Nobody Said Amen. Tracy Sugarman
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Ball truck convoy outside of Saint-Lô. He was scrambling out of the slimy water, hauling his wrecked bike, when the driver of the last truck in the 30-truck convoy saw him and wheeled the loaded truck off the rutted highway. The black GI leapt from the cab. “You okay?” He extended his hand and helped the bleeding and shaken Mendelsohn to his feet. “Good reflexes, man! I’ve seen worse slides into second base. You sure you’re all right?”
Ted wiped the muck from his face and stared at the wrecked bicycle. “I made second safe, but my bike was out by a mile.” With disgust he tossed the bike back down in the weeds and sank, exhausted, to the roadbed. “Thanks for the hand, Mac. You got a load to deliver. I don’t want to keep you.”
The driver squatted beside him, exploring the cut on Ted’s forehead, trying to stop the bleeding with a handkerchief soaked from his canteen. “Doesn’t seem deep. I don’t think it’s much to worry about. I got a truckload of medic supplies, but you’re not going to need them.” He sighted down the empty and silent highway, seeing only the clouds of dust from his convoy that still lingered like ghosts in the dusk. “Gotta catch up with the trucks in Chartres and then I got a detail to deliver to a place called Dachau. You know Dachau?”
“Dachau? Never heard of it. But if you’re really going into Germany can I hitch a ride with you? I’ve been stuck in Normandy since D-Day and I’d like to see Hitler’s playground and the Supermen. The Krauts have just been mostly the invisible bastards who’ve kept me from going back to Atlanta.”
“Atlanta! You must be kidding. You’re going back to see my mammy in old Dixie? You really from Atlanta? I can’t believe that! I’m from the south side. Went to Carver High.” He grinned. “Don’t guess you went there, too. Wrong color, man. Name is Sam. Sam July.”
Ted took his extended hand. “Ted Mendelsohn.”
“Climb aboard. I can always use a back-up driver.” July threw the truck in motion. “We ought not be out here alone. The krauts love to surprise us.” He stared out the grimy windshield. “Watch the sky on your right.” When the convoy came into view he lit a cigarette and passed Ted the deck. “What did you do in Atlanta?”
“I worked for Eli Dairy.”
July slapped his hands against the wheel. “Best damn milk in all of Atlanta!” He turned and looked at Mendelsohn with a new interest. “Mendelsohn,” he said, “Eli Dairy Mendelsohn?”
Ted tried to smile. “Eli Dairy Mendelsohn.”
“My Grandpa Phineas on my mama’s side had a route with Eli, horse-drawn,” said July. “Horse’s name was Moses.” He laughed. “Used to let me feed Moses once in a while. He and Moses delivered for Eli for twenty-seven years.” He smiled, watching Ted out of the corner of his eye. “Hey, now you can deliver for me!”
“I’m not as dependable as Moses,” said Mendelsohn. “But I do land in the bulrushes.”
They were laughing as they rolled into Chartres.
From Yank magazine:
KILROY WAS HERE
There is no way, no way I know, for an American born in the twentieth century to really understand what I am seeing. This is the concentration camp of Dachau, a German invention. It was erected as the very first camp for political prisoners by Adolph Hitler in 1933. Just beyond these bullet-riddled and now deserted guard towers is an unrecognizable nightmare world, created by the same nation that blessed us with Bach, with Beethoven, with Mozart. There is no way.
What I enter now is a killing ground, an extermination camp with a still-warm crematorium, rail tracks still shivering from the last transport of the men, women, and children who have been delivered here to be murdered. In front of me is a rotting pile of 2300 human corpses, and the riddled bodies of wild carrion dogs who had been feeding on the flesh, shot by outraged GI’s when they broke into the camp, and the ashes of 400 innocents whose bodies were set on fire by the terrified Nazi guards as our troops stormed the gates. I wondered if some of them were Mendelsohns who never reached America. There is no way.
There was no way for General Eisenhower either. The unspeakable horror assaulted him when we liberated Dachau. In his fury he ordered our troops to go outside the camp and round up every German male in the village and march them slowly, one by one, through the entire slaughterhouse. The Nazi commandant was laid on the top of the rotting corpses, and the villagers were forced to spit upon him. Even for this five-star General, born in Abilene, Kansas, just before this century began, a man from a family rooted in Germany, there was no way. Dachau was such an obscenity that his very humanity felt assailed. No way to understand how his family’s spiritual home could be so profoundly defiled.
There was no way. There is no way.
The guards who survived recalled that during the forced showers, when the tens of thousands of children, women, and men were suffocated by gas, the loudspeakers in the camp would play Bach. And Beethoven. When the next trains arrived, they would play Mozart.
Mendelsohn was nearly overwhelmed by the human disaster he encountered everywhere, the cruel consequences of the Master Race mythology, the unspeakable barbarism it had unleashed. Dazed and shattered remnants of the Jews, Gypsies, and liberals who miraculously had escaped the fires of Dachau, Treblinka, Auschwitz, and Buchenwald filled every by-way and turgid refugee camp in the heart of Europe. It was a desolate and desperate journey into the dark heart of racism, and he wanted to capture that reality in his “Kilroy Was Here” columns that now had begun to appear in Newsweek. The heartbreaking powerlessness of the skeletal survivors seeded a fierce resolution. Mendelsohn knew he would resist the horror of racism whenever and wherever he found it.
On his last week on the continent, Max Miller had sent him a cable.
Teddy,
Soon as you can shake the clan after your visit home, there’s a chair for you at Newsweek. Folks here are eager to meet Kilroy because your stuff has been so alive and on-target. We got a lot to do, pal. Come.
Max
When he returned to Atlanta at the end of the year, Ted Mendelsohn was nearly a stranger to his family. Although they ravenously reclaimed him, he found the norms of Atlanta life stultifying and surprisingly difficult. He had changed, and Atlanta was changing. The city was racing into a buoyant postwar prosperity, reaching out to new suburbs and greenery. But beneath the euphoria, he could detect the old truisms of caste and race that he remembered from his childhood.
It was soon apparent that the subject of racism in any form was a source of irritation to his parents.
“Let the schwartze get the laundry, Teddy darling. You ought to rest.”
He reacted abruptly and loudly, startling his mother. “Christ, Mom, stop that! Clementine is not a schwartze. She’s an American who happens to be Negro!”
His mother’s eyes widened; she was clearly wounded by the sharpness in his rebuke. “All right, darling. I understand. I won’t use that word. I won’t say schwartze again.” She cocked her head, seeking to find the boy who had gone off to war, then smiled. “I should have my mouth washed out with soap.”
Ted looked tenderly at his mother. “When is the last time you told me that, mom? Probably when I called Paddy McElroy a lousy harp when he called me a kike after Boy Scout camp!”
She kissed him then and walked briskly to the door. “Get washed up, Teddy. We’re going to the club for dinner.”
Relieved and grateful to have him home safe, she brought her young veteran into the social swim of the synagogue and the country club, eager to have him meet the young men and women who could relaunch him into the community. “He’s very high-strung,” she confided to her husband that night as they were retiring. “He’s been through a lot.” But fatigued by the daily struggle to keep Eli Dairy running through the long war when all the young men had been gone, his father was ailing now. Ted watched with distress as proud Irving Mendelsohn’s strength seemed to be betraying him. “Help me, Teddy.” The words were so needy that Ted became more and more