The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel EPILOGUE AFTER BEING TAKEN from Belgrade I spent longer or shorter periods in the following prisons: Graz, Vienna, Munich, Salzburg and Ulm, and, later, the police barracks in Spandau. I became very weak from under nourishment, lack of vitamins and exercise, and from the sedatives which were administered to us in the so-called coffee (a thin liquid made probably from burnt acorns). I contracted scurvy, fortunately only slightly, and all organs, including sight and hearing, began to give out. When I hear women complaining about a lack of luxuries in America, it is hard for me to feel very sympathetic. We had to keep body and soul together on thin potato soup and two chunks of bread per day; bread so slimy and repulsive that, starved though we were, it was almost impossible to swallow it without some added taste. I forced myself to swallow it by covering it with the taste of lemon peel. When I was lucky enough to get hold of the peel of one half of a lemon (I was never lucky enough to get the inside) sent in to some prisoner by relatives, I could, by taking the tiniest nibbles, make it last for four days. One lump of sugar could be made to last two days. Let me add that the experience of such hardships makes life seem good to me now-a thousand fold more splendid and beautiful even than it was before. Each of the hundreds of women I met had her different, interesting, and almost always tragic story. In Vienna I saw the notable Frau Neumann (though I only saw her naked!), who possesses and had managed to send to America three of the only seven paintings by Hitler known to be extant. The Nazis are determined to force her to hand them over and so cannot let her die. Her behavior during her imprisonment, which has already lasted two and a half years, has been admirable-and funny. In Munich I occupied for ten days a cell with a red-hot Nazi concert singer imprisoned because, living only for her music, she had refused to obey an order to become a schoolteacher in Poland. Her uncle had just returned from the Russian front. His stories, as repeated by her, were unprintable, and she gloried in them. We talked all day and most of the night. And when I was moved on again, a blazing Nazi fire had been reduced to cold, gray ashes. The prisons of Germany bulge with suffering humanity. There are four major types, each with variations, of German prisons: the regular prisons, the concentration camps, the prison camps, and the internment camps. There are also the ghettos, brothels, farms, and factories. Each is a distinct form of prison. There are not less than ten million foreigners at slave labor in Germany. When the hour strikes there will be action by those fiendishly treated millions- action such as imagination boggles at. There were special groups of prisoners which one came to recognize at sight. There were the real Communists, especially in Austria, whose strong faith upheld them in a sort of shining brightness, strengthening to all who came in contact with them, whatever one thought about communism. There was the already famous Viktoria, a brilliant girl of only nineteen, already over two years in the prison without a single sight of the sky. She led physical-training exercises every morning, and her courage marched like a banner. There were the fortunetellers, prophets, palmists, numerologists, and astrologers, who all, because they foretell the fall of Hitler, must be incarcerated. Strangest of all are the members of a very widespread and fast-growing organization called the "Bible Searchers." These are mostly people in humble walks of life, and the Nazis are hounding them ferociously. Their gentle, firm, and dedicated mien is unmistakable, reminding one of the early Christian martyrs. Everywhere I was transported in the black, almost airtight, and entirely viewless prison trains which shuttle ceaselessly across the German landscape. Their rough walls are scrawled with despairing or brave messages from their previous occupants on their way to ghettos, to the even more fearful concentration camps, to indescribable degradation or to death. In those black prison trains I met specimens of the wild, utterly depraved German youth, a terrible phenomenon of which little is yet known in America. They represent a violent reaction to the Nazi regimentation and are a dreadful portent to the German race. I met Polish girls, well-bred university students who, returning from lectures, had been seized on Warsaw streets, thrown into trucks and, without a word to their parents, carried off to Germany and put on farms at the mercy of the lowest German farm hands. Their clothes in ribbons, shoes gone, they are escaping in hundreds, marching the German roads by night, hiding by day, determined to return home. When caught they are returned to the same farms from which they fled and to treatment which one does not dare think of. Yet their calm, grim courage remains absolutely unshaken. They are spiritually inviolate. Always I was marched in and out, often the only woman, with lines of chained men. It is possibly significant that in Munich, high seat of Nazi Kultur, I was more spat at than elsewhere. At last, to my great surprise, I was put into internment with the British women internees at the Liebenau Internment Camp in Wurttemberg, near the Lake of Constance, with