Long Way Home(80)

“We eventually set up a hospital in the former SS barracks and attended to the survivors who were closest to death. Jim would look each person in the eye, and he would ask their name. He would remember them all, too, and call everyone by name whenever he took care of them. They had been treated like animals for so long, Jim said, that he wanted to let them know they were still living people with names and a soul. He said we needed to restore their dignity and humanity as much as we needed to restore their bodies.”

My tears started falling at Art’s description of Buchenwald. It was so easy to picture the Jimmy I knew so well, offering warmth and compassion in such a terrible place. “That must have been heartbreaking,” I murmured.

“The people who revived, who were resurrected from the dead almost, were the ones who kept us going. They were so grateful. There was a language barrier because the survivors had been transported to the camp from countries all over Europe—France, the Netherlands, Belgium. But compassion speaks all languages.”

“Do you know if there was a woman Jimmy was close to?” I asked. “A nurse or maybe a patient?”

He thought for a moment. “There weren’t any Army nurses. The nurses who had been working with us before we liberated Buchenwald had to be transferred someplace else. Seeing such misery and human suffering would have been too much for them. It was hard enough on us men, and we’d already seen a lot during the war. But there were a handful of Jewish physicians and nurses who had been prisoners in the camp. They had suffered like everyone else, yet as soon as they regained their strength, they insisted on working alongside us. One of those nurses spoke a couple of languages, including English. She was a big help to us.”

I pulled Gisela’s picture from my bag and showed it to Art. “Might she be one of them? We found this picture in Jimmy’s pack. It says on the back that her name is Gisela. And it looks like she’s wearing a nurse’s uniform.”

Art studied it carefully. “I don’t know. She might have been. You have to understand how emaciated and close to death these survivors were. Their heads had been shaved. Hundreds of them died in the weeks after we arrived, in spite of our best efforts to save them. We were just too late. When the liberating armies first arrived, some of the soldiers mistakenly fed their rations to the survivors, but their bodies simply couldn’t handle food and it ended up killing them. It’s hard to deny food to a starving man, but we had to proceed slowly and feed some of them intravenously. The soldiers meant well and they wanted to do something to help, so we let them donate blood for transfusions.”

“Do you know what happened to any of those Jewish nurses who’d been in the camp?”

“The first thing most of the survivors wanted to do after they recovered was find their loved ones. They didn’t want to imagine that they were the only one in their family who had survived. Organizations started springing up to try to reunite all of these survivors and help them return to their homes—or what was left of their homes.”

“How would you even begin such an enormous task?”

“I don’t know. It was overwhelming. They posted lists of names, of the dead as well as the living, and the survivors checked and rechecked them every day. As soon as our patients were well enough to leave, they usually moved to a displaced persons’ camp if they had nowhere else to go. The authorities were trying to get everyone back to the cities and nations where they had lived before the war, but I can understand why many of them refused to go back. Anti-Semitism didn’t end with the war.” He shook his head as if unable to comprehend such a thing. “Jim spent his free time helping his patients get in touch with various Jewish agencies or the Red Cross. By the time we left Buchenwald, I was starting to feel a glimmer of hope for the future. But Jim? In his mind, he had unfinished work to do. He wanted to put everything back together again, as if the world were a giant jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces scattered, and it was up to him to fix it. I kept telling him it was an impossible task, but he was driven. And it started taking a toll on him.”

Art’s wife came out with a tray of sandwiches and some colas, and our conversation drifted to other subjects. I could tell that Joe would have preferred a beer—or two. We ate lunch on the front porch, watching kids riding bikes, skipping rope, and playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. We would have to be on our way soon. We had a long drive ahead of us to get home.

“I thought of one more question, Art, if you don’t mind,” I said as we were finishing lunch. “Did Jimmy ever talk with you about God or his faith?”

I could see Art searching his memory. “Not that I can recall. Why?”

“Because all the other men who served with Jim—like Joe, here—said that Jimmy talked a lot about what he believed and was always inspiring others and even praying with them. I just wondered if he still did that when you knew him.”

Art slowly shook his head. “I never heard him mention God, and Jim and I worked together pretty closely. Buchenwald was a very dark place. God seemed very far away.” My heart squeezed. That didn’t sound like the Jimmy I knew. “Now that I think about it, Jim got so depressed after working there for a few months that Major Cleveland, our CO, made him take a week’s leave. Eventually we were both transferred out. I don’t know where Jim ended up after that. Sorry.”

I wrote down the commander’s name, Major Mike Cleveland, so Chaplain Bill could try to get in touch with him. Art had given us some important information about when and why Jimmy had begun to change, and I could see that liberating Buchenwald had obviously had a profound effect on Jimmy. The fact that he hadn’t talked about his faith or prayed with his patients while working there was upsetting. Jimmy had wanted to put all the broken pieces back together again, and it must have devastated him when he couldn’t.