Defending the Truth, page 2
The Battle of the Bulge, they will call it. But now it’s just a nameless surreal montage of blood and explosions and bullets. It is two weeks until the annual celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace, and I am lying in a foxhole in a foot of snow in a frozen field near a place prophetically named Diekirch, Luxembourg, and the 109th Infantry Regiment is pinned down by what appears to be every Tiger tank in the German Army. My company suddenly comes under a withering barrage of machine-gun fire from a battery set up at the edge of the winter-skeletalized forest. It rakes our exposed foxholes with bullets. I think that all of my men are going to be killed, and I find myself crawling through the frozen snow to within forty feet of the edge of the machine-gun emplacement and throwing a grenade into the hole and spraying the three German soldiers with the entire forty-round clip of my submachine gun. It is as though I am watching myself in a movie theater, and I have no control over my body.
Suddenly two of my men huddle with me on the ground, and I can vaguely hear one of them calling frantically through the field radio for a medic, but I can’t focus on why. Then I allow myself to fall into an oddly warm sleep. I awake sometime later in an aid station, and it is the first time that I feel the pain. My left leg is no longer frozen, and the bullet wound in my thigh hurts like hell. My leg is in a slinglike contraption hanging from a metal rod over the bunk, and I can see that the four small toes of my left foot are a morbid purplish color, like shriveled plums hanging on a tree limb. I realize that I have frostbite, and then my foot really starts to hurt.
Some medics haul me into an evacuation ambulance and load my shoulder with something that stings a little and soon takes away most of the pain. I wake up on a cot in an army hospital in Antwerp, Belgium, in an officers ward with about thirty other men, and the doctor tells me that I have lost all of the toes on my left foot except the big toe, and that the thigh wound will heal without a trace other than the scar, but it will take time.
My father is Orthodox, as I was as a child and young man. But somewhere I fell away from orthodoxy, I stopped wearing a yarmulke, I started shaving every morning except Saturday, and I stopped putting on my t’fillin [phylacteries] and tallis [prayer shawl] each weekday morning. I didn’t even take them with me when I moved from my parents’ house in Crown Heights in Brooklyn to a tiny apartment on the edge of Harlem when I began law school at Columbia.
But now I feel differently. I need help. Seeing men die, seeing the gravely maimed soldiers in this hospital, has frightened me as I have never been before. I turn to the Psalms and read them, as millions of men do and have done for centuries in their moments of sorrow and misgiving: “It is good for me that I have been afflicted, that I might learn thy laws, O God. Teach me good judgment and knowledge, for I believe thy commandments…How long shall the wicked triumph? They break in pieces thy people. They slay the wicked and the stranger and murder the fatherless. He that created the ear, shall He not hear? He that created the eye, shall He not see? Who will rise up for me against the evildoers? Who will stand for me against the workers of iniquity? The Lord is my defense, my God is the rock of my refuge. And He shall bring upon my enemies their own iniquity and shall cut them off in their wickedness.”
One day the colonel who is the hospital chief of staff comes to my cot and sits down in the field chair next to it and gives me a soulful look. “I was notified that your wife died in an automobile accident in Brooklyn,” he tells me, “but I didn’t think you were up to hearing about it till now. I’m very sorry, my boy,” he says. “I’d have medicaled you back to the States, but we’re on our last push through Germany, and we need every available man. I’ve got to send you back to light duty.” He stands up, shakes my hand, and walks out, leaving me piercingly alone, staring into space, seeing nothing through tear-filled eyes.
What will happen to Hanna and Adam? Are they okay? I am sure that my parents have taken them to live in their apartment on Brighton Beach Avenue, and that they are well cared for. Just the distance from them, however, just the not knowing, makes me deeply fearful for them. And I had thought that my war was over and I’d made it through alive, and they would soon send me home in one of those huge hospital ships, and I’d be able to start living again, to be with my children. But now I lie on the cot in the midst of dozens of other men, and I have never felt so desolate.
