No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Arthur Goes on a Death March

We are in Nicarellis and a man says the Germans are coming to kill everyone in the camp. If you want to run away, there’s a train. It was a nice train with benches for the people. I wouldn’t have gone in a boxcar. I go for the benches. And here’s the joke — three hours later that camp was liberated by the Americans. I volunteered to go to Dachau. Now I have to endure another four weeks of very tough life. All for benches.

I’m sitting on the train and it’s dark and I see some red in the sky. Some kind of light. I watch it. I can’t move. I don’t feel like moving. After a while I lose completely this feeling of time. Days pass or minutes, I don’t know. There’s no noise, no sound at all. A lot of smoke. I thought it was Hell and everything is on fire, but I’m not hurt. Quiet like I had never heard such quiet. You have to hear that quiet.

We were caught in a bombing raid. The train is overturned and I am looking through open windows on the side at a burning city. The reason I cant hear is from the bombs. German people pull me out. They gave me a blanket. I remember just a wall of flames and it is Ulm burning.

They give us Red Cross packages and send us to Switzerland. Those packages contain sugar, milk, chocolate, sausages, shortbread, long bread, preserves, bandages, piece of silk, razor blade. All kinds of things I hadn’t seen in the last five years. I would have given away my life for it. They took us into the Alps. Beautiful. I suffered in the most beautiful countryside.

The train stops in the night. We hear heavy artillery and know the Americans are in the area. I’m convinced the Germans will shoot us because they cannot let us go into the civilian population of Germany. We might just be a little bit angry. We might not be so nice to the people. If I find out that my wife and my brother are alive, maybe I would not be mad. Otherwise I don’t want to live and I have to kill the people first.

The train can’t go any farther because the tunnel was bombed by the Americans. Ordinarily we had a lot of guards, heavily armed, but not now. A discussion is going on. They called the chief of the village, and he said, no, you’re not gonna shoot anybody here. If you shoot the prisoners, the Americans will shoot everybody in my town. I wont let you do that here.

So lo and behold we walk to the next town. It’s the end of April. Snow all over the place. And we are marching through the snow. It is magnificent. The sun is going down and the snow on the mountains is fiery red. We are marching through the night and my feet are very tired. I said in my head, don’t fall asleep, because if you fall asleep, you freeze to death. Some of my friends are sitting on the road and fall asleep. The first couple of guys they shoot them. Then they didn’t shoot them anymore. They let them freeze to save the ammunition.

I had good shoes at that time and I walk all night long and morning comes, very cold — actually, unbelievably cold. But we walk. I keep myself going. I walk, I walk, I walk. The sun comes up and the Germans are gone. No guards. They left us during the night. We are a whole column of idiots walking alone.

One of the guys is a German prisoner and he knows the area. He said there’s nothing ahead, no city anywhere. We have to go back the way we came. So we walk back. No sleep, no food, no coat. We walked all night, now we’re going back. We passed hundreds of dead. There were two brothers with us all the time. They wouldn’t walk without holding hands and that’s the way they fell asleep. They survived the whole war and froze to death holding hands a couple of hours before the war was over. We walked out seven thousand, we came back three thousand. We came back like sheep to the SS.

They corralled us against the river. The valley is very narrow. We’re deep in the Alps. The Callevendo. I saw them putting up machine-gun rests.

The German prisoner says we have to get out of here because they gonna shoot us. He gave me a sleeping bag made out of paper covered with tar. I swam the river at night with the help of that German fellow. On the other side, we took our clothes off, we climbed into the sleeping bag because we were wet, put our clothing out to dry, and that was it. I didn’t want to get out of the sleeping bag. That night was full of stars, a beautiful starry night. The biggest starry night I ever saw. I slept for three days.