The Liberator

This chapter in The Comfort Bird follows Nanno through the hell fires of the allied battles against the deadly Nazi enemy.  The following excerpt features some parts of Nanno’s experience.

On the fourth story of the Chicago Grand Railroad Office, Nanno finds a small table for himself.  He and another couple of hundred thousand American military were just informed that after this there will be no communication possible at all with the home front.  “Time to say goodbye,” he hears all around him.  But what does that mean in the old language of Dad and Mom?  Write a letter first to Alice.  No, better write the old folks first.  A few sentences, that will long be saved, first in a small drawer in his parents’ house, later in his own drawer that he will not often open:

            ‘[…] Whatever will happen to me, what I took with me from my parents

is worth more than gold.  That’s what makes the writing of these lines

so difficult.  What is precious to you is hard to let go.  I promise

dad and mom that I will do my best to come back safe and sound. […]

[The men embark on a troop ship by the end of March 1944.] …

Circling the convoy is a swarm of speedy destroyer escorts and frigates armed with torpedoes to keep the German submarines at bay.  And they have all they can handle. 

[They make it across.] …

Liverpool.  Nanno Hiemstra does not yet know at this point that on the northern Atlantic Ocean, he became the Dad of a healthy baby girl.

…

In the second half of May 1944, hundreds and hundreds of boats lie anchored in Liverpool and Cardiff, but also in many other English and Irish harbors, and a hundred thousand soldiers are ready to do what will be asked of them. 

…

   There stands his loyal brother-in-arms of iron and steel: a thirteen-ton M5 Caterpillar truck Diamond T, and coupled behind it a piece of artillery of 105mm and a weight of six ton. He’s to boss that around as long as the war shall last.  He’s practiced with such a behemoth for longer than a year, till he could handle it as easily as a pair of horses in front of his wheat meal-and gravel wagon in South Dakota.  Another friend joins who introduces himself as Doug.  He will be his riding mate.

   Five thousand sea ships with a hundred thousand heavily armed men; twenty thousand pieces of heavy equipment; a thousand parachutists who – for all anybody knows – are already in the air somewhere over enemy territory; hundreds and hundreds of airplanes, waiting somewhere for a signal from higher up to take off; gigantic battleships which soon will emerge from behind the scene and storm ahead into the battle to unload their firepower. 

   When they near the French coast, earth turns into hell.  Light that’s unbearable to look at rises from the cellars of the sea, all begins to shake, his body, his ship, the sea, even the sky. The cannons roar, everything that can unload fire, unloads fire.  Everywhere – in front, on the sides, behind him – there’s light; around him he sees hundreds of ships advance, with a wrathful foaming of the mouth. Far ahead of him a coastline that begins to light up as in a raging thunderstorm; arcs of fire sail from behind over the enormous fleet to the front and land on the continent from which Dad and Mom still carry with them its joys and sorrows.

   “Don’t hit me, don’t hit me!” Nanno screams inside.  He advances falteringly, toward an elevation, till the Cat with howitzer runs stuck in the loose sand of the steep dune.  “Doug, I’m not dead, I’m not dead!  Doug, where are you hanging out!”  He stares at the place where his buddy had just been sitting.  Two holes in the seat, some blood and bone fragments, that’s all.  He sees that the right door with the white star is totally gone.

   For the 90th infantry division of Patton’s Third Army it becomes a matter of life or death for an endless week.  Facing them is an SS regiment willing to fight them to the death.  How long is this supposed to last?  What day is it?  Or has time stopped?  This is no way to live anymore.

…

   They succeed in taking 1500 SS prisoners.  “Arms up!”  If they don’t see it from the uniform or from the skull on their cap that one is an SS’r, they can see it from the blood type mark on the underarm. 

   It is the evening of 30 July, the sky is clear but there’s roaring around the city of Avranches.  Nanno sits with a steaming mug of coffee, staring ahead, when an officer appears who’s looking for him.

   “Soldier Nanno Hiemstra?”

   “Yes sir!”  He’s told that in the coming night he will drive at the head of the column into the city of Avranches.  “Because we want to have that city in our hands by tomorrow night!  ….”

   The subordinate from Wisconsin wants to say something too; he says that he’s just become a Dad, and that…but the officer is not ready to tell his story again.

Avranches is burning, but that’s not the worst: the resistance is so all-out powerful.  Snipers, machine gun-and grenade fire.  With his steel brother-in-arms he searches for the path that he’s imprinted on his brain by studying the city map.  There’s no time to look around now; it’s as if he’s the only one riding into the city.  Whole blocks of homes that have been erased confuse his sense of direction; it becomes a gamble.  Here and there he sees personnel from his 90th division who’re there to give his column cover.

   All around him there’s flaming firepower, but he succeeds in reaching the city center.  With the Cat hiding between two walls of a skeleton that once was a church, he looks around.  His column!  … Now he will need to be the first to hurry to the center square, and then across it, but what through-street must he take to reach the northeast side of the city?  The enemy is clever enough and turn the signposts pointing in the wrong direction.