I loved Rachel. I remember our last night together as though it were last night. We made love, and she cried. And I lay there with the scent of her on my lips, and I cried, too. Though I didn’t let her see or hear me, because I didn’t want to frighten her, for her to know that I was a coward, that I didn’t want to go to war, that I just wanted to stay with her and Hanna and Adam. Rachel was just a girl, and she died. And I couldn’t even be with her. And then the agony of not being able to take Hanna and Adam into my arms and cry with them. That is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, to know that my children were grieving and in terrible pain, but not to be able to touch them and hold them and kiss away their tears. How can the central elements of a man’s life be taken from him just like that? Bang! Gone. And then a colonel says that he’s sorry, but that’s the way it is. Your wife is dead but you can’t go home. And you pray and cry out to God to help you in your despondency. But God does not answer. God does not help. Does God ever help?
The day before I’m discharged from the army hospital to join my new unit, there is a little ceremony in the general’s office. I’m promoted to major and awarded the silver star. The citation reads “for bravery above and beyond the call of duty,” but I can hardly remember exactly what I did, and I have no idea why I did it. The only thing I know for certain is that I wasn’t motivated by bravery but by abject fear.
I’m attached as JAG officer to a rear unit of Patton’s Third Army. We rapidly cross Germany into Czechoslovakia. My company is sent around behind the heavy weapons company to guard their rear when they enter a little town named Medzibiez. Intelligence reports that there is a platoon or more of SS troops holed up there. They had been in charge of a prison camp just south of the town, and they had abandoned it when the Americans were a day away. The prison camp is my responsibility: secure it, disarm it, make sure there are no Krauts around.
But it turns out not to be a run-of-the-mill prison camp. There are four ramshackle wooden barracks in which are huddled perhaps five hundred starved and diseased human beings. They are covered with suppurating sores and thriving lice and are but vacant-eyed remnants of what had once been real people. Most of them are obviously dying. And behind the barracks are heaps of decaying, stinking cadavers, toothless protruding mouths gaping open, eyes rolled back white, sixty-or seventy-pound skin bags of putrid flesh. They all have filthy yellow Mogen Davids stitched on their striped pants.
That had been their crime.
I and many of my men double over and vomit convulsively, embarrassed to look at each other, frightened to look at the still barely alive inmates. But they can’t simply be ignored. They need help, at least those few who aren’t obviously going to die.
My company remains at the concentration camp outside Medzibiez for several days waiting for orders to continue our push to Vienna. Of the 511 inmates still alive when we liberated the camp, 174 die despite all of our medical efforts to save them. The survivors have nowhere to go. They come mostly from the Ukraine, and if they try to go back there they will be hunted down and murdered by German soldiers or Polish and Russian partisan bands roaming the forests. So they have to continue to live in the same vermin-infested barracks in which the Nazis had imprisoned them.
Four of the survivors can’t stand it any longer.
“But I can’t protect you outside these gates,’” I tell them in Yiddish. “There are reports of bands of SS troops from this camp in the forest between here and Medzibiez. Believe me, you’re better off waiting here until the war is over. It won’t be long now.”
“It doesn’t matter to us anymore. Don’t you understand? We cannot stay another minute in this place where our families and friends were exterminated like cockroaches.”
They stand there stolidly, these starved, head-shaved, walking cadavers with their jaws clenched resolutely shut. And I cannot and will not hold them against their will. So I go with them to the mess sergeant and draw them each a week’s provisions, and then I take them to the armory and give them each a Luger, which have been left behind by the fleeing SS detachment. And then I stand dejectedly at the gate and watch them disappear into the forest, truly believing that they will be murdered within a few hours or days.
Three hours later a scouting patrol from the camp reports finding four bodies of emaciated, head-shaved men dressed in U.S. Army fatigues. They are on the north bank of the Kura River, about six miles from the camp.
I take a platoon of my men into the forest to flush out the killer or killers. We find the bodies by the river.
They have all been shot in the back, and their faces have been stabbed so many times that all that is left are small puddles of bloody, oozing mush. My men spread into the forest to round up the subhuman animals who have done this.
