Ezra went to war and returned from Stalag IIB

Ezra (left) went to war and returned from Stalag IIB

I tend to be a day late on subject-of-the-day posts because i’m not a quick one, I have to ponder. And also the server this blog is on is iffy and sometimes I’ll write a post and punch publish and the post disappears, the blog going down for five seconds, as happened with this one. I was also thinking of a different kind of memorial this weekend. But would now like to try to reconstruct my memorial day post that is now a post memorial day post.

Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” fictionalizes some of the confusion of Europe uprooted and wandering as WWII came apart and the order and organization of Death Camps and POW camps turned into a chaos of those with no other nation than limbo, picking through trash for food, drinking bad water, brains too stunned to consider much beyond walking, resembling more the many homeless that every morning emerge out of the concrete gray and the shadows of parks and begin their trek to the food line of one of the city’s main church soup kitchens a couple of blocks from our apartment, many days the streets seeming to empty of all pedestrian traffic but those whose lives have been reduced to the portable. Like epileptic Bill who several years ago went out of work when a fancy restaurant, also a couple of blocks away, closed and its gate and stoop became a line for homeless drying their clothes on early sunny mornings. Epileptic Bill, who did get meds from the State and our landlord couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t take them until I explained to him that perhaps it’s because it takes a while to find a cocktail of meds that will work and how an epileptic friend of ours was almost killed by State meds carelessly prescribed, who spent years barely able to do much but have seizures and sit in a daze, until she met a State doctor who cared and said your meds are killing you and worked to find the right cocktail. Bill, who our landlord gave a perpetual loan to of four big plastic trash bins in the decaying narrow dirt and broken concrete courtyard in the back of our 80 or 90 year old building, and Bill would daily come at 7 am and climb the gate outside our bedroom window and tend his cache of Coke and Pepsi cans and sit in a chair outside our decaying kitchen window, shadow ghost having a few isolated smokes. As it is with most ghosts he was the kind you see out the corner of your eye, who as you turned to look straight on at him would disappear, poof. I’d open the kitchen blind and there he was. I’d turn and turn back and during that interval he would usually disappear.

At winter’s end Bill would leave out back the jacket given him by the landlord and the landlord would put it away then would pull it out with fall’s chill and put it in the back for Bill to pick up. For Easter last year the landlord bought Bill new clothes and put them out for him on the cyclone fence next to the trash bins, where he would put Bill’s clothes that he would take home to wash when Bill would have a seizure and soil himself. The clean clothes would hang on the fence with spic-and-span healthful goodness, so lively they were nearly wearing themselves, and Bill would come and go daily but not pick them up. The clothes would be rained on, air polluted upon and still he’d not touch them. When they were again stiff and the color of coffee and concrete then they’d disappear from the fence and appear on Bill. Bill treated his new Easter finery the same way. He has since apparently disappeared for good. Months have gone by and Bill hasn’t made an appearance, which is probably bad news for Bill. After three months the landlord emptied the trash bins of Bill’s cans.

Bill once found a wallet in the street still fat with credit cards and twenty dollars. Bill had the landlord get in touch with the owner. The owner came and got his wallet which was as plump as it was when he’d lost it and he gave Bill the twenty dollars. The next day the wallet’s owner returned and gave Bill a couple hundred dollars and if I remember correctly he rented for him a room for a night at the motel near here. The same motel from which, last year, went a husband and wife and some children who had been living there for several months, walked down the street, past our own, inexplicably nude, leaving behind in their motel room the dead body of another one of their children, exorcised of life which they had mistaken for a demon and tortured out of her.

Bill confused the landlord, showing off the couple of hundred dollars worth of cigarettes he’d purchased, which he stowed in the trash bins, used mainly for trading.

