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