I am alone, walking slowly eastward. I see movement in the trees ahead of me, leaves rustling, a small sapling swaying, and I spray it with my Thompson submachine gun. There is a scream, and a voice hollers out something I can’t understand in garbled German. A tall, thin soldier in an SS uniform, supporting another wounded soldier, comes out from behind a tree thirty feet in front of me. The wounded man’s feet are dragging and his head lolls on his chest. The tall, thin one calls out in heavily accented English, “Enough, surrender, surrender, no shoot.’” And I level my Thompson submachine gun at them and fire a long burst, from right to left and back, and the Germans slump to the ground. I do not even flinch, I do not even blink, as I stand over the bodies. I actually feel better than I have in many days. I pull my bayonet out of its scabbard and bend over and stab the dead Germans in the face, first one and then the other, again and again, until their faces are bloody pulp. I am gelid, emotionless.
Suddenly shots ring out. I feel the bullets rip into my chest and left arm. I don’t know who has shot me or from where. All I can focus on is the ugly stain of blood spreading over the front of my field jacket. It is April, and an early spring thaw has melted the snow and ice in the forest, and it is too warm for the wound to be anesthetized by the weather alone, as my leg wound had been last December at the Battle of the Bulge. The pain is excruciating.
Two of my men carry me back to the camp. Medics deaden my pain as much as possible with morphine ampules in my thigh, but I remain semiconscious and feel cold and clammy. I am flown somewhere in a medical evacuation airplane. I lie on the stretcher and try to mesmerize myself by concentrating on the incessant whirring of the propellers. They sound to me like a long drawn out melancholy low string on a cello. A little grating, very mournful and distant, like a doleful dirge being played under my head.
They wheel me into an ambulance, and the cello dirge stops but the pain is still there. And they unload me like a side of beef onto a real bed, this time in a hospital, and still the pain does not relinquish its penetrating vibrato, but now it is a guttural oboe playing a whispery sound like hot wind rustling drapes by a window. They shoot my shoulder full of something and my hip full of something else, and then I drift on that reedy oboe whisper and float away from my pain, looking back at myself like someone I have just visited in the hospital and am damn glad to be away from at last.
When I finally wake up again and know that I am alive, my left arm is missing, part of my left shoulder is missing, and I drift in and out of dreamlike slow-motion ballet sequences in which Rachel dances on a cloud with only my arm and toes as her partner. And then she smiles down at me, and her face becomes a leering skull of death.
I remember, I see vividly the lugubrious faces of the inmates of that concentration camp, like hundreds of haunted Ichabod Cranes, and they open their eyes wide to me in speechless pleas for mercy and help, but I am helpless. I must just watch them die, the gleam disappear from their eyes, their mouths fall open like the ricti of sparrows begging for food from their mothers.
They put me on a hospital ship, and uncounted days later I’m in a little white room in the Brooklyn Veterans Hospital My parents come to see me, and I see the shock and grief in my father’s eyes, the tears pouring from my mother’s. Hanna and Adam want to see me, they say, but I shake my head and tell them, “No, absolutely not, I don’t want them to see me like this, I don’t want to scare them to death.”
The war is over for me, and I am still alive, but so much of my life has been shattered…
The door opened a few inches, then wider. Barbara came in and sat down next to her husband on the sofa. She put her hand lightly on his thigh. He looked up at her, startled, and then pushed away his memories.
“You all right?” she asked.
“Sure, honey.”
“You look like hell.”
“Hanna and I had another quarrel about Mark.”
“I thought so. She came into the living room a few minutes ago, and I could see she’d been crying.” She shook her head sadly. “It’ll be an awful time for her with Mark gone.”
He nodded. “Yeah, but the war won’t last forever. The newspapers say that General Ridgway is trying to get truce talks going, and if that happens they’ll start reducing our troop strength. Mark may never even have to go over there.”
“Let’s hope,” Barbara said. “Come on back to the party. Everybody’s missing you.”
