and drew closer to her father. “Getting warmed up, I see. You’ve been doing your homework.” She dumped a handful of potatoes into the stainless steel pot filled with boiling water.

Ernst set his notes on the kitchen counter and stirred the potatoes with a wooden spoon. “You’ve heard the popular saying around here: ‘For six days a week, Switzerland works for Nazi Germany, while on the seventh day, it prays for an Allied victory.’ We all know that thousands of Swiss cross the border daily to work in German factories. The Swiss need to work a little less for the Germans and pray harder for an Allied victory.”