Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts

b. 1924

Tables Turned

At kommando 64B, in the spring of 1945, the Germans put them to work building roadblocks.  The cement recipe called for three parts sand, one part concrete, but the POWs mixed at a 6:1 ratio.  Bernard Travers imagined U.S. Army tank shells exploding the roadblocks as if they were sandcastles.  Now and then, the men broke a shovel or lost a crowbar.  “Our way of being saboteurs,” says Bernard, an infantryman captured five months earlier.  

One evening a bunch of them escaped through a hole they cut in a barbed-wire fence.  Walking through fields, exhausted from hunger and punishing work, they watched bomb-flashes break the darkness.  Berlin burned to the south.  The men wore filthy clothes and packed no guns or ID papers.  But it was the Big Escape.  They were out, on their own, free.

“Now where do we go?” one POW asked.  No one knew how to read the stars.  Where are the Germans, the Russians?  Will the Americans liberate the kommando while we stumble around asking to be shot?  The sky flashed to the south. Soon the men turned around and went back to their cages.  The guards didn't even know they had left. 

Weeks later, the POWs were moved out of 64B and put in a thick column of German soldiers and refugees—the world in flight, to the west and away from the merciless Russian army that spent its own soldiers like bullets.  They marched for over 100 miles as artillery pounded and British planes strafed the roads, no questions asked.  Bernard saw German MPs pull deserters from the column and shoot them. Without proper papers, you were shot. “Everyone had to have papers,” he says.  

On the fifth day of the march, the American 8th Infantry Division came down the road.  Now all tables were turned.  Guards transformed into prisoners.  The judged rose up into judges.  In the garden of an opera house, where the POWs slept, Bernard watched a “striped gang” of six Holocaust survivors beat a German man in shiny black boots to death.  It took that many, they were so near death themselves, and Bernard can still hear them crying,  “What happened to my mother? Where is my father?”