North Easton, Massachusetts

b. 1925

 
Slow, Slow

If you could take an apple or a small potato, or a quick spoonful of sugar, you took it.  Even if a rifle butt to the tailbone or base of the skull was your reward.  Wire or cloth or wood was good for scavenging, too. “Anything you could get your hands on,” says Bob Cournoyer.

At first Bob and his fellow POWs—Americans, Russians, French, and Poles—dug potatoes in the fields of Erdeborn.  The German guards always made the POWs walk in the gutter, where filth belonged.  Sometimes passing civilians threw stones or yelled angry questions.  Bob remembers an old man hitting him with a cane–he didn't fault the man, his grief was so raw. 

On one particular day, he saw a little girl pulling a broken wagon along the road.  Bob said, to hell with it, and he left the gutter, hunched down, and used a scrap of wire to repair her wagon's faltering wheel.  As she started away, he called out “Slow, slow,” afraid that she would pull it along too quickly, with too much joy, and it would fall apart again.

He survived captivity by luck, Bob says, plus those spoonfuls of sugar he swiped while laboring in a sugar beet processing plant after the harvest of '44.  Luck was a scarce thing, though.  Many prisoners starved or were beaten to death.  Sick men who stayed in their bunks in the morning were gone for good when Bob returned in the evening, and no one knew what happened to them.  So you got yourself up, got yourself going, no matter what.

Later on, Bob was taken to the bombed-out town of Zietz, where for months he chipped mortar off bricks in the freezing cold.  His hands were exposed and his feet covered only in paper sandals. Again and again, the hammer slipped off the head of the chisel and pounded his gnarled left fist.  As the ground rumbled and colossal armies ripped the Third Reich to the bone, the POWs removed mortar from bricks. 

Bob's hands dripped blood into the snow and still he couldn't stop, for there were always the guards and their rifle butts.