The Boy Who Went to War

  He asked after Lang, one of Wolfram’s fellow funkers, who had been in charge of the Turkmen and always treated them well. ‘Lang gut,’ he said. ‘Lang’s a good one.’ Wolfram replied that unfortunately he had no news of Lang. Babei then threw the blanket over the fence and said in his broken German: ‘It’s for you.’ Wolfram was extremely touched by his generosity, aware that the Turkmen could have done with the blanket himself.

  The prisoners arranged themselves on the rough ground as comfortably as they could, but there was little shelter from the wind and driving sand. Even though it was midsummer, the air grew damp and chilly as the last light faded. The men resigned themselves to a sleepless night.

  It was about two in the morning when the Georgians in the adjacent camp lit a bonfire that they had made from bits of old crates. Once they had a settled blaze, they all started to sing.

  The singing was quiet at first, but the sound steadily grew in crescendo as more and more of the men joined in. It was piercingly beautiful – an intricate polyphonic chant that drifted across the night, like a mournful and plaintive outpouring of all their sorrow. Wolfram could not help asking himself how the same people who had been so wild just a few hours earlier could now give voice to such haunting and complex melodies.

  He remained in the camp on Utah Beach for the next six days. Each morning, the Americans asked for work volunteers, promising double rations as an incentive.

  When the volunteers returned to the camp each evening, they invariably said that they had been burying decaying corpses all day, but Wolfram noticed that the last group of workers never came back. He had also observed that cargo ships arrived from England each morning with men and military hardware to be unloaded and assumed that the volunteers who did not return to camp had been taken away on the returning cargo ships. Desperate to escape from the war zone, he made it his goal to get aboard one of these vessels.

  To his surprise, he found that a number of his comrades did not share his desire to get away from the battlefront. Many believed that the war was almost over and were hoping to return to their families in Germany as quickly as possible. They had no wish to end up as prisoners in England or, worse still, find themselves transported to America.

  A few confessed to believing that Hitler’s much vaunted wonder weapons would soon be unleashed on the Allies. If so, they wanted to be in a position to break out from their prison camp and continue the fight.

  On 7 July 1944, the American guards once again called for volunteers. When the necessary number had been assembled, the rest of the men, including Wolfram, were told to make their way down to the beach. They were going to be shipped to England on the next available vessel.

  Later that afternoon, they were taken to an enormous cargo boat that was being used to transport tanks and artillery from Britain to France. There were no decks inside – just a cavernous, hollow shell, like a gigantic warehouse. The guards told the men to find a space on the floor and sit down. A row of buckets at the far end of the hall would be their latrines.

  The German soldiers retained a strict hierarchy of rank even in captivity, with the officers sitting in a little group by themselves. Each time the men needed to use the latrines, they had to pass these officers.

  On one occasion, those answering the call of nature included a private named Goesser who had been at Wolfram’s training camp in Strasbourg. Wolfram, seeing him now wearing the badge of a sergeant, assumed he must have been promoted on the battlefield.

  The officers also noticed the badge as he passed and began jeering at him. ‘Congratulations!’ they shouted amid peals of laughter. ‘So you’re a sergeant now!’

  It transpired that Goesser, hearing a rumour that the American army required work only of the lower ranks, had promoted himself by removing the badge of rank from a fallen sergeant and sewing it on to his own uniform.

  The genuine officers teased him mercilessly but with good humour. One of them said: ‘Come, come over here. Have you got your papers? I’ve still got my stamp and I can validate your promotion.’

  Goesser was embarrassed but nevertheless had his papers stamped, upon which the officers extended a general invitation to the others. ‘Hey, does anyone else want to be a sergeant? Come over here and we can sort it out!’

  The ship sailed through the night, docking in Southampton at the break of dawn on the following day. Wolfram and the other prisoners were escorted off the ferry in the early-morning sunlight and led down on to the quayside at exactly the moment when the English harbour staff were heading to work. All reacted similarly to the newly arrived Germans, turning their heads to stare, but no one said a word. It was so different from what the men had experienced in France, where villagers had shouted abuse and thrown stones.

  Their guards on land were a different matter, however. On board the ship they had been civil and courteous, but here in Southampton they were overtly hostile, screaming at the men, calling them pigs and insulting them in German.

  They were almost certainly Jewish immigrants who had fled their homes in the wake of Nazi persecution. Having been given refuge in Britain, they now vented their rage on the German captives in their charge.

  The prisoners were ordered to strip naked and their clothes were taken to a special oven to be heated to a temperature that would kill all the lice and fleas, while the men were led to a shower block where they could at last wash away weeks of sweat and grime.

  First, they were told to put all their personal belongings into a little bag with their name and number on it. An officer told them to report anything that went missing while they were in the showers.

  A few of the men, discovering that items had indeed been rifled, duly reported it but soon realised their mistake. The guards were furious, yelling at them: ‘How dare you – how dare you complain?’

  The prisoners were completely bewildered by this. Why had they been told to report missing items if they were just going to be abused?

