Wolf's Mouth Read online

  The U.S. government made every attempt to adhere to the rules of the Geneva Convention regarding prisoners of war. Some believed this was because the Americans were honest, decent people; others were convinced it was a matter of propaganda. It was both, really. Clearly, the U.S. government feared that to mistreat their prisoners would only encourage the Axis to do the same to American prisoners of war. We had heard that the Allies were air-dropping leaflets in Europe—leaflets signed by General Eisenhower himself—that promised excellent accommodations to German soldiers who surrendered. And conditions in the German army were such that more and more soldiers were giving up, approaching the Allies, waving leaflets. Such news infuriated Kommandant Vogel, and he liked to explain that in English “Allies” really meant “All lies.”

  We had sufficient access to news—newspapers, radio, movies—though Vogel was often trying to establish some kind of control over what we received. Some of the most reliable news arrived by the mail, both from our families in Europe and from relatives in other U.S. prisoner-of-war camps. The mail we received and sent out was censored by the Americans, and there were restrictions on how much we could send out: one letter and one postcard a week, and nothing over twenty-five lines. Adino, who was illiterate, asked me to write to his wife every week, until he learned to write well enough on his own in the Introduction to Italian class I was teaching two nights a week. He was remarkably proud of his first letter, which read: Carissima Maria, followed by Ti amo (“I love you”), written twenty-three times, followed by his name.

  What we learned from other camps in the U.S. made most of us thankful that we were in Au Train. The Americans weren’t the problem—it was the Nazis. They succeeded in taking over a camp, terrorizing any German prisoner who had been a Social Democrat before the war, or anyone who was not convincingly pro-Hitler. The only ones who were disturbed by the fact that we weren’t under the same influence, naturally, were Vogel and his gang. Several of them were SS men, and they chafed at the fact that our camp operated so efficiently without being under complete Nazi control. So an incident such as Gerhardt not returning in time for dinner was for them a ray of hope. The men often sang while cutting down trees, believing that it would ward off an attack by wild animals, and I wondered if Gerhardt might actually be eaten by a bear or a wolf.

  There were stories about other breaks that had occurred before I arrived at Au Train. Communication between the five camps in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan was frequent, particularly with Camp Evelyn, which was not far to the east. There were stories about men walking into nearby small towns. Evidently, many of the Americans living in the U.P. weren’t even aware that prisoners of war were being held in camps out in the woods. So on several occasions, prisoners who entered a town were treated cordially, despite the fact that they were either wearing the military uniform of a foreign country, or wearing a prisoner’s outfit, which included the letters PW on their shirts and trousers. In such cases, a member of the local law enforcement would be notified by the prison command, and soon the prisoners would be escorted back to camp, often to be greeted as though they’d been on a pleasant holiday.

  But one break from a Michigan prison had been somewhat successful. Several prisoners escaped, and though most were quickly picked up, two of them were not. It soon became clear that they were on the run with one of the guards. Often when we were drawing maps in the dirt, there would be speculation about how these three might get out of the United States and return to Europe. Some, who paid little attention to maps, insisted that they could sail from San Francisco and cross the Atlantic. Adino suggested that they might swim to Cuba. I didn’t understand why they would want to go back to Europe, at least until the war was over. But then I didn’t have a wife and children, like many of the men, and my parents and sister, who wrote to me regularly, seemed safe in their villa in Macerata. I was most curious about whatever possessed the American guard who ran off with these two prisoners.

  2.

  In the morning we were awakened by machine gun fire echoing in the hills.

  “That’s about a half kilometer off in the woods,” Adino said, climbing down from his bunk, which was above mine. He led me to the door, where we could look out across the yard. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It was dawn and the men were going about their morning routines. None of the guards in the towers and at the gates seemed unusually alert.

  “It’s dinner,” I said. “They just shot dinner.”

