 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
Upstarts
We reiterated the same instructions for the following day, with the same result.
This time I took an armed delegation to visit the mayors. "When we say assemble the
Russians, we mean it!"
"Wait," protested the mayors. "If you want those Russians, you had better
assemble them yourselves. We would have them there if we could find them. They are all
hiding out in the woods somewhere. You have the manpower and weapons to dig them
out, but we don't."
The war was over, and the thought of using force on peaceful civilians, possibly
having to shoot a few, was not appealing. So I took another tack and asked some
questions. "What part of Russia are these Russians from?"
"Why, I suppose from various locations."
"Are they from southern Russia?"
"They might be. "
"Well," I said, "since they are from southern Russia, they must be Ukrainians. We
don't have any orders to repatriate Ukrainians. Change their nationality on your reports,
and we'll wait until they're called for."
Col Hughes backed my solution, and we heard no more. Our motives were
perhaps not so much humanitarian as to avoid unpleasant work, but we may have saved
some lives. Later I talked to an officer who had drawn the duty of turning over a large
number of Russian DPs to a Russian liaison officer. The Russian and his men screened
the persons involved and divided them into two groups. He had the first loaded into
boxcars, then turned to my friend. "Please get out some machine guns and shoot the rest
of these."
The American officer emphatically refused to do so, and the Russian shrugged.
"It would save the cost of transporting them back to Russia first."
I practiced typing on a "liberated" German typewriter. I had learned the keyboard
a dozen years before, but never used it enough to get up reasonable speed. Now I did
better, despite the fact that the German keyboard reversed the positions of the y and z
keys. Sometimes the results were diyyzing.
But most of the time I felt I was not earning my pay, and it occurred to me that
now that the shooting was over, the army had more medical facilities than it knew what
to do with, and perhaps there was time to explore what was wrong with me that caused
my chronic eyestrain, photophobia, and headaches.
I consulted Lt Davis, the battalion surgeon, and after he exhausted his diagnostic
facilities, he sent me to the hospital in Regensburg, where they had equipment to do more
thorough testing.
242
|
 |
|