Chapter 8 #2
Say, did you hear what General McAuliffe did a couple of days back?
Bastogne encircled by the Krauts, and the Germans demanding his surrender.
Tough situation. He sent them a message, all right.
It was one word: “Nuts!” What a guy. Patton’s troops relieved him yesterday, and the Germans haven’t been able to break out.
They don’t have the air power anymore and we do, and they’re mighty thin on supplies, too, especially fuel.
They beat a pretty quick retreat once Patton’s men showed up.
There are advantages to being the radioman—I hear more than most. Of course, I’m not allowed to share it at the time. If the censors don’t like anything I tell you, you’ll know, because it’ll be blacked out.
I guess by the time you get this it will be OK for me to have told you that we moved into position on the western bank of the Rhine yesterday.
There are Germans right across the water from us—our first sight of them.
The war seems mighty close—we can hear the shelling.
I expect we’ll see some action at last, maybe even tomorrow.
Plenty of tension in camp, but more joking than usual, too.
It’s like a test you’ve been studying hard for, the kind that’s going to determine your future.
You’re dreading it, and you also just want it to be over. We’ll see how the thing comes out.
Love to you and Mom,
Joe
My own Christmas was more comfortable.
25 December 1944
Not just Christmas, but my 16th birthday.
Frau Heffinger has been saving up the sugar rations, it seems, and our smuggled eggs, too, because she made an Eierschecke in honor of the occasion.
Not a very large one, but oh, how we enjoyed it.
We each had the tiniest sliver, so there was enough for the servants to share as well.
How good the custard tasted! I’ll never take food for granted again.
Mother says that she’s never in her life had to be so concerned about what the servants will eat.
Honestly, I find her attitude a bit regressive, and wish she’d join the modern age.
She’s fond of Lippert, of course, because Lippert came with her from Schleswig-Holstein upon her marriage, but otherwise?
They may as well be chess pieces to her, I’m sure.
Father is different, but then, Herr Kolbe, his valet, once saved his life in the first war, and Father has more modern ideas than Mother.
I’ve vowed to model my life on Father’s, as much as a girl can.
The most important thing, I believe, is to be clear-eyed and strong.
Mother gave me a pearl necklace for my birthday, one of the lesser jewels that wasn’t sent away for safekeeping.
It’s certainly very pretty, but I can’t imagine where I shall wear it.
Certainly not with my horrible BDM uniform, and that’s almost the only place I go now, to do our silly marching and singing, the running and jumping about, and then the “home evenings” where we’re meant to learn to cook and clean and care for babies so we can become good wives and mothers.
“Like any petit bourgeois Hausfrau,” Mother sniffs.
“When is my daughter going to need to cook and clean, I’d like to know?
” One does have to laugh, she’s such a snob.
Oh! I did go someplace else this week, for a treat! Traudl Larsen and I went to the cinema on Friday, as we’ve been doing every few weeks this past year. One must have some fun, after all. It was a romantic picture, though, and very silly and immature. I prefer a more serious and dignified man.
Father gave me a gold wristwatch for my birthday, Art Deco in style and very fine.
I suspect it to be one of his, as it’s rather large.
I shall treasure it. I knitted him a scarf, made of wool I unraveled from an old sweater.
I’m afraid it was rather lumpy. Frau Lieberman, one of our BDM instructors, despairs over my knitting, not to mention my inferior athletic ability at everything but swimming—Father has told me I mustn’t reveal my condition, so Frau L.
merely thinks I’m clumsy and timid when I fail to manage a somersault.
I’m certainly not going to tell her, either, that Mother said, “Why would my daughter possibly need to knit?” At least I’m not scolded at home for my failures!
I gave Mother a watercolor I did of the palace and Hofkirche viewed from across the river, which I put into a frame that had held a photo of Max, the harlequin Great Dane we had when I was young.
I’m afraid my painting isn’t any more skillful than my knitting, but it cost me a pang to take Max out of his frame, so perhaps the sacrifice counts for something.
It’s difficult to give gifts when there’s nothing in the shops but the occasional potato.