  After two nights camped out on the Southampton quay-side, the men were told to gather their belongings and prepare themselves for a long train ride. They were to travel at night so they would have no idea where they were going.

  The journey seemed to take a lifetime, for the train kept shuddering to a halt in the darkness. Wolfram slept fitfully, even though he was exhausted. When dawn broke and the train started moving again, the men were told to close the curtains and not to look out.

  After few more uncomfortable hours they finally arrived at their destination: a prisoner-of-war camp at Driffield, near Hull, on the north-east coast of England. It was a makeshift establishment, a tented encampment laid out in a field. With eight men to each circular tent, it was so crowded that they had to sleep with their feet pointing into the middle. When it rained, the tent leaked.

  Wolfram was constantly hungry for the canteen staff never produced enough food, but one unexpected treat came in the form of real coffee. None of the men had drunk it for years; Wolfram had last tasted it in Nikolaiev, in November 1942. Now, there was an unlimited quantity and they drank so much that they all got stomach ache.

  The worst element of life at Driffield was the constant boredom. There was absolutely nothing to do. One of the men brought out a deck of playing cards but that amusement soon wore off. Wolfram had a little pocket knife and started to carve chess figures out of lumps of chalk. He had only enough time to make three pawns before it was announced that they were once again on the move.

  This time, their destination was infinitely more exciting. They were being taken to New York.

  Pforzheim had undergone many changes in the three months since the Allied landings in Normandy. The summer vacation had been become permanent as schools and universities across Germany were closed.

  The teachers were sent to work in factories producing weapons, where children were also given jobs. In the Rodi family, fourteen-year-old Frithjof and his two older sisters were required to go to work each morning, Frithjof to make clockwork pins for anti-aircraft grena
des. When the clock started ticking, it was fired skywards into a convoy of planes and would then explode, sending fragments of metal everywhere.

  Anyone who was too old to be conscripted into the army had to serve in the munitions factories. At the same time that Wolfram was being transported to Driffield prisoner-of-war camp, his father, Erwin, was told to report for duty in a weapons factory in Pforzheim. He was not there for long. As summer gave way to autumn, he was drafted into the Volksturm or Home Guard and posted to Alsace, where he was placed with a small group of men his age whose job was to construct defences on the frontiers of the Reich.

  Each morning, Erwin and his comrades were woken at dawn and handed pickaxes and spades. For the next ten hours, they were required to dig deep trenches and construct earthen embankments high enough to stop a tank. It was tough physical labour for old men and quickly took its toll. Erwin had never been physically strong, even when young. Now, aged fifty-seven, he was in poor shape. After a few weeks of back-breaking work and very little food, he was close to collapse.

  It was extremely fortunate that the head of the Eutingen Volksturm group happened to be Max Weber, a friend and close neighbour. Aware of the debilitating effect that such hard exertion was having on Erwin, Herr Weber wrote a special letter, permitting him leave of absence.

  Erwin arrived back in Eutingen to find Marie Charlotte struggling to find enough food to feed herself and her daughter, let alone the various house guests. As time went on, meat, dairy products and vegetables had become more and more scarce; now, total war was constantly disrupting supplies from farms to markets.

  The shortages affected families in Eutingen, Pforzheim and every other town in the area. In the Rodi household, one of the daughters, Gisela, was put in charge of food. The family nicknamed her their Minister for Foreign Affairs. She would regularly head into town and try to stock up on essentials like flour and cereals, which would be placed in a huge wooden cupboard that the family called the mehltruhe or flour trunk. Even so, the Rodis, like the Aïcheles, could not have survived without the fruit and vegetables they grew in their garden.

  The family’s eldest son, Peter Rodi, was two years younger than Wolfram and had so far escaped being drafted into the army. Now, however, after a brief stint in Poland, he was conscripted into the infantry and sent to Montbéliard, in eastern France, where resistance fighters were proving a new and menacing threat to national security. Many of these fighters had joined the French Forces of the Interior, formed in the aftermath to the Normandy landings. They would turn out to be an effective fighting force, despite their poor discipline, and the German army in France would come under increasing attack in the autumn of 1944.

  In the weeks that followed Peter’s departure, the family received no news as to his whereabouts. His mother used to tune in to the BBC every day to get the latest information on the fighting. The news was always announced by a loud and distinctive bumb-bumb-bumb-bumb sound. Whenever people heard that noise, they instantly knew that someone was listening illegally to the BBC.

  One morning, a few weeks after Peter had left home, two men from the local Nazi Party turned up unannounced at the Rodis’ house. The family had by now become so accustomed to listening to the BBC that they had forgotten that it was punishable by several weeks of harsh treatment in Dachau.

  Martha Luise had left the radio on by mistake and, as the Nazi officials stood in the hallway, there suddenly came a loud bumb-bumb-bumb-bumb. It was the BBC news.

  Fortunately the men passed no comment and, equally, Martha Luise managed to keep her cool. Calmly turning to her daughter, she asked her to switch off the radio.

  She found it rather more difficult to keep her composure on discovering the reason for their visit. Peter, the officials told her, had been involved in a shoot-out and was missing in action. It was unclear whether he was dead or had been taken prisoner.