  After breakfast, a group of us were taken in a truck out to a place where there were seven dead deer mowed down by machine gun fire. It was our morning’s work to dress out the carcasses and bring the meat back to camp. Adino, who descended from generations of butchers in Naples, was expert at cutting meat. Because we arrived back in camp at noon, which was unusual for a weekday, we were fed lunch, a thick, salty soup of barley, carrots, onion, and chunks of venison. Afterwards we were given some free time, so Adino and I kicked the soccer ball around, discussing strategy for our upcoming match against Camp Evelyn. They were fielding an all-German team and had tied us, 2-2, a few weeks earlier. We agreed that the next time we needed to take advantage of our smaller size and use our speed.

  When a truck stopped by the recreation field, the Shepherd, who was driving, told us to climb up in the bed. At first we thought he was going to take us out to where the other men were cutting wood, but the truck took a different route and soon we were on a paved road, the cold fall wind blasting our faces.

  “We are going into the village!” Adino shouted, happy like a child.

  “Just remember what your loving wife Maria said at the end of her last letter.” He looked away in shame. “She said, ‘When you go to bed at night, don’t forget your prayers, and don’t yank on your beloved thing so much because I want you to have plenty left when you come home.’” She only mentioned the prayers, of course. I added the rest because I was tired of waking up in the middle of the night with our bunk bed shaking to the point that it might collapse.

  “I can’t help it,” Adino said, blessing himself. “When we go into town and see women . . .”

  “Maybe I should blindfold you until we’re safely back in camp. Or at night, tie your hands together in prayer. Or behind your back, like a prisoner.”

  “Boh!”

  The truck entered Munising, a town that looked out on a spectacular harbor. All around us, steep wooded hills of red and orange foliage descended to a wide channel of blue water. Several miles out was an island, Grand Island, and in the distance beyond that we could see Lake Superior.

  The Shepherd parked in front of a grocery store and we followed him inside, where there were sacks waiting to be loaded on the truck: potatoes, rice, carrots, onions, beans. Adino and I went back and forth, a sack on each shoulder.

  “We will eat better than the pope,” Adino said. “Except there’s never any pasta. What kind of a country is this that’s never heard of farfalla or tagliatelle or—”

  “I made tagliatelle last night,” a woman said from the next aisle—in Italian.

  We went around to the next aisle. The woman was certainly over fifty years old and looked like she had spent her life in a medieval village. Her coat, dress, shoes, and scarf were black. She stared at the canned goods on the shelves with disdain.

  “Buongiorno, Signora,” I said.

  She continued to scrutinize the cans. “All this English, and I forgot my glasses. Can you read this?”

  I looked at the label. “Whole tomatoes,” I said. “Pomodori.”

  She shrugged and dropped the can in her basket. “We moved here from the Soo and no one speaks Italian here.”

  “They speak Italian in the . . . Soo?” I asked.

  “Sault Ste. Marie,” she said. “Large Italian population there because of the plants and the mining.” For the first time she looked me over, smiling at the sight of what remained of my uniform. “A couple of Mussolini’s boys?”

  “No, Signora.”

  “The trains may run
on time, but I will never go back. Never.”

  She hobbled up the aisle to the counter, where there was a cash register. “Chiara!” she nearly shouted. “Come help me get these out to the car.”

  Adino tugged on my sleeve and I turned around. In the corner by the front window there was a red-and-white Coca-Cola machine. A girl with a mass of dark hair was leaning against it. She finished her Coke, slid the green bottle into the wood crate on the floor, and walked past us toward the counter. She might have been twenty and she wore a white sweater and blue jeans.

  “Oh my God,” Adino whispered.

  “Shut up and keep your hands in your pockets.”

  Her blue jeans were rolled up so that we could see the lower half of her slender calves. Her thick hair was absolutely black and tumbled over her shoulders. She took a small package from the counter and again walked past us without acknowledging that we were standing there. The front door slammed behind her, and through the window we could see her climb behind the wheel of a gray Ford sedan.