Even needles are in short supply, Frau Schultz, the housekeeper, tells me, and cloth is of course rationed strictly.
At least that means my lack of sewing ability goes unchallenged!
Dr. Goebbels gave a Christmas address over the wireless.
One does wonder why the Führer never speaks anymore; he is, my mother says, conspicuous by his absence.
(I must remember not to say “the Führer” before Father, as he doesn’t like it.
I haven’t told him that we’re required to do the Nazi salute and heil-Hitler our way around the place at school and BDM meetings, but I assume he knows.
It’s hardly a secret.) G. reported that half a million men have been working nonstop on fortifying the Siegfried Line, so that it is now an even more impregnable bastion of bunkers, tunnels, and tank traps from the Netherlands to Switzerland.
The Allies will never breach the Rhine, he proclaims, although Father says, “And Goering swore that no aircraft would ever reach German skies.”
Honestly, one doesn’t know what to wish for anymore.
Outside of the palace, things seem very bad, with queues for food everywhere, the shelves nearly empty, and scrawny children scavenging for spilled coal on the railway tracks.
On the tram home from school on Friday, a shabby old man stood on the forward platform in the cold—it was an icy, windy day, quite miserable—when a rough-looking fellow, a workman in a cloth cap, opened the door and said, “You’ll catch your death.
Come inside.” The man—bearded, with deep-set eyes in a sunken face—stared at him with the oddest expression, and I realized he was wearing the star and wasn’t allowed to ride inside, and that he didn’t dare disobey.
One sees so few Jews on the streets now, one forgets.
I wonder where they’ve gone? Evacuated, we hear, but to where?
Can peace, even a losing peace, be worse than this war? Mother says the Russians would definitely be worse, but when I ask how, she tightens her lips and won’t say. Honestly, could she remember that I’m very nearly an adult now?
What a difference between that entry and Joe’s next letter.
January 9, 1945
Dear Dad,
Well, I guess you know by now that we’re across the Rhine, but they sure didn’t make it easy. I can say I’ve been in it now. It’s not what I thought it would be. More confusing, for one thing, but I’ll try to make some sense of it here.
The brass knew the Germans were trying another counterattack, it seems, not ready to give up what they’re calling “The Battle of the Bulge,” for the shape of the advance.
They thought, though, that the main push would be to the north, up toward Strasbourg.
We were mighty surprised, then, the day after Christmas, to find ourselves faced with tanks and artillery manned by SS troopers.
They’d crossed the Rhine in the dead of night, and we weren’t prepared for them, with no tanks of our own and no artillery support.
We did what we could, though it wasn’t much use.
There we were, lying in the snow, shooting at tanks with rifles.
One SS officer poked his head up out of the turret and shouted, “Surrender, surrender, you damn fools.” In English, if you can believe it.
He got his arm shot off for his trouble, and no, we didn’t surrender.
We pressed forward, with the guys shouting, “Hubba! Hubba!” It was rousing to hear.
We couldn’t wait until morning, when our position would be even worse, so there was nothing for it but to fight our way through the town, though we weren’t expecting the scrap to last for days.
I don’t mind telling you that it was a mighty close-run thing.
Our ammunition was low, and our casualties were high.
Don’t tell Mom this, but you remember Alan Menckel, the fellow I told you about, whose family has the department stores?
He fell right next to me, barely an hour in, shot through the chest. I’d been joking with him the night before, telling him that the Allies hadn’t got it done yet, but now the Jews were here and we’d show them how.
He did his best, all right, and so did the rest of us.
“Hold at all costs,” they told us, and we held.
Remember how I said the radioman wouldn’t be in the thick of it?
Well, that’s not how it goes. Even the cooks and clerks were out there with us.
I saw Gus Samuels, who dishes up a mean stew, on a machine gun, giving better than he got right up until he was hit.
Wounded, though, not killed—he jokes that he’s as tough as Army beef, and I’d say that’s about right.
By the end of the first day, every one of our officers had been killed or wounded (don’t tell Mom that one either), but First Sergeant Biggs stepped up to lead us, and can you ever say he was brave. And at midnight, we still held half the town.