Talking about the Ralph Ellison novel with my American Lit students yesterday, I suddenly remembered a story Mr UD’s father used to tell.
The version I told the students was the one I happened to remember; later that evening, Mr UD gave me a more accurate account.
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An officer in the Polish army in the Second World War, Jerzy Soltan was captured by the Germans in 1939 and put in Murnau, a prisoner of war camp for these officers.
In the early afternoon [of April 29, 1945], on the orders of a German officer, Captain Pohl, the 40 or so camp guards relinquished control of the watchtowers and handed in their weapons. [The camp commanders knew the Americans were on their way.] Then, at around 3 p.m., as the American Army approached the town of Murnau from the north, a small group of cars with SS men approached the camp from the opposite direction. When the Germans and the Americans met just outside the front gate of the camp, gunfire erupted. Most of the SS cars turned around and fled back to town, but the lead car opened fire, which brought even heavier fire from the medium-tank platoon and their 76mm guns. Two SS men, Colonel Teichmann and Captain Widmann, were killed in the exchange of fire, as prisoners in the camp climbed on the front fence and watched the proceedings, cheering the Americans on. Also killed by a stray bullet during the exchange of fire was 2nd Lt. Alfons Mazurek, one of the prisoners.
Jerzy Soltan stood among the prisoners at the front gates, watching. To his left, he saw pull up a huge, shiny, Horch, inside of which sat an elegant SS man. To his right, Soltan saw trucks approach Murnau’s entry.
As he looked at the SS man, “I saw that suddenly he had been transformed into a general!” Come again? “His uniform suddenly went from green to red!”
Soltan wasn’t being funny. The moment was so surreal – liberation? death? – that this was simply the thought that came into his head.
A moment later he realized the SS man had been shot to pieces by the Americans in the trucks.
But where were the Americans? No one was driving the oncoming trucks. “They were black. I couldn’t really see them. I had never seen a black person.”