  Adino started toward the counter, but I caught his sleeve. “Remember, Maria’s waiting.” His face bunched with confusion. I went up to the counter and took both paper bags, and said to the woman, “Posso, Signora?”

  She was counting out coins from a small purse—black, of course—and without looking at me said, “Put them in the back seat.”

  I walked to the door, which Adino rushed to open for me. Before I stepped outside, he reached up and brushed the hair back from my forehead. “Shut up,” I said.

  Out on the sidewalk, I leaned down to the open window on the driver’s side of the car. “Your mother would like these on the back seat,” I said.

  She didn’t seem to hear me as she stared out the front windshield. I had a difficult time opening the back door with both arms full, but I managed to set the bags on the seat.

  “Put them on the floor,” she said in English.

  “Mi perdoni?”

  “Put them on the floor so they don’t spill over when I come to a stop.”

  “Sì.”

  “And stop with the Italian. Where’d you get that accent?”

  “Italy.”

  “Never been there.”

  “You should go someday,” I said in English. “But I’d wait until the war’s over.”

  For the first time she turned her head, her hair falling down across her breast. Glaring at me, she said, “Perché?”

  “Because . . .” But I couldn’t continue. She stared at me with her large, dark eyes as though I were hopeless, which was true.

  Adino opened the door of the grocery store and helped the old woman down the steps, but she pulled her arm free of his grasp when she reached the sidewalk. I went around to the other side of the car and opened the door, but didn’t dare touch her as she struggled to climb up onto the front seat. When I closed the door, she raised a hand and said impatiently, “Andiamo.” Chiara put the Ford in gear and pulled out into the street.

  Adino came out on the sidewalk and we both watched the car in silence. When the Shepherd came out, we jumped up into the back of the truck. We kept our eyes on the Ford, which was a block ahead of us, until it slowed down and a long, slender arm came out the window. Chiara had pushed the sleeve of her white sweater up, and as she made the signal for a left turn I thought I’d never seen a more graceful hand and forearm. The car turned into the side street, and as we passed through the intersection we saw it pull into a driveway in front of an old house—an old house for America, something built maybe fifty years earlier, a wooden house painted white.

  “Did you see her?” Adino said as the truck climbed the hill up out of Munising. “Did you see those calves? Did you see those?” He cupped his hands beneath imaginary breasts.

  I had seen all of it. “Shut up,” I said.

  We didn’t say another word during the trip back to camp. When we reached the gate, one of the guards, a tall one named Bobby, waved for the Shepherd to stop. Bobby got in the passenger seat and, to our surprise, the truck turned around rather than entering the prison yard. We drove through the woods for about twenty minutes, first taking several logging roads, and then turning down a two-track that ran through a dense stand of pines.

  “We have never been out this way to cut wood,” Adino said.

  We came to a clearing where several other GIs were waiting. They had two dogs with them on leashes—German Shepherds, heeling next to the soldiers. One of the men waved with both arms, indicating that he wanted the truck to back down a path toward a stand of trees. It was dark in there and Adino and I had to duck and push branches out of our way, until we saw Gerhardt, hanging by the neck from the branch of a maple tree. It looked like he didn’t have any bones left—his uniform and coat appeared to be in danger of sliding off his limp body. The Shepherd stopped the truck where Gerhardt was hanging above the sacks of potatoes.

  Bobby climbed up into the truck bed, a long-bladed knife in hand. “Take hold.”

  Reluctantly, Adino and I stepped up to Gerhardt and put our arms around him. Adino looked at me with panic in his eyes, and I could smell it: shit. Bobby reached up and cut the rope just above the noose. All of Gerhardt’s weight came down on us, and for a moment I thought we were going to lose our balance, but we managed to lay him down so that his back was on top of a sack of potatoes. I wanted to remove the noose from Gerhardt’s neck, but I didn’t dare touch him any more.

  When Bobby got in the truck, the other GIs and the dogs jumped up into the bed. During the drive back to camp, Adino and I leaned against the back of the cab, and the two GIs sat on the tailgate with their legs dangling. No one spoke, but one of them offered us cigarettes, which we accepted. The dogs curled up by Gerhardt’s feet and went to sleep.