I once found online the account of a Concentration camp survivor, wrote at length what it was like with the approach of the US and USSR troops and the fleeing of the Nazis, who shed their uniforms and went a few miles back home, put the civilian life camouflage on over the military, hid in the wide open air and waited with the rest, all welcoming smiles. The survivor was wandering with other survivors, weakened by captivity and rare and bad food, confused by the sudden change, at their resurrection from the dead, survivors who were as disinterested in him as he was in them, and during their initial wandering they were invited for a farm house meal by a man and his wife. As he and the others sat eating he realized the host was one of the officials at the Death Camp, jovial now, serving them, piling food on them when a couple of days before he’d still been killing them. And the survivors, realizing who he was, instead of attacking the officer, eating the good food at his table, laughed at the jokes and said thanks for the potatoes and meat, not knowing what in the hell else to do. Shocked by a world going topsy-turvy. When the meal was done they shook the fake civilian’s hand and returned to the road. The survivor outlined his weeks of wandering, walking himself back to life, and I gained a better picture of the chaos, the people looking for an old home that no longer was, after a while remembered relatives and started to look for them, lost seeking the lost in a Europe that seemed less like nations than houses blasted and jumbled together by a several year long hurricane.

In school we were taught that the US troops rode in. There was liberation. We were shown pictures of townsfolk celebrating the arrival of US troops, of prisoners lined up behind fences waiting release, lying on bunks. One imagined an immediate translation of liberated prisoners to hospital wards with three meals a day, clean sheets, warm baths, the Andrews Sisters in nursing caps bouncing their curls off their shoulders, breaking into impromptu song while taking temps.

My husband had a great Uncle. One of the Black Sheep Uncles. Who my husband liked best. An alligator trapper in the bayou who was missing several fingers. Whispers of his being a morphine addict. There were the church-going, Assembly of God, in good stead with Christ members of the family. And there were the tubercular alcoholics who joked and told stories and purchased and gave candy to the nieces and nephews rather than church judgments. And then the whispers of the morphine addict Uncle.

I knew he had served in WWII. Had been a POW as well, but not much was said about this.

It bothered me that I knew Ezra was in the war and had been a POW but no one could tell me anything else about it.

I did a little research and found out that Ezra was in the 509th Parachute Infantry Batallion, which was the first American Unit to parachute into combat in November of 1942.

Ezra grew up in Louisiana. I could be wrong but I doubt he had traveled much before going off to war.

On Feb 29 1944 he was taken prisoner and was a POW at the infamous Stalag 2B, well known for being the worst of the German POW camps. Towards the end of the war the camp was evacuated and the POWs spent the next two months marching.

From http://darbysrangers.tripod.com/id64.htm

EVACUATION & LIBERATION: On 28 January 1945, POW received German instructions to be ready to evacuate camp at 0800 hours the following morning. Upon receipt of these instructions, the MOC set up a plan of organization based on 25-man groups and 200 man companies with NCOs in charge. On the day of the evacuation, however, POW were moved out of camp in such a manner that the original plan was (of) little assistance. German guards ordered POW to fall out of the barracks. When 1200 men had assembled on the road, the remaining 500 were allowed to stay in the barracks. A disorganized column of 1200 marched out into the cold and snow. The guards were considerate, and Red Cross food was available. After the first day, the column was broken down into three groups of 400 men each, with NCOs in charge of each group.

For the next three months, the column was on the move, marching an average of 22 kilometers a day 6 days a week. German rations were neither regular nor adequate. At almost every stop Sgt McMahan bartered coffee, cigarettes or chocolate for potatoes which he issued to the men. Bread the most important item, was not issued regularly. When it was needed most it was never available. The soup was, as a rule, typical, watery German soup, but several times POW got a good, thick dried-pea soup. Through the activity of some of the key NCO’s, Red Cross food was obtained from POW camps passed; by the column on the march. Without it, it is doubtful that the majority of men could have finished the march. The ability of the men to steal helped a lot. The weather was atrocious. It always seemed to be either bitter cold or raining or snowing. Quarters were usually unheated barns and stables. Sometimes they slept unsheltered o the ground; and sometimes they were fortunate enough to find a heated barn.

