AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Good call, Peggy,” he told me. “I think you caught it in time, before it could do permanent damage.”
I had just finished the treatment Mr.B. had prescribed and was wrapping Pedro’s leg when I heard footsteps crunching on the gravel driveway outside the stable. I looked up, surprised to see Joe standing in the doorway. Buster, who had been keeping me company outside the stall, went over to greet him, tail wagging.
“You going to deliver another baby horse?” Joe asked.
“This horse’s name is Pedro,” I said, laughing, “and he definitely isn’t pregnant. He’s gone lame.”
“How about that. Pedro has a bum leg just like us, Tripod.” He scratched the dog’s ears. Joe looked as though he wanted to tell me something but didn’t know how to begin. I took a guess.
“You’re taking off again, aren’t you? Is that what you’ve come to tell me?”
He sighed. “I have a hankering to see the ocean. Thought I’d drive down there, you know?” Mitch O’Hara’s memorial service had been hard on Joe, but I still hated to see him go. I had gotten used to having him around.
“I’m glad you didn’t leave without saying goodbye,” I said, swallowing a lump in my throat. “Will you—I mean, do you think you’ll be coming back this way ever again?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have any plans... just... you know.”
“You’ve been a huge help to me, Joe. And to Jimmy, too. I don’t want to tie you down here, but Jimmy’s mother found some more of his letters and we discovered another name to contact. Someone he worked with when they liberated a concentration camp.”
“Jim was there? In those camps?”
“Yes. We could tell from his letters that it was a horrifying experience. Maybe it’s one of the reasons he became so depressed. We’re going to try to contact his friend, and if he doesn’t live too far away, maybe we can visit him. But I’m no good with people, Joe, and you are. I could really use your help.”
He rewarded me with a grin. “I’ll be glad to help. I’ll just go and stick my five remaining toes in the ocean, and then I’ll be back.”
“Thanks.” He could probably tell how relieved I was. He had started to limp away when I called to him. “Joe?” He turned around to face me. “Don’t get into any trouble, okay? And be careful driving. No speeding.” He laughed and gave me a salute.
* * *
A week and a half later on a sunny Saturday morning, I climbed onto the back of Joe’s motorcycle to ride to Bennington, Vermont, to talk with Art Davis. It was the longest trip I’d taken on his motorcycle so far, but one of the prettiest. Vermont’s Green Mountains took my breath away, rolling into the distance like a rumpled green carpet. Bennington was the kind of picturesque hometown that every GI must have longed to return home to. But I felt as though every bone and organ in my body had been jiggled out of place by the time we arrived. My ears were still ringing when Art came out of his house to greet us. He was probably thirty, a tall, lanky, down-to-earth New Englander with a pretty, pregnant wife. Art was a high school science teacher and volunteer firefighter, so he and Joe hit it off right away as we sat talking on his front porch. But Art grew very serious and closed his eyes as if he was in pain when I told him about Jimmy’s breakdown in a little more detail than I had on the phone.
“We’re hoping you can tell us about your time with Jim, and how you adjusted to civilian life afterwards, so we can help Jimmy get better.”
Art drew a deep breath as if about to plunge into cold water. “I’m sorry to hear about Jim but to tell you the truth, I’m not surprised. Anyone who was there at that camp and saw the things we did... I admit there are days when I still have a hard time with it. I think Jim was even more deeply affected than I was. Having the love and support of my wife made all the difference, I think. It was like she was able to show me that there’s still some good in this world and some hope for the future. I know Jim wasn’t married—are you his girlfriend?”
“Just a friend.”
“It helps to have good friends. I had only known Jim for a few months by the time the camp was liberated in April of ’45, but it felt like we’d known each other all our lives because of everything we went through. Experiencing the carnage of warfare and seeing so many young men gravely wounded and dying... that would give any sane man reason enough to want to check out of this world. But then we came to Buchenwald.” He paused and I saw him struggling with his emotions.
“Even now, it’s hard for me to talk about. You don’t want to remember, but the memory is seared into your brain and your heart, and it’s impossible to forget. We don’t dare to forget!” He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded raw. “I won’t describe it for you because it’s beyond description. Jim and I were both deeply shaken to see the things that evil men are capable of doing to their fellow human beings. Jim fell to his knees and wept, right there on the road. I wanted to do the same, but all of these skeletons were shuffling toward us, some of them kneeling down to try to kiss our feet, so I pulled him up again. We had to get to work, doing what we could for them. It was the only way to keep from breaking down ourselves.” Tears filled Art’s eyes but he didn’t try to wipe them.
“We eventually set up a hospital in the former SS barracks and attended to the survivors who were closest to death. Jim would look each person in the eye, and he would ask their name. He would remember them all, too, and call everyone by name whenever he took care of them. They had been treated like animals for so long, Jim said, that he wanted to let them know they were still living people with names and a soul. He said we needed to restore their dignity and humanity as much as we needed to restore their bodies.”
My tears started falling at Art’s description of Buchenwald. It was so easy to picture the Jimmy I knew so well, offering warmth and compassion in such a terrible place. “That must have been heartbreaking,” I murmured.
“The people who revived, who were resurrected from the dead almost, were the ones who kept us going. They were so grateful. There was a language barrier because the survivors had been transported to the camp from countries all over Europe—France, the Netherlands, Belgium. But compassion speaks all languages.”
“Do you know if there was a woman Jimmy was close to?” I asked. “A nurse or maybe a patient?”
He thought for a moment. “There weren’t any Army nurses. The nurses who had been working with us before we liberated Buchenwald had to be transferred someplace else. Seeing such misery and human suffering would have been too much for them. It was hard enough on us men, and we’d already seen a lot during the war. But there were a handful of Jewish physicians and nurses who had been prisoners in the camp. They had suffered like everyone else, yet as soon as they regained their strength, they insisted on working alongside us. One of those nurses spoke a couple of languages, including English. She was a big help to us.”
I pulled Gisela’s picture from my bag and showed it to Art. “Might she be one of them? We found this picture in Jimmy’s pack. It says on the back that her name is Gisela. And it looks like she’s wearing a nurse’s uniform.”
Art studied it carefully. “I don’t know. She might have been. You have to understand how emaciated and close to death these survivors were. Their heads had been shaved. Hundreds of them died in the weeks after we arrived, in spite of our best efforts to save them. We were just too late. When the liberating armies first arrived, some of the soldiers mistakenly fed their rations to the survivors, but their bodies simply couldn’t handle food and it ended up killing them. It’s hard to deny food to a starving man, but we had to proceed slowly and feed some of them intravenously. The soldiers meant well and they wanted to do something to help, so we let them donate blood for transfusions.”
“Do you know what happened to any of those Jewish nurses who’d been in the camp?”
“The first thing most of the survivors wanted to do after they recovered was find their loved ones. They didn’t want to imagine that they were the only one in their family who had survived. Organizations started springing up to try to reunite all of these survivors and help them return to their homes—or what was left of their homes.”