“I think I’m all partied out. I won’t make very good company in there.”
“Can’t just sit here and watch TV. The Goldbergs may be insulted.”
“They’ll live.” He shrugged apologetically. “I’m starving. How about going over to the Dixie Diner for some shrimp?”
“Okay. I’m hungry, too.”
“You mean Mortimer’s hungry.” He patted her tummy softly.
“Esmeralda.” She smiled.
Barbara’s two-month pregnancy had just begun to show. But it was a bad time to be talking merrily about a new baby Rabb when Hanna was going through the worst misery that she had experienced since her mother died. So they hadn’t mentioned it to her yet, and Barbara was wearing looser dresses and skirts. The low-cut yellow sundress she wore now was tied under her full breasts and fell loosely to just below her knees. Very stylish and very unrevealing.
“Let’s round up Adam,” Joshua said. “There’s nobody here his age, and he’s probably sitting in some corner waiting to be rescued.’”
In the forty-five minutes since Joshua had left the living room, dozens more guests had arrived. No one would notice him and Barbara and Adam leave. They found Adam sitting on the back porch on a small swing chair, drinking a Coke, looking terminally bored.
“I’m going nuts here, Dad.”
“Yeah, I know. We’re going over to the Dixie for some shrimp. Want to come?”
“God, yes,” he mumbled. He stood up quickly and put the almost empty Coke bottle on the small side table. He was tall and muscular, but thin in a way that only fifteen-year-olds can be. His seal brown hair and deep blue eyes and the squareness of his chin were the same as his father’s.
“Let’s leave through the patio gate,” Joshua said. “No need to traipse out the front door past everybody.”
They followed the flagstone walk around the side of the house. Joshua unlatched the white-painted wooden gate, and they walked to their 1948 Dodge parked beside the purple plum tree hedge on the edge of the road.
“Can I drive, Dad?” Adam held out his hand for the key. He would be sixteen in two months, and he had his learner’s permit. He loved to drive. Sometime after August 7, his birthday, Joshua planned to give him the Chevy convertible that Hanna was now driving, Hanna would get the 1948 Dodge, and Joshua and Barbara would buy a new car, an Oldsmobile maybe, or, if things really kept going well with Joshua’s law practice, a Buick. Adam started the car and pulled carefully onto the asphalt road from the loose dirt shoulder.
“Why don’t we go pick up Magdalena and Macario?” Joshua said.
“Good idea,” said Barbara. “She got a letter from Chuy this morning, and she’s been in her room crying most of the day.”
Magdalena had been the Rabbs’ “acculturation girl” for their first three years in Tucson, when they lived in the small adobe house across from the San Xavier Papago Reservation, six miles south of Tucson. Joshua and Barbara weren’t married then, and Hanna and Adam were just kids. Joshua was the part-time legal affairs officer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and all white BIA employees were expected to take a Papago girl into their homes as a servant, to acculturate them to the ways of the white world and to make them capable of leaving the Reservation and living and working in the white cities.
When Magdalena had first come to the Rabbs, she was twenty yeas old, shy and delicate, and as exotically beautiful as the statue of the “Black Madonna” that Joshua had once seen in an art museum in New York. Her skin was nutmeg brown, her eyes anthracite. Both she and Hanna were tall and slender, and very soon Magdalena’s meager wardrobe of two pairs of faded Levi’s and a T-shirt and a threadbare blue chambray work shirt had been enriched by Hanna’s own clothing, and they had become as close as sisters, and Magdalena had become a mother to Adam.
She was the granddaughter of Macario Antone, the former chief of the Papago tribe, and she had lived in a dormitory at the University of Arizona for two years while pursuing a degree in education, so she hardly needed acculturating. But she had had to leave the university to return to the Reservation and look after her aged grandparents. Macario had died a year later, and her grandmother Ernestina had gone back to Pisinimo on the Big Reservation, a hundred miles from Tucson, to live out her last years in her centuries-old ancestral home.