   Then something happens that he will never forget: someone is running as hard as he can across the square with a white flag right toward his Caterpillar.  Is it the road guide who’s been designated by the French resistance to show the Americans the way?  One wouldn’t think so, because it turns out to be a boy of somewhere around sixteen.

   “That way, sir!”  Nanno sees in a pair of dark eyes a burning city.  But does he also see the truth in those eyes?

   “That way,” the boy repeats, and he points to a narrow street that comes out on the other end of the square.  Why shouldn’t it be the other, wider street?  Nanno hesitates.  Right behind him a grenade explodes; here life is short-lived.

   “Say boy, point me the way to the northeast! Now!”  Nanno grabs the boy by his chin.  Two big eyes.  Tears.  Whistling bullets, but the boy doesn’t duck; crying from the stress and agitation he points again emphatically to the narrowest passage.

   “Yes, boy?”

   “Oui, mon libérateur.” [Yes, my liberator.]  Nanno signals the column behind him, gives gas, hears an explosion right behind him, looks around for the boy  –  what happened to the boy?  For the first time since Utah Beach, Nanno again hollers aloud while he races across the square like a madman: “This boy must come home again!”

   Years later he will relive this scene in scary dreams, still always calling out loudly as he chases across the square of Avranches: “This boy must come home again.”  Because that boy showed him the right way.

…

   The way one can hardly stand oneself without a clothes change for weeks, the same way one’s spirit can also become grimy.  How long has it been since he thought about the dearest in his life?  How’s it possible that for a whole day he hasn’t given a thought to his lovely wife and tender baby?  It seems like a mere instinct has taken the place of human feelings.  Survive, who cares how.

At long last his division has arrived at the Mosel, but no matter where they try to cross, they land in easy range of an SS regiment that dug themselves into the hills on the other side of the river. … Again it is Nanno’s role to be in the lead for crossing the river.  …   It is as if someone is standing by Nanno as he crosses the Mosel three times in a row; he is never hit. 

…

They still have to fight their way across the Rhine.  Who’s going to survive?  Who isn’t?  Nanno thinks of the first sentence in his dad’s first letter, which he had first read somewhere in the Ardennes: “It’s good growing weather here, but Nanno my boy, Mom and I think about you more often than about the weather.” …

   A few days later he thunders behind the columns of Sherman tanks right across sprouting patches of meadows and farmland where the un-reaped harvest of last fall lies in decay.  At the edge of the town they take time for a break. 

   Nanno takes his sten gun, strolls over the farmyard, and feels the heat of the sun when he touches the shed’s brick wall.  … when he comes face to face with a woman.  She must be the farmer’s wife.  The woman doesn’t give a sign of surprise.  He’s enjoying this encounter and reaches out his hand, but she beats him to it, she grabs his hand and walks alongside him.  But then, while still holding his hand, she turns to him, and what he sees is a mother.  She’s all in black, like his mom in the three months after Grandma Ytsje’s death.  She’s in mourning.  He stands beside her and can see over her, the way he could see over his own mom on the small train station platform in Sharon.  He takes off his helm.

   “Handsome young man,” she says, “I’ve lost everything!”  She points to her house, her field with grape bushes that were plowed under by the tanks, and makes clear to him that that isn’t the worst.  “The scars in the field will fade in time, but the scars of a mother who first lost her husband and then two of her sons will never heal!”

   Is it possible that all mothers have one and the same voice?

…  

   [ And finally they make it across the Rhine.]

…

Beginning of April 1945.  Nanno is there when the 90th Infantry Division liberates the concentration camp Flossenbürg, not far from the Czech border.  Not till decades later does he decide to tell about it.  He wouldn’t have, except that one of his large number of grandchildren asks him about it.  And that boy is the spitting image of the boy of Avranches.  “I want to know, Grandpa, I want to hear it from Grandpa himself,” the boy says.  And then he tells, he passes it on, but then the unbearable images reappear, of the boy, of the emaciated souls who stared at him through large eyes in hollow eye sockets.  “They no longer had hope or tears, and now they had to cry from joy.”

   Of the 90,000 inmates in Flossenbürg, 30,000 had died by the day of liberation.

…

   Now it is 8 May. …  Germany capitulates.  Exhausted and battered, a large part of the 90th Infantry Division of the 3rd American Army has camped in and around the town of Bodenwöhr.  Thousands of military, endless columns of heavy equipment, temporary barracks and kitchens and hospitals.  There Nanno says farewell to his brother-in-arms of iron and steel, his Cat.  “No, not a single emotion over the scars in the steel.”  Or does he?  The tall Corporal Hiemstra needs to be alone for a moment.  He strolls through the village, sees a mother with a small girl standing in an open front door and asks how old the girl is.  She turns out to be a little over a year old.  “My girl is the same age, but I’ve never seen her.”

                                          -from The Comfort Bird, tr. from De treastfûgel by Hylke Speerstra