Murray Levine of New Hempstead, N.Y. was captured by the Germans at Anzio. He passed away in 1999

©2014, Aaron Elson

    They brought me at two in the morning to Stalag 17. They dropped me off on the Russian compound side. The lights went on and Russians dragged me in. And I’m looking around. They dragged me to a bed that was too small for me but I lay there. And I’m looking around. I see Russkies. I don’t see any GIs. And I hear a lot of Russkies talking. They’re in bad shape, all of them. Their heads were shaved. The Germans treated them like dirt.

    Finally, everybody left the room except one guy. Did you ever get a feeling that somebody’s staring at you? I look around and I look at him, and he smiles at me. I smile back. He hobbles over to me. I see that he was wounded in the leg; he had his kneecap shot off.

    The first thing, he looks at me, "Du bist Amerikaner?"

    I said, "Yeah."

    He said, "I’m Russky."

    I said, "That’s what I figured."

    He says, "I wish I was an American." He says, "Du bist ein offizier?" Am I an officer? He spoke in German.

    I said, "No, I’m a private."

    He says that he’s an offizier. "Leutnant." Russian Leutnant.

    He looks at me. He says, "Du bist ein Jud?"

    I said, "Yeah." I’m a Jew.

    He says, "So am I."

    He says, "The next time I go to the lazarete" – that’s the delousing chamber – "and they see that I’m circumsized, they’re going to kill me."

    For a couple of days, I was just heartbroken. Finally, while he was talking to me, a couple of GIs come in. They’re looking for me, because they had a roster, and they expected some GIs to come in, and my name was on there. They figured somebody screwed up, they must have dropped me off in the Russian compound, and they found me. They said, "What are you doing here?"

    I said, "I don’t know." How the heck should I know?

    So they got me and they took me to the American compound. In the interim, I befriended this Russky, and I used to make sure that I would give him some food, because we used to get a Red Cross parcel, which was actually an American Army parcel but they were using the Red Cross as a front.

    His name was Liebman, I’ll never forget.

    Then one day we were looking for him, because I couldn’t find him. The Germans had killed him. Only because he was a Jew.

An interview with Murray Levine

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