The Medic: Life and Death in the Last Days of WWII

by Leo Litwak

Overview

Leo Litwak was a university student when he joined the Army to fight in World War II, "a na've, callow eighteen-year-old son prepared to join other soldier boys being hauled off to war." In 1944 he found himself in Belgium, in the middle of the waning European war, a medic trained to save lives but often powerless to do much more than watch life slip away. It was hard fighting that took Litwak and his rifle company into the heart of Germany at the close of the war. But Litwak learned there was more to war than fighting, more to understand than maps and ammunition.

In the final months of the war, he watched the men in his company tenderly serve food at a Passover seder for a dozen brutalized Jewish women newly liberated from slavery. He watched those same men torture and execute defenseless German soldiers. He fell in love at the Moulin Rouge in a scene straight out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting.

The men in his company were dreamers, thieves, friends, killers, revolutionaries, and heroes. They were the men of their time: sometimes brave, sometimes compassionate, sometimes cruel, sometimes loving, usually scared. They were held together by loyalty, only to be scattered by the war's end. The Medic is the gritty, wise, bighearted, and unflinching account of one man's quest to find sense in war and its aftermath.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781565128774
Publisher:	Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Publication date:	05/01/2001
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	584,949
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Leo Litwak grew up in Detroit and served in WWII as a medic. He taught English literature at San Francisco State University for more than thirty years and is the author of the novels Waiting for the News, which won the 1970 National Jewish Book Award, and To the Hanging Gardens. His short story "The Eleventh Edition" was awarded first prize in the 1990 edition of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards.

Read an Excerpt

PROLOGUE

In the last weeks of the war in Europe my company entered a village in Saxony that was decked out in white flags. We found cozy billets in large houses-feather beds, tile ovens in kitchens, cellars stocked with food and drink. Details were assigned, the night's password given, guards posted.

One of the guards outside our platoon billet heard a noise in nearby bushes, maybe ten yards away, spotted a German uniform, yelled something like, Who goes there! and started shooting before there could be an answer. I was the platoon medic and came running when I heard the call for aid. The German lay facedown, his hair, abundant, dirty yellow, was tangled in the bushes. We turned him over. He was a kid, maybe sixteen years old, unarmed and barely alive.

Maybe he didn't understand the challenge. Maybe he didn't have time to respond. The thirty-caliber bullets had scooped out his chest and bared his heart. When I recall the scene I see his beating heart. I don't know how that can be but that's how I remember it. He must have been prone when the bullets hit, just starting to rise, wedged into the bushes. He still had breath to whisper and I put my ear to his lips.

"Ich ergebe mich. Warum schiessen sie?" I surrender. Why do you shoot?

"Wir haben nicht gew*sst." We didn't know, I said, and uselessly bandaged him with large compresses and two-inch gauze and tape. The medics from the battalion aid station arrived by jeep and carried him away. The next day when I asked a medic from the aid station what happened to the kid he said it was a hopeless case; why had I bothered to send him back when he had no chance? I'd wasted the resources of the aid station and the field hospital.

Toward the end the German army was stocked with kids and old men, and this kid, among the masses of dead, was no one special. Kids were running the war. I wasn't much more than a kid myself. The wound was terrible but I'd seen worse. After we packed him off to the aid station I returned to a meal scrounged from a German cellar-ham and black bread and white wine and cherry preserves-and didn't give the dying boy much thought.

Twenty-three years later he unexpectedly showed up. It was 1967. I was at the Esalen Institute, on assignment for the New York Times Magazine. Esalen, on the Big Sur coast of California, bordered a wilderness preserve on one side. On the other side were steep cliffs and the Pacific Ocean. Between wilderness and ocean there were plush meadows and a lodge and cabins and hot mineral baths.

According to its brochure, Esalen was engaged in a radical exploration of "human potentiality." It was just beginning to receive media attention as a major source of the mind-blowing, erotic culture of the sixties. The Esalen authorites feared the media would be biased against them, on the hunt for sensational stories about the baths and drugs and nudity and sex. I was urged, as a matter of fairness, to actively participate in program offerings, rather than to stay on the sidelines and observe. That seemed reasonable and I joined, with some misgivings, a five-day encounter workshop that offered "body movements, sensory awareness, fantasy experiments, psychodrama."

I had enrolled in a particularly aggressive group and from the beginning felt exposed and vulnerable. I decided on irony as the strategy for handling the new experience. The intense, intimate connection to strangers made the workshop seem to last for weeks, and toward the end, irony went out the window and I felt close to blowing up. The group leader saw that I was strung tight. He asked if I would be willing to take a fantasy trip. Where did he want to take me?

"Into your body to examine the stress you're under."

I said okay and at his instruction lay on the floor of the workshop room and closed my eyes. He asked me to imagine entering my body.

I imagined an enormous statue of myself, lying prone in a desert. I imagined my tiny self climbing into my open mouth and down my gullet and into my chest. I became absorbed by the effort and lost sense of the room and the group and heard only the leader's voice.

He asked, "Where are you?"

"In my chest."

"What do you see?"

"It's empty. There's nothing here."

"Where's your heart?

"There's no heart here."

He asked if I could bring a heart into my body and suddenly there it was, a pulsing heart sheathed in slimy membrane, the heart I'd imagined seeing twenty-three years before in the open chest of a dying German boy, and I broke down, wailing for a kid I thought I had long ago put out of mind. Other memories of war came up, equally vivid. The war, which had long been out of mind, was not yet finished.

The war years were perhaps the most dramatic of my life, responsible for habits of mind that shaped my generation. It is hard to distinguish events as they were and as they have become in memory. And yet when I recall the smell of a cup of hot coffee on an icy morning in Belgium more than fifty years ago it seems more real than the cup of tea I drank this morning.

The Medic is based on my experience as a combat medic. It takes its shape from a memoir published in the New York Times Magazine in May 1995. I have modified and dramatized the memoir, merging impressions-some vague, many vivid-of wartime encounters. I have invented names so that no one I served with would be confused by the composites of people, places, and units. The First Platoon, A Company, is itself a composite of units in which I served. The town I have called Grossdorf has a wartime model in Saxony but its geography has been altered to conform to my imagination since my memory here is vague. However, the city of Chemnitz will still be on the horizon. There will no longer be a camp containing Russian women slave laborers, but that camp was once there, as was the camp of Hungarian Jewish women outside Kassel, Germany.

What I vouch for in this dramatized version of my service is the transforming intensity of war-the shellings, the entrenching, the wounded and dying, the Sauer crossing, marching fire, the sex, the loot, the Paris leave, Marishka, the encounter with the Russians, the war's end.