Not I by Joachim Fest Read Free Book Online Page B

when, just before the border, we abruptly turned toward Euskirchen and from there headed toward that airfield on which a few weeks before we had laid the glass mines. After about an hour of wearying waiting around we had to get down from the trucks, and at every moment I expected the order to clear mines.
    Quite lost in thought, I suddenly heard my name called. In front of me stood Medical Corporal Schneider, who had until recently tried to have me court-martialed, but who now showed something like warmth and expressed his pleasure at our unexpected reunion. “When did we last see each other?” he asked, and protested how much he had always liked me and my fearlessness “in front of the epaulets.” Had he ever even suspected how mendacious and inhuman the Nazis were, he would have been my most loyal friend, but, thank God, he wasn’t aware of any wrong he had done me.
    One could have easily suspected and even known what had remained unknown to him, I retorted, particularly if one had joined the party before 1933. But Schneider acted as if he hadn’t heard my objection, and told me that about ten thousand Americans had already crossed the Rhine on the Ludendorff Bridge. Hitler, he said, as informed sources already knew, had convened a drumhead court-martial to condemn to death the six or seven officers responsible for Remagen. I acted as if his confidences didn’t interest me, and simply said, “Just stop it, Schneider! Times have changed, as you know!” He looked at me in astonishment, and I’ll never forget his dumbfounded, foolish expression as I simply lefthim standing there. After two hours we were ordered onto the trucks again, and the convoy continued its journey.
    Our destination was not, in fact, Paris, but a small place not far from the French capital called Attichy, which at this late stage of the war had acquired some notoriety as an assembly camp for what would soon be hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war. As we climbed down from the trucks in front of the camp, French civilians pushed toward us from all sides. They spat at us or cheered the women who struck us with their fists, while the American guards formed a cordon to stop the attacks. That was the beginning of the “heroic Resistance,” said one of my neighbors, who, after we had passed through the camp gate, introduced himself as a French teacher from Hanover.
    What stays in my mind from Attichy, more than anything else, is Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, which at our arrival thundered from all the loudspeakers, and was still doing so nine days later when we left: day and night without stopping and with an annoying click after the sixty-fourth bar. The music was interrupted for every announcement, after which the gramophone needle was dropped onto the scratchy record again by a half-deaf GI. There was also talk in the camp of an organized squad of “Irreconcilables,” as they called themselves, who quite unceremoniously killed any prisoner who made a disparaging remark about Hitler or the war. The squad would throw him into the huge, open cesspool and push him back into it every time he bobbed up.
    Eight days later, shortly before we were moved from Attichy, I got into conversation with a prisoner who had caught my attention, because I thought I knew him. Indeed, it turned out he had belonged to the group from which I had been separated in Landau. I told him about my capture, the deployments from Arnhem to Remagen, and asked whether he knew Reinhold Buck. He said they had not been friends, but that he had admired Buck from a distance. “He was a genius,” he said. “I heard him play furiously and masterfully on the violin.” I asked him why he was using the past tense. “Oh, Buck,” he said, “he’s dead! And if I’m right he was only about two hundred yards away from you when he was dying, a bit to the east of the farmhouse where you were taken prisoner.” When he saw my shock, he went on to say that Buck had bled to