Plymouth, Massachusetts 

b. 1920

 

Goodbye, Charlie

Cosmo Fabrizio and 60 American POWs slept on racks in a cramped hut.  The latrine, a bucket at one end, stunk up the place.  As the winter of 1944 descended at Stalag IIIC, they ripped wood from the ceiling to stoke their Sibley potbelly stove.  The Germans treated Cosmo's foot wound with sulfur and wrapped it with crepe paper as a bandage.  But his right boot was gone and he had to tie burlap around the foot to protect it. 

The radio made a big difference.  An ingenious kid rigged it from a sewing needle, a double-edged razor, and wire plugged into a light socket.  At night, after roll call and grass soup and sawdust bread, they listened to the faint signal of the BBC in shifts, 15 men at a time huddled over the delicate gizmo.  “It kept us going,” says Cosmo.  Their spirits sagged, though, as they listened to the Allies getting creamed in the Battle of the Bulge.  So much for the war ending by Christmas. 

“That's it,” Cosmo remembers saying.  “Goodbye, Charlie.”

Those damn roll calls, they never ended.  Morning, noon, and night.  Stand and wait, stand and wait.  The POWs grew weak, light as birds, and Cosmo's weight dropped from 140 to 95 pounds over several months.  During his captivity he saw one lousy Red Cross package, ripped open by six men. 

Time dripped, life was dull.  Sometimes they were allowed to toss a baseball or walk the camp grounds. Stripped to the waist, the men picked lice off each other's bodies, and they made elaborate, tunneling escape plans that went nowhere.  The floors of the huts were raised above the ground to frustrate that kind of business. 

The German sergeant in charge of their hut spoke pretty good English.  He said he was from Brooklyn, New York, said he rooted for the Dodgers.  The way he told it, he came to Germany to visit relatives in the late 1930s and the army nabbed him.  Maybe he was telling the truth, maybe he was a spy.  Cosmo's not sure.  Either way, Russian troops who liberated the camp on February 5, 1945, shoved Sergeant Brooklyn and the other guards into the camp bakery and machine-gunned them down.