Of Hunger in World War II: Rat-Proofing The Walls By Using Tin Cans

In the imagination of a young soldier, there was this one extraordinary midnight the Yanks liberated fifty middle-aged Brit officers captured and held by the Germans in dreary sheds at the Czechoslovak border.

“The British officers were among the first English speaking prisoners to be taken in WWII…. They had not seen a woman or a child for four years… They hadn’t seen any birds either. Not even sparrow could come into the camp.

“The Englishmen were officers. Each of them had attempted to escape from another prison at least once… Now they were here, dead center in a sea of dying Russians… who spoke no English, who had no food or useful information or escape plans of their own.

“The Englishmen had been singing together every night for years… They were among the wealthiest people in Europe, in terms of food. A clerical error early in the war, when food was still getting through to prisoners, had caused the Red Cross to ship them five hundred parcels every month instead of fifty.

“The Englishmen had hoarded these so cunningly that now, as the war was ending, they had three tons of sugar, one ton of coffee, eleven hundred pounds of chocolate, seven hundred pounds of tobacco, seventeen hundred pounds of tea, two tons of flour, one ton of canned been, twelve hundred pounds of canned butter, sixteen hundred pounds of canned cheese, eight hundred pounds of powdered milk and two tons if orange marmalade.

“They kept all this in a roof without windows. They had rat-proofed it by lining it with flattened tin cans.

“They were adored by the Germans… they made war look stylish and reasonable and fun…. And, in exchange for coffee or chocolate or tobacco, the Germans gave them paint and lumber and nails and cloth for fixing things up.

[Now} The Englishmen had known for twelve hours that American guests were on their way. They had never had guests before, and they went to work like darling elves, sweeping, mopping, cooking, baking 00 making mattresses of straw and burlap bags, setting tables, putting party favors at each place.

Now they were singing their welcome to their guests in the winter night… They were dressed half for battle, half for tennis or croquet….

“They wrestled the Americans toward the shed door affectionately, filling the night with manly blather and brotherly rodomontades. The called then “Yank” and told them, “Good show” promised them that “Jerry was on the run” and so on… Billy Pilgrim wondered dimly who ‘Jerry’ was.”

Do you remember the rest? Before or after? And about the little coat? And the fire? And the soldier in the middle of the night in the middle of snow at the Czech border who only longed more than anything to just call his mother?

And how a lot of us still say in honor of the passing of the mighty Kurtigus: So it goes…

_________CODA
Excerpt from the work Slaughterhouse-Five by our late friend and author, Kurt Vonnegut.