the snowcapped mountains of free Switzerland on the horizon. This is a great lunatic asylum run by German Roman Catholic nuns. Five hundred lunatics had been murdered to make room for the internees. But there were still about five hundred gibbering lunatics left to add to the misery of the British women, some of whom have already been there for three years. Seventeen children are being brought up under these circumstances. One was born there in internment. Her father was murdered when, on shipboard, a German sailor fired wildly, without provocation, into a group of unarmed prisoners. The patient, steady good nature of these British women was remarkable. But nerves were strained, and heart disease was spreading swiftly, owing to the complete lack of any sports. At the end fifty American citizens arrived, mostly Polish Jewesses quickly exchanged with America. When I arrived at Liebenau (translated "Field of Leve") after months in prison, I was very weak. When I first saw there the garden of flowers with nuns walking gently in pairs back and forth, the thought flashed that I must really be dead and gone to paradise after all! Paradise it seemed to me then, after what I had been through, and paradise it continued to seem to me in spite of all its sorrows. I was allowed to work in the great and beautiful convent library, a very rare privilege, and I spent every waking moment happily studying. I was able to follow the significant developments in Germany by reading the local newspapers and talking to people who came in. I quickly and fully recovered, thanks entirely to the Red Cross, but for which I should not be alive today to write this book. I can never sufficiently express my thanks, and the thanks of all of us internees, to the British, the American, the Swiss, and the International Red Cross for the regular weekly parcels of one week's food and the occasional supply of dress materials and underclothes. These parcels, carefully worked out for calories and vitamins and for maximum warmth, fed and clothed us well. They are unquestionably keeping alive the women and children I sorrowfully left behind there and are saving the older women from madness. On everyone who reads this I want to impress the fact that Germans are scrupulously observing the Red Cross agreements for the sole and sufficient reason that England holds more German civilian internees than the Germans hold British. German policy is directed by two principles, greed and fear. They fear British reprisals. Through the efforts of my relatives and friends, especially of my daughter, Ruth Norna van Breda Yohn, of Zetta Carveth Wells, and of my sister, Harriet Mitchell Fladoes, to whom I can never be sufficiently grateful, I was exchanged to America. In the train through the heart of Germany to Berlin and again in the sealed train from Berlin to Lisbon I watched carefully and was able to draw certain conclusions. In Berlin on June 14, 1942, I was strangely enough free without shadowing for five hours and I met a group of Germans and two Irish broadcasters working for the Nazis. I also got in touch with a British agent still calmly working there. He had just viewed the results of the first great block-busting attack on Cologne. I returned to America with nine hundred other American citizens on the last exchange ship arriving in New York, on June 30, 1942. As we approached the harbor we were all on deck, eagerly straining our eyes to see the great statue that beacons the entrance of New York Harbor. I expected that when we saw it we would all burst into songs and cheers. But as slowly it emerged from the early mist there was not a sound. Instead we all simply burst into tears: we had come from the lands where even to say the word "liberty" put men and women and children in danger of instant death. I was back home after four years of great happiness, great inspiration, indescribable pain. I wrote this book to help the United Nations realize what the Balkans mean directly to us; especially, what an immeasurable debt each one of us owes to the small yet great race of Serbs. Serbia was the only small country in Europe to come in openly on our side before she was herself attacked. The Serbs did not bargain with us for their help: they gave it, leaving our recognition of it to American honor, which they believe to be not inferior to their own. I gave the dying men and women of Serbia my promise that I would spend the rest of my life looking after their children. I promised them that America would never forget the bond and the debt. I pledged American honor that the thousands upon thousands of orphans left in a ruined land would be cherished by their American brothers and sisters. In view of all that the Serbs have done-for us; in view of all they have lost in fighting-for us; in view of all they have saved-to us- in money and in lives, I propose that for the rebuilding and the future of Serbia we appropriate the cost to us of one day of war. Knowing that nothing could have been nearer to the fighting heart of my brother than the Fighting Serbs, I have established in his memory the General Billy Mitchell Memorial Foundation for Balkan Youth. I pledged the honor of my country. I rely upon my countrymen with complete trust to help me to keep that pledge. Previous Chapter | Content | Next Chapter The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel