Belmont, Massachusetts

b. 1918

Dandelions

POWs died of malnutrition that winter of 1945, men just like him, and as part of a burial detail, he helped put nine in the ground.  Here’s how it went: they dug a shallow hole, wrapped the body in a blanket and swung it in, shoveled on the cold dirt, and then planted a homemade wooden cross by the head  They hung the man’s dog tags on the cross. 

Nobody said nothing at the funerals of Stalag IVF.  “What could you say?” says Armando DeVito.  They were all starving.  They all knew they could be the man in the grave.

At one point, Armando gave up.  It wasn’t long after that day at the benzene factory, where POWs worked side by side with civilians in striped clothes, marked by yellow stars.  Armando and a buddy got caught helping two old men carry planks.  The guards beat the Americans with their rifles and boots—those boots had steel toes, Armando is sure—but the Jews got it worse.  

The sons of bitches Germans could kill him, he groused, he didn’t care.  Then in his bunk one night he said to himself, “Armando, are you crazy thinking this way?  Who’s going to take care of Frances and the kids?”  And that was that. He gave up for maybe a week.

Back home, his family lived in an apartment without heat.  On the coldest days, a sheet of ice formed on the kitchen floor. The four kids slept in layers of clothing, and some nights they went to bed hungry because Armando’s paycheck was going to an Armando DeVito in Ohio.  Frances knew nothing of her husband’s fate, except that he was MIA according to a telegram from the Adjutant General of the Army.

Spring, though, arrived around the world.  On the road between Stalag IVF and the benzene factory, Armando ducked into fields and picked bunches of dandelions.  As a child, he had gathered them for his mother for soups and salads, and now in the barracks he boiled the dandelions, stems and all.    

Wise guy POWs made fun of Armando for eating weeds.  But he knew they were flowers, as delicious and bitter as home, and he gobbled them down.