Beyond the Call (26 page)

In the many interviews he conducted with ex-prisoners, Wilmeth learned that there was a pattern to their experiences.
¹⁷
With some exceptions, liberated American POWs were usually treated well, if rather offhandedly, by the frontline Soviet troops. The same was not true for captured Germans and liberated Russians. There were frequent murders. One group of American ex-POWs told of being given 25 German prisoners as a ‘gift' by their Soviet liberators, to kill as they saw fit: shoot them, hang them, chop them to bits, the Russians suggested, and they were disappointed when the Americans declined.
¹⁸
The truly abusive treatment of liberated American and British POWs usually began, as far as Wilmeth was able to make out, when they came to the rear areas, which were controlled by the NKVD and its operatives within the Red Army. Men like Colonel Vlasov.

If only the POWs could be brought to Odessa, they would be safe. Latest information was that the arrangements there were working out well.
¹⁹
The facilities originally set up by the Russians had been typically awful,
²⁰
but the American contact officer, Major Hall, had
worked to help improve them. There were now repatriation teams from America, Britain, France, and Belgium, all working efficiently with the Russians to process the ex-prisoners and put them aboard the British troopships that would take them to their home countries. (There was a simple and chilling reason for Russian cooperation at Odessa. The ships arrived filled with Russian ex-POWs who were handed over to the Soviets.
²¹
The fate of about half of these men would be incarceration in the gulags or even death; many were executed in warehouses near the docks.
²²
)

For Colonel Wilmeth, gathering the British and American POWs and getting them from Poland to Odessa was the hard part. Toward the end of the month, unable to make progress, constantly reminded by the Soviets that his presence was unwelcome, he finally gave up. There was nothing more he could do. He made arrangements to leave Lublin and return to Poltava.

His mission was indebted to the tune of $36,000 to the Polish Red Cross. He left them his unused surplus medical supplies, worth about $500. The Red Cross reckoned that their value on the black market would easily pay off the debt.
²³

Colonel Wilmeth and his party were flown out of Lublin on 28 March. Their mission was not finished. Wilmeth knew there were still ex-POWs out there, of all nationalities, who didn't dare come into the towns. They needed assistance, guidance, reassurance. Somebody needed to be out there, helping to bring them to safety.

Somebody was. One man was out there alone; one man whose sole purpose was to get Americans home. And not just Americans: all stray people from the free world were his concern.

 

LATE MARCH 1945: NORTH-WEST OF LUBLIN

W
HAT HE REMEMBERED
most vividly was the distant sound of the freight trains on the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Side by side, father and son, they would sit under the trees on the bank of the Juniata River, or wade out off the rocks, their fishing lines running into the broad, slow water. Robert loved those fishing trips, in that golden time before his father went away and everything was poisoned and turned to darkness.

There was a sound that haunted that valley. A long series of booming reports, like distant cannon-fire, rolling up the river, echoing through the mists that hung over the forested slopes. Slow as a ticking clock …
boom
…
boom
…
boom
… continuing for a minute or more. To a young boy, it was ominous, frightening. His father smiled at him and explained that it was the sound of a long freight train setting out from the Enola rail yard. As each car's coupling locked in place with the pull of the engine, it would make that sound, which would reverberate for miles up the river valley.

The Enola yard, a vast nexus of sidings and junctions, stood on the side of the Susquehanna River across from Harrisburg, right next door to Camp Hill. When he was a boy, the railroad entered Robert Trimble's soul. It was always there in the background, on those weekend trips with his father. In the winter they hunted deer and would live out in the wilds for days at a time among the snows that lay on the pines and the red spruces. It was a beautiful place, fresh as the morning of the world, the valley ridges cutting across the land as if the tines of a vast rake had been dragged through this country when it was young and hadn't yet hardened.

And from time to time came that
boom
…
boom
…
boom
… as one of the great half-mile trains with its hundred or more cars started up the valley toward Pittsburgh, or south for Baltimore.

It echoed in his memory now, marking out the rhythm of his steps as he walked along the railroad through the wilds of Poland.
²⁴

Robert had been back a few days now, having replenished his stock of cash and rations at Poltava and caught a flight back to Lwów, ostensibly still on salvage and aircrew recovery business, but in reality slipping out of the bird dogs' scenting range and heading deep into the country.

The agents' messages – moving by word of mouth now through the network of POWs and informants that Wilmeth had helped link up, as well as via the embassy – still reached Robert at the hotels in Lwów or Kraków or Lublin, or even at the homesteads out in the country, or wherever the mission happened to take him.

There were more messages, more calls for help, than a single man could cope with, and they came not only from American POWs, but from people of other nations, all kinds of people who had been set loose from the Nazi camps and abandoned. Although Robert wasn't conscious of it, the stress of his mission, layered on top of what he had gone through during his combat tour, was beginning to wear away at him. He was approaching that point where fractures start to appear in a person's inner being.

A message had reached him the previous day: a rendezvous with a band of POWs, concentrated in an area north-west of Lublin. It was close to a railroad route, so getting them to a station and aboard a train shouldn't be too difficult. He could even follow the tracks to the meeting point. And so he set out on what now seemed almost like a routine mission. What he saw that day would haunt him the rest of his life. He didn't like to think about it; didn't even like to acknowledge that it was there in his memory. Only with patient persuasion could he be drawn to talk about it.

It was a beautiful day, bright and clear, seeming to promise the first approach of spring. Out here, away from the towns and roads, there was peace. And there was a familiarity too – the slopes covered in bare birches and green pines dusted with snow, casting long winter shadows across the crackling ice floes that dotted the slow-moving Vistula River. It could almost be the Susquehanna, and this railroad could almost be the line that snaked up the Juniata valley toward Pittsburgh and Cleveland.

