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19
Peggy
JULY 1946
I was so excited about working all day with Mr. Barnett that I was awake with the chickens the next morning. Mrs. Barnett kept a few in her backyard coop so she would always have fresh eggs, and her rooster faithfully serenaded the dawn. Mr.B. and I spent all morning at two different dairy farms, testing their cows for tuberculosis. We enjoyed riding around the countryside together and didn’t need to talk much in order to be content. When we got back to the clinic, Buster was sitting on the Barnetts’ back steps waiting for me. He greeted me like a long-lost friend. I quickly apologized to Mr. Barnett.
“I’m so sorry that he came over here. I’ll take him back to our yard.”
“Let him be,” he said. “He seems happy sitting there.”
“Come on inside and have some lunch, Peggy,” Mrs. Barnett called to me.
“Oh, you don’t have to feed me. I packed myself a baloney and cheese sandwich.”
“Well, sit down and eat it with us anyway. I already poured you a lemonade. And I have something I want to show you afterwards.” She insisted that I sit at her kitchen table, which I didn’t mind doing at all. Her kitchen was clean and tidy and always smelled like something good. Today it smelled like strawberries. Eight jars of fresh, homemade jam were cooling on her stovetop. I heard one of the lids give a satisfying pop as it sealed. Ever since Donna started cooking for Pop, our kitchen had smelled like cigarettes and burnt toast. My feet stuck to the floor when I walked through it on the way to my bedroom. It had never, ever smelled like strawberry jam.
“I’m going to borrow Peggy for a few minutes,” Mrs. Barnett told her husband after we ate. “She’ll return to work in a bit.” She led me into their parlor and opened a cloth carpetbag that held her knitting. “I haven’t been doing any knitting since last winter, and I happened to come across this bag today when I was vacuuming. Look what I found inside.” She showed me a slim packet of letters in airmail envelopes. I recognized Jimmy’s handwriting on them. “This was the last batch of letters Jimmy sent home to us. I kept them in my knitting bag so I would remember to pray for those poor souls while I was knitting.”
“The wounded soldiers?”
“No, the survivors in those terrible concentration camps. Remember how Jimmy wrote and told us he was helping in a hospital there?”
I had forgotten, but the letters reminded me now. I opened the first one and read it out loud.
“Dear Mom and Dad,
I’m sorry that I haven’t written in a while, but I haven’t been able to talk about what’s happening over here. Even now, I don’t think I can put it into words—and for your sakes, I’m not sure I should try.
As our forces penetrated deeper into Germany, we liberated a Nazi concentration camp. The immediate need was so great that they asked all medical personnel to suspend our regular work and help set up a hospital to care for the survivors. Nothing in my life could have prepared me for what I’ve encountered here. I wasn’t the only soldier who wept at what we saw. These are people! Human beings! Yet they have been beaten and starved and worked to the point of death. Now they are walking skeletons with skin. I don’t know how they can still be alive.
I find it impossible to understand the evil and depravity that led to this. The horror of it paralyzed me at first, but when I saw how badly they needed our help, I went to work. I’ve heard that our soldiers are finding more and more of these concentration camps all over eastern Europe. They were built to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people. The vast majority of them were Jewish. The press has been called in to document these war crimes, so you’ll be seeing photographs in the newspapers. They won’t begin to portray the horror. Or the overwhelming stench of death and decay.
Sorry for the rush, but I need to get back to work.
Love,
Jim”
Mrs. Barnett’s eyes glistened with tears when I finished. “When they started printing photographs of those camps and the gas chambers in the newspapers,” she said, “they moved me to tears. In fact, Gordon wouldn’t let me see any more of them after the first few. He said they were the stuff of nightmares. I couldn’t imagine our Jimmy having to witness such inhumanity in person. I prayed for him every day, but most of my prayers were for those poor people who had endured so much. Imagine, being torn from your home and taken to a place like that to suffer and die.”
“I can’t. It’s unimaginable. My heart aches for them.” The mention of being torn from their homes reminded me that I needed to find a new home for myself and Buster. But my situation was nothing compared to what millions of people in Europe had suffered. I needed to remember that so I wouldn’t be tempted to feel sorry for myself.
Jimmy had written a few more letters after that first one, but they were very short. The last one said:
I don’t have much time to write but I wanted to let you know I’m okay. I’m still working at the concentration camp where we’re nursing thousands of poor souls back to life. What will become of these survivors afterwards is another question. I haven’t had a chance to celebrate V-E Day yet, but I’m glad that victory has finally come. I know a lot of soldiers who are hoping to go home soon. Their work is done but my friend and fellow medic Art Davis and I are committed to postponing our discharge and staying for as long as we’re needed. Our work is far from finished.
As soon as Jimmy mentioned his friend’s name, my pulse sped up. “We need to write to Chaplain Bill right away and ask him to get Art Davis’s address,” I told Mrs. Barnett. “Art was probably one of the last people Jimmy worked with before he was discharged. Maybe he can tell us who Gisela is and what happened to Jimmy.”
Mrs.B. shared my excitement. “A letter will take too long. Use our telephone, dear. Do you have the chaplain’s phone number?”
“I do. But a long-distance call to Connecticut will be expensive.”
“It doesn’t matter. Let’s call him right away.”
I retrieved the number and called Bill at his church, giving him Art Davis’s name. He promised to call back as soon as he got Art’s address.
Later that afternoon, I was still grieving for all those people in the death camps as I applied a poultice to Pedro’s front leg. I had noticed that the horse had a slight limp, and when I’d mentioned it to Mr. Barnett, he’d diagnosed a shin splint. He showed me how to palpate Pedro’s front leg and find the hot spot and the lump.
