Nobody Said Amen Read Free

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,