But there were differences. It was 80 years since war had last visited Pennsylvania. In the valley of the Vistula, although there was peace this minute, war had been here very recently. This very spot had been on the front line as little as two months ago, the Vistula forming the
boundary between the opposing forces of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. That changed with the beginning of the Soviets' Vistula–Oder Offensive in January. The traces were still to be seen: pieces of broken gear and weapons poking through snowy hummocks; wrecked buildings, an occasional burned-out vehicle, and trees splintered by shellfire.

In this area there were at least three abandoned Nazi concentration camps, satellites of the main death camp of Majdanek in Lublin.
²⁵
And this river, further upstream, passed by an even more notorious camp: it was into the waters of the Vistula that the SS had dumped the ashes from the ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

But to Robert, lost in his own thoughts, that was all far away.

He paced steadily, walking between the rails, where the snow was thinnest, the sleepers firm and familiar under his boots. Robert Trimble was far from home, but at times like this, alone in the wilds, he could almost imagine he was back there. The smell of the winter pines was in his nostrils, the mournful squalling of crows in the far distance. His mind was in the past, in the head of the adolescent boy he'd been, when he still had a father and his closest pals were his fellow Boy Scouts.

Camping out in the woods was a favorite pastime, but there were jaunts further afield. In 1933, the Scout troop bought a dilapidated old Bell Telephone truck, and their scoutmaster drove them up to Chicago to visit the World's Fair (‘A Century of Progress!'). For Robert, the best part was sleeping under the stars at Niagara Falls on the way home. But the favorite times were with his dad: fishing, learning to hunt deer. His father was devoted to young Robert – until one day, with no explanation, he left and never came back. It was like having a limb blown off by a sudden bomb blast. The scarring ran deep into Robert's soul, leaving a place that was hardened, closed off.

But he still loved to hunt and fish, still loved the wild country.

It took a war to bring him happiness again. In the fall of 1943, he was posted to Fort Worth Army Airfield in Texas, to begin transition training on the B-24 Liberator bomber. He'd become a skilled pilot, and this was his introduction to the shoulder-winged, twin-tailed
behemoths he would eventually fly in combat. They were built nearby at the Consolidated Vultee factory, and during the course of the war, Fort Worth was the training base for thousands of pilots. When Second Lieutenant Robert M. Trimble arrived, he and his buddies were given accommodation by a local oilman who had a huge ranch near the airfield.

The men's wives came to live with them. For Robert and Eleanor it was their perfect honeymoon – a Shangri-La for two kids from blue-collar Camp Hill. Robert taught her to fish on the ranch's lake and hunt in the woods. One evening they walked down by the lake. ‘I could imagine us staying here forever,' Eleanor said. ‘Couldn't you?'

‘Well, I'd like to,' Robert said. ‘Everything I want is here. Hunting, fishing …' He corrected himself: ‘
You
, hunting, fishing …'

She scolded him, and they laughed. He could still see in her the teenage schoolgirl, radiant from basketball practice, coming into the shop where he'd worked Saturdays as a soda jerk. ‘Cat got your tongue?' She taunted him as he bashfully served ice-cream sodas to her and her best friend. She was pretty, but there was more than just a teenage fancy in their attraction; they were drawn to each other, two children scarred by their fathers.

With the Texas sundown coloring the waters of the lake, he took her in his arms. ‘The war could change our lives forever,' he said. He let the words hang in the air; the unspoken question was whether it would change their lives for better or worse. So far, it had brought them this idyll, but it could so easily bring them unthinkable grief …

Robert was so deep in his memories, he wasn't sure at first what it was that yanked him back to the present. The cawing of crows, the cold air burning his cheeks, the thump of his boots on the railroad sleepers … everything was the same. Everything except the peculiar whatever-it-was that was scattered along by the tracks about a quarter mile ahead. From a distance it looked like a knocked-over cordwood stack. Not an uncommon sight: most of the Polish locomotives burned wood, which was why they were so underpowered and slow. But it
didn't look right: the billets were much too long for firewood – about the length of a man.

As Robert drew closer, his steps slowed. The crows he'd been hearing for the past mile or so were fluttering and circling overhead, and he understood what the objects were. For a moment, preposterously, he thought they might be railroad workers on a nap break.

There were dozens of bodies, scores of them, maybe a couple of hundred, lying heaped or in rows next to the tracks. As he approached, his feet carrying him onward in spite of the feeling of foreboding settling on his heart, he noticed that some were actually lying on the tracks. Not just on them, he realized –
tied
to them. They had been mutilated, decapitated or cut in half by the wheels of a train.

Moving carefully, and fighting down the urge to vomit, Robert stepped among the corpses. The crows hopped away or went flapping up into the air, squawking. Other than the ones tied to the track, the bodies were mostly laid in rows, as if they'd been lined up and shot in batches. How long ago it had happened, he couldn't say. The bodies were frozen. They could have lain here for days. Not much longer than that, or they'd have been covered in snow. Their faces were edged with frost, but seemed almost alive, spared the bloating and discoloring of decomposition. They looked disconcertingly as if they might wake if they were disturbed.

Most of them were in German uniform; others were in tattered remnants of what appeared to be Red Army clothing. The latter were in an emaciated state and were obviously Russian prisoners of war. What had occurred here was a mystery, but some possibilities suggested themselves. Most likely a consignment of captured Germans and liberated Russian POWs had come down from the front line all herded together, probably by train. American ex-prisoners had reported this kind of mixing of captured enemy soldiers and liberated prisoners. If that was the case, then up to this point the Russian POWs had been lucky; at this stage in the war, the Red Army was so desperate for troops, the standard procedure was to march liberated Russians straight to marshaling centers, regardless of what state of emaciation
and sickness they were in, kit them out, and ship them straight to the front line.
²⁶