The Forgotten Soldier, a memoir of World War II
Before, during and after the leave. People around Sajer from Russia to Berlin say, "Surely the war must end soon." "Surely the war can't go on like this." Of course, the war does go on, and on, until finally Nazi Germany is crushed between two massive Allied armies.
Sajer spends his first months of war in a transport unit trying to bring supplies to Stalingrad. The city fell before the snowbound trucks of Sajer's unit could reach Stalingrad. In the way of all armies since the Roman Empire and before, the front line troops blamed the supply troops for their defeat.
Sajer volunteers to be a front-line infantryman with an elite division. Part of the offer by the officers asking for volunteers is a fourteen-day leave. Sajer volunteers and gets his leave.
His goal is to go home and visit his family in Alsace, France, 500 miles west of Berlin. The train he is on west of Berlin is stopped when the town ahead of them is bombed by the allies. Sajer and everyone else on the train helps to clear the tracks. When they get to the station, Sajer is told his destination is too far from his unit and he has to go back.
He decides to return to Berlin. He visits the family of his best friend who was killed on the road to Stalingrad. While he is waiting to see his friend's parents, he meets Paula and falls deeply in love with her. They spend every moment they can together during the rest of Sajer's leave.
The most intense moments they share are during bombing raids. In a night raid that hits the neighborhood they are in, they hide in a shelter, then help to care for the wounded when the all-clear sirens sound. In the shelter, terrified mothers say,
"Surely the war must end soon."
Later they are near Templehof Airport on a lovely spring day, when the airport itself is the target of a daylight bombing raid. There are no shelters nearby and they hide in a fold in the ground as Eighth Air Force bombers reduce Templehof to rubble. As they help the wounded after they raid, they tell each other, "Surely the war must end soon."
It doesn't. The war drags on and on until crippled Berlin is fully destroyed and the Nazi army retreats all the way from Russia back to Germany. Sajer goes back to his unit. The lovers write to each other, but never see each other again.
Sajer records all of the deep emotion he feels, and the reaction when the older soldiers in his unit find out he fell in love on leave. They needle him and tell him he has a thousand miles to travel back to the front lines and he can fall in love on the way.
Sajer conveys very well the hope that wells up inside people who have suffered. "Surely we have suffered enough," They say. "Surely this will end." But it does not. The suffering of individual men and women and children is never a priority of the leaders who want victory. A year later, after a victory in which they hold the advancing Soviet Armies, young soldiers like Sajer--he is then 19--start to talk about how the war must end soon and they will all go home.
I read all this book 42 years ago as a 24-year-old tank commander in Germany on the East-West Border. I did not remember the leave from forty years ago. I remembered much of the book, but not the leave. This time reading, mid-tour leave was part of my experience, part of my year in Iraq. It struck me how different it was to come home to a completely peaceful country.
The other deep irony of the leave was the way that Paula's parents and the people Sajer stayed with were worried the young couple was moving too quickly. They were worried about the young couple doing the "right thing."
By the time of the leave in 1943, Nazi armies had already deported and slaughtered millions of Jews. They had killed millions more civilians in pitiless air raids on civilian targets and armored warfare.
It is painful for me to read how people could be concerned with moral questions while German soldiers and German policemen drafted into military service had already shot more than two million Jews and thrown them into pits and were sending others to death camps for slaughter on an industrial scale.
But tradition has always blinded people in this very way. So the Berliners could be concerned about what a Good German would do at the same time German soldiers were machine gunning children.
In America, the people who owned slaves went to Church and told their children to behave even while they, just like the Nazis, believed people who lived among them were less than human and could be tortured and denied freedom for their entire lives, and the lives of their children. The American segregation in the Jim Crow South that followed the end of slavery was Hitler's model of making an underclass of Jews. Hitler started that segregation immediately, and quickly went past oppression to slavery and murder.
The Church in Germany, like the Church in America, was complicit in the terrible plans. The American Church twisted the Bible into saying Black people were less than human. The German Church, Evangelical and Catholic, expelled Jewish convert pastors and then Jewish Church members within the first two years of Hitler taking power. The German Church, like the slavery Evangelical Church in the South, supported the racism of their governments.
This time re-reading Guy Sajer, the most painful passages are not about the war, but about what was happening "back home."
