Soldiers of Another War

The Devil Quotes Scripture A heavily padlocked steel door, topped by a barred vent, swings open, and from the depths of the tunnel a current of cold air is released into the summer haze. All is quiet. The White Elster River flows lazily, flies hovering at its eddying surface. On the far bank, visible through the trees, lies the small eastern German town of Berga. The tranquillity seems real. But it is an illusion. Germany must be seen in space and in time. To see what is there, it is necessary to see what is hidden. At this spot, the tunnel extends about 150 feet into the tree-covered hillside. Water drips, some of it close by, some deep in the bluff. A few boulders and scattered rocks lie around small pools of water. The shaft, with its jagged walls of black slate, is still and damp. But beyond the peace lies something else. The sound wells from the depths of the tunnel, advancing across the years. A sound of rending and blasting, of screeching and booming, of screams and pandemonium fills this confined space. The tunnel, perhaps twenty feet high and fifteen feet wide, is peopled now with bedraggled men, their faces blackened with dust, drilling and shoveling and heaving and loading as explosions turn the air into a lacerating gale of fine shards. The fragments penetrate the unprotected mouths of American and European prisoners of the Nazis, cutting their throats, devouring their lungs, weakening them day by day. The Americans are young, most of them no more than twenty years old, from Ohio and Virginia, New York and California. They have been sucked into a place they cannot comprehend. It is March 1945, the war is almost over, but these GIs are dying at a rate unknown among American prisoners of war elsewhere in Europe. Each day they are herded into the tunnels. They have scarcely been fed, they have no protective clothing, and their cuts are infected, but still they must hold the heavy pneumatic drills against the rock face and bore a hole sufficiently large for the German engineers to insert dynamite. When the explosion comes, they are pushed back deep into the tunnels. They must pick up the rocks, some of them large and unwieldy, and load them onto small carts that run on a narrow-gauge railroad track. They have no gloves. Their hands are a mess of scratches and wounds. They push the carts down to the river and empty them. If they slow down for a moment, they are beaten by the guards. One of the Americans is Sanford M. Lubinsky of Lima, Ohio, captured by the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge and brought here because he has been identified as a Jew. Lubinsky, a private in the 28th Infantry Division, has to maneuver the drill. But sometimes his strength gives out: "My arms were coming down slowly. And so it happened that when that SS guy came through inspecting with his whip and his stick, hateful, strutting in, at that time my arms gave way and that drill came falling down. Oh, was he mad! 'You damned Jew,' the SS guard said." The SS man grabs a shovel. He hits Lubinsky in the back, crushing part of it. He kicks him when he goes down, then takes out his whip. Lubinsky curses the German; he is now beyond caring about his fate. "I didn't care. I thought I was going anyway. The heck with him. What kept me going, I guess, was a fighting hate. I wanted to get out of there. I was going to get out somehow and kill those dirty sons of bitches." Every afternoon when the sun shines, four or five old women gather on a bench in the main square of Berga. The town is quiet today, too quiet. A flag flaps. Children's voices carry from distant gardens of roses and sunflowers. An air of abandonment pervades the neighborhood. The plasterwork of the town hall is crumbling. The textile factory that once produced kit for the doped and indomitable East German OlCohen, Roger is the author of 'Soldiers of Another War' with ISBN 9780375414107 and ISBN 037541410X.