Except for one period when Red Cross food was exhausted and guards became surly, morale of the men remained at a high level. Practically all the men shaved at every opportunity and kept their appearance as neat as possible under the circumstances.

From time to time weak POW would drop out of the column and wait to be picked up by other columns which were on the move. Thus at Dahlen on 6 & 7 March, the column dwindled to some 900 American POW. On 19 March at Tramm, 800 men were sent to work on Kommandos, leaving only 133 POW who were joined a week later by the Large Kommando Company from Lauenberg. On 13 April the column was strafed by 4 Spitfires near Dannenberg. Ten POW were killed. The rest of the column proceeded to Marlag 10C, Westertimke, where they met the men they had left behind at Stalag IIB who had left on 18 February, reached Stalag 10B after an easy 3 day trip, and then moved adjacent Marlag 10C on 16 April. Westertimke was liberated by the British on 28 April 1945.

There is a report that July 11 1945 Ezra was reported as living. I don’t know what happened to him in the final days of the war, and in the couple of months between liberation and when he was reported as living. I have seen the report of another individual also part of the 98 North African Theater in Italy who was also in Stalag 2B who was reported as living over a month before Ezra was. Where Ezra was between liberation and when he was reported alive, I don’t know. Was he a Pynchon character journeying back from the underworld, walking until he found his name again. Was he lying in a hospital, unidentified. Where was he? I don’t know, only that the war left him in bad shape.

Ezra didn’t talk about his experiences. All my husband knew was that he’d been a POW and his mother mentioned he’d gotten a Purple Heart. I sent her what I’d found on Ezra and she wrote back this maybe explained his being in and out of the hospital for years following WWII. Psychiatric problems. Ezra was 31 when he was taken prisoner so he had gone into the war probably as a man who’d had some idea of a life he’d wanted to lead and had been pursuing. Or maybe not. He returned home and I get the idea he was viewed as kind of a puzzle, people not getting the connection between the ward and the war, it seems, Uncle Ezra just not able to get with the game. And then the morphine addiction thing. He had married one of the nurses he met. They had one son about a year or two after the war ended. “Pride and joy”. Y’know. And one can well imagine, I think. Ezra taking to the bayou to fish and trap alligators, spending his time out in the boat, away from people, married to a nurse who perhaps he found was able to listen, their having a child, and the cliched “pride and joy” of a son being not so cliched.

When he was 19, young son, on his job for the telephone company, was hit by a car and killed.

I don’t want to imagine.

Ezra’s wife died about 12 years later. Ezra lived a year and a half longer and died at age 65.

I don’t know if Ezra was brave. I don’t know what kind of soldier he was. I don’t know anything about him really, other than the fact he was my husband’s favorite uncle, that he and his wife were funny and nice, and that my husband enjoyed visiting him as a child, at their house “way way out” in the bayou.

Before I learned about Ezra and the war, my husband and I used to joke about Ezra, who I’d never met, having lost his fingers trapping alligators. We didn’t know if he’d lost his fingers while trapping alligators but had assumed it. Learning about the war, I’m not so sure now. I have two photos of Ezra just after he’d entered the military, in uniform, the image where he’s standing military straight for the memory book ruined with what looks like a light leak in the camera. I have also two photos taken in the early 70s. He was a skinny man at 60, tanned about as dark as the light brown polyester shirt he was wearing, looking less like his lighter-skinned siblings who were still living and more like his Cherokee-Chahta great-grandmother whose father never got with the program either, wanted to fish and hunt rather than farm and so his white relations called him “Lazy Ward” and for a time every descendant who took after him was nick-named after him.

In the photos, Ezra’s whole hand rests at his side, his left hand conspiculously jammed deep in his dark brown polyester pants pocket, hiding the missing fingers from view.