  Like all prisoners of war, I arrived in the United States full of misconceptions. The most significant, perhaps, was that the Americans weren’t who I thought they were—not in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, at least. I was exhausted and disoriented after the African campaign, and suddenly we were delivered to what seemed to be a forest as big as the desert. The Americans call it the forest primeval. The Americans we had contact with—people from surrounding towns that came and went from our camp, as well as the guards—I could not believe they were really Americans. Many of them were Finnish, or from another country in Scandinavia. Some were French Canadian or Indians. It was not uncommon to hear them speak languages other than English. At first I thought that they too were prisoners in this cold, isolated place. It wasn’t the result of the war, however, but some other great, nameless tragedy that involved migration. An American diaspora.

  My English was very limited when I first arrived at Camp Au Train, but at least I had some, and I was quickly identified as one who could be used for purposes of communication between the prisoners and the Americans. The result was that my English improved, and it wasn’t long before I was giving evening classes in Italian and English conversation to the other prisoners. And because I spoke English, I was often thrust into situations that allowed me to talk with Americans. Soon I realized that the reason many of these people were in northern Michigan was because they were indeed immigrants, and their families had come from Europe to find work in mines throughout the region. Copper, iron ore, silver mines, which required men with strong backs. The other thing that became clear was that many of these Americans had lived in this remote forest for years, so long that there had been a great deal of intermarriage; thus they would often explain to me how they were one-half Finnish, one-quarter French, one-eighth Ojibwa, and the rest might consist of family lines of undetermined origin. I understood this to some degree because I had Austrian and Swiss ancestors on my mother’s side, which was why, I had always been told, I had black hair and a Mediterranean complexion but light blue eyes.

  But there was something else about these Americans that baffled me. They were not unhappy with their situation. They weren’t overjoyed either, but most of them possessed a level of acceptance that I found truly remarkabl
e. I was in northern Michigan because of the war; I had every hope that I would survive (like most other prisoners, I was pleased to be out of the fighting) and eventually return home. But these Americans seemed content to stay here. They worked—and worked hard constantly—they had homes, they married, they had children, and they had no desire or intention to ever leave. In fact, one of the guards, who was from Marquette, the largest town in the region, said he had never been south of the Mackinac Straits and vowed he never would be. This was an absolute revelation for me. It seemed that the rest of America, the place where there were enormous cities and vast farmlands, was vile and tainted as though harboring some sort of plague. By contrast, he viewed these north woods, frozen and barren much of the year, as a wholesome, pristine haven, where man, animal, and Nature, capital N, could thrive.

  Our camp functioned well because the Germans, who constituted the majority of the inmates, actually ran the camp. Say what you will about Nazis, but they understood organization. They took great pride in being neater, more punctual and efficient than anyone else. They drove us crazy with their inspections, drills, codes, and regulations, but the camp was inhabitable largely because they made it so. The Americans often referred to Au Train as the “Fritz Ritz,” and though our accommodations were quite Spartan, all of us came to realize that daily life in many other camps around the United States (even the ones in warm places such as Arizona) could be much worse.

  I had arrived at Camp Au Train in May, when the ground under the shade of the trees was still covered with patches of snow—winter did not really end until June that year. The Allies had taken Rome that month, and then within days there was the assault on the coast of Normandy. We knew that it was only a matter of time before Italy would be liberated, and Hitler’s Axis was going to lose the war. This gave hope to many of us who longed to return home. But for some it was extremely unsettling. The German prisoners could be broken into two categories: the Nazis, of course, and the Germans—men who had fought out of a sense of patriotism to their country, not to Adolf Hitler. And these two groups could be divided into two subcategories: officers and enlisted men. The rest of us—an assortment of Eastern Europeans, two Italians, and one Russian—were at best tolerated, at worst treated as an imposition.