  Many months were to pass before the family heard that Peter had been captured and was being held by the French. It was even longer before they learned the details. The moment of his surrender, heavily outnumbered and outgunned, had been extremely tense. His captors had lined him up against a wall with two others and pulled out their guns. Peter was convinced that they were about to be executed.

  The three Germans stood in abject fear as the French soldiers joked among themselves and played with their pistols. Then, unexpectedly, the Frenchmen started to laugh. The mock execution had been nothing more than a little joke. Satisfied that they had made their three captives sweat, they put away their guns and led them off to a barn where many other men were being held prisoner.

  They were eventually transported to the citadel in Besançon. For fully eight days they had nothing to eat. With just one tap for water, there was always a massive queue of men made desperate by thirst. On the ninth day of their captivity, they were given bread and a cauldron of watery soup.

  Peter and his fellow men were first transferred to Camp de Thol, a prisoner-of-war camp close to the town of Pont d’Ain, then, shortly afterwards, moved once again, this time to Genissiat, just a few miles from the Swiss border. Here, they were to work as labourers on the construction of a new hydroelectric dam across the Rhône.

  Although the barracks were marginally better than in Camp de Thol, with at least beds to sleep on, there was never enough food for young lads doing hard physical labour and they were famished from dawn until dusk. Meals consisted of pois de champs – hard, brown peas. If the men had chewed them, they might have got a little nourishment, but being ravenously hungry they wolfed them down in a matter of seconds. An hour later, the peas came out exactly in the same state as they had gone in.

  The French had suffered four long years of occupation and saw no reason to treat their German prisoners anything other than harshly. The lads worked for at least eight hours a day, shovelling sand and mixing cement. It was back-breaking work, especially on such a meagre diet. There were few rest breaks and the guards overseeing them would beat anyone they felt to be slacking. On one occasion, Peter was so exhausted that he could no longer summon the energy to lift his shovel. He pretended to faint in order to give himself a few minutes’ respite. When the guard realised that he was faking, he hit him.

  The chill mountain air, hard labour and wretched gruel quickly took their toll. One morning, Peter noticed that ulcers had started developing on his feet and arms. Soon after, his legs began swelling from hunger oedema, a swelling that then spread to his face. It was not long before he was in terrible shape; he was beginning to waste away from a lack of protein.

  The non-existent hygiene also contributed to the miserable state of these weary and hungry men. Because they were unable to wash, their skin erupted into livid rashes and sores. Each morning, when they had to walk up a hill to their workplace, all the French girls would hold their noses against the stench of their unwashed bodies.

  After a further week of hard labour, Peter was declared unfit to work. His oedema had worsened to such an extent that he was no longer able to pick up a shovel. He was taken back to the camp in Pont d’Ain and sent to the camp infirmary. It was where people went to die: the entire place stank of death.

  There were thirty prisoners in the infirmary; each night one or two of them would expire. Peter knew when someone in the neighbouring bunk had died because the lice would leave the corpse as soon as the warmth had gone from it and make their new home on his body.

  The inmates were left unattended for most of the time. A prison guard usually appeared twice a day – once to deliver a saucepan of inedible slops and once to take out the toilet pail. It was not long before Peter was little more than a skeleton. He weighed less than fifty kilograms, despite being well over six feet, and much of that weight was from water retention. As he lay there in the darkness, surrounded by groaning and dying men, he told himself that he had less than two weeks to live.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Working with Cowboys

  ‘We can’t all be cheats!’

  Wol
fram and his comrades were transferred by train to Liverpool in the second week of August 1944, then escorted to the city docks, where a large troopship lay at anchor. This was to be their floating prisoner-of-war camp for the next fortnight as they were transported across the Atlantic.

  For the first few days of the voyage the men were allowed out on deck for only half an hour at a time, but this rule was relaxed once they were at sea. The American officers assembled the men outside each morning and asked for volunteers to work on the ship. The outer hull was covered in rust, which needed scraping off. As an incentive, volunteers were promised extra rations of food.

  Wolfram offered his services immediately, infinitely preferring to be out of doors, in the fresh sea air, to being confined below decks. He was roped to the side of the vessel with scraper and brush in hand, and spent hours in the late-summer sunshine, watching the frothing breakers beneath his feet.

  After almost two weeks at sea, the men were once again confined to their cabins; they realised they must be nearing their destination. All were excited about the prospect of landing in America. It was as if a whole new adventure was about to begin.

  One evening, an excited cry went up. Some of the men had managed to prise off the cover of one of the ship’s portholes and could see that they were at long last approaching land.

  In Wolfram’s corridor there was a flurry of activity as everyone dashed to the porthole. Naturally, they all formed an orderly queue so that everyone could have his turn.

  The sight that greeted Wolfram’s eyes was breathtaking. The entire skyline of Manhattan was lit up – a sparkling, twinkling panorama of skyscrapers and lights. It was incredible to behold. The blackout had been a fact of life for so many years in Europe that everyone had forgotten what it was like to see lights at night.