We had few visitors in South Lazar, but every few days a
young Serb came through the barracks dressed in a green-and-red
uniform with a GI knitted cap giving, in his limited English, a
cheery greeting: "How do you do, goddamn! How do you do, goddamn!"
One evening a POW got the biggest laugh of the winter. He
arrived from Munich with the detail and while fully clothed called
for attention from the top of a table. In the presence of those near
him he started to unload. He dug into his coat and turned up five
loaves of bread, piling them neatly on the table. The audience
increased as he pulled from his jacket, one at a time, five more
loaves, piling them on top of the others. From inside his shirt, like a
magician, he produced six or seven more loaves, the pile now taking
on the proportion of a pyramid. From inside his trousers, by
now shouting and lolling himself with bravado and us with laughter,
he drew forth four or five more. Eventually he stacked up
between twenty and twenty-five loaves of bread. I have no idea
whether he dealt directly with a bakery or with several Germans. It
was a fantastic performanceout of The Arabian Nights.
Going and coming on the Munich detail, I passed a compound
housing troops from India. The yard beside their barracks was used
to dry their turbans, which they strung like colored streamers crisscrossing
the area. It was an extraordinary sight to come upon in
prison. The men walked about the yard in twos and threes conversing
while worldng with the bright and many-colored wrappings,
their long black hair released and falling below their shoulders.
Many American POWs, ignoring or being unaware of, or indifferent
to, the fighting reputation of these men, thought they were
funny as hell.
In the small yard beside our barracks, walking was not especially
inviting. One February morning, after days of darkness, the
sun broke through the overcast sky and fell brightly upon the eight foot-
high barbed-wire fence. The fence was covered with a deep
frost. The sun softened that cruel thing made by man. The barbed
wire glistened in the shining sun of a bright, clear morning. The sun
and the wire formed exquisitely lovely patterns running around the
yard. It was nature's way of beautifying while humanizing man's
ugly invention. The prison fence that had hitherto been too brutal to
handle became for a few moments an object too tender to touch. I
was enchanted by its crisp loveliness, a loveliness so fragile that li1<e
thin blown glass a man's warm hand might destroy it, so delicate
that his warm breath would dissolve it. The barbarous bits, sinister
and cruel, now encased in frost and sun, made a delicate fabric and
changed our inhuman enclosure into a dainty trellis that might
serve to bound a fairyland and not a prison.
Deep into February the temperature fell sharply and the nights
grew intensely cold, so cold that the stars seemed frosted in the winter
sky. The sky itself seemed colder, a blue-black cold with white frosted
red-fringed globes for stars. Under this boundless sky a
sharp wind whipped the prison yard, while a chilling moon
flooded the compound, highlighting the shiny black-tarred roofs of
the barracks. I stood in the moonlight and thought of Mavis and
reflected upon our secret code-"moonlight on the roofs of Ballyemena"-
by which she would know that I was in combat. It was five
months since silence had fallen upon me and since I had heard from
her. I had no idea if she knew anything at all about me.
Personal relationships in South Lazar labored under the pressure
of darkness, within and without. I found everyone around me
annoying. There developed in me an unwillingness to care anymore
about friendships. Weeks of sunless days, each day with the
threat of further reduction in rations, each trip to Munich more
hateful, drove me into a desperate need for change and for freedom.
I volunteered for a farm Kommando and waited each day for the
authorities to let me know.
In the meantime the constant darkness, the shortened tempers
sparked by emptiness, the long dreary days arguing with Lynn
Smith and being nettled by everyone slowly pressed me to the point
of wanting to scream out and to run into the yard and plow through
the barbed wire. Anything to get out of the barracks, out of the
enclosure, out of prison. I felt inside me that I was about to crack up.
I feared a nervous breakdown unless something happened to get
me out of the darkness. Days passed and there was no word about
theKommando.I gave up hope. I wasn't even sure anymore I wanted
to go. The isolation, the frustration, and the confinement had
brought me close to a nervous collapse when suddenly, one day in
the first week of March, the glorious sun appeared and the tension,
like a passed sore stabbed by a lance, collapsed. The next day I was
notified that my farm Kommando would leave immediately.
210
