housekeeper standing at the gate of the hospital. I noticed immediately that he was wearing my father’s leather jacket, but I did not pay much attention to it. I was glad to see him alive and grasped his hand. “Huang, I am so glad to see you. Where are my parents? How are they? Please…”
He pulled away from me and acted so strangely cool, so hostile. But my thoughts were with my parents. “Please,” I cried, “where are they?” He pointed toward the main building. “You will find them in there,” he said and smiled. But his smile frightened me. I could not imagine what was wrong with him. I rushed toward the main building and as I entered I saw… I saw my father… in a pool of blood… When I fell on him, he was icy cold… then my mother… she lay in a nearby room with bullet holes in her breasts… and, and…” She could not continue. Her words faded into a stream of tears. Her frail body shook as she buried her face in her hands. Madame Houssong rushed to her and caught her in her arms, herself crying. Yvette was weeping too and the colonel covered his face, shaking his head slowly. “Don’t talk, cherie,” I heard Madame Houssong speak to Lin gently. “We have heard enough for tonight.”
Lin, with her eyes closed, her tears rolling freely, grabbed Madame Houssong’s hand and pressed her face against it. “I must… I must tell. You are so good to me… I could never tell anyone how much I was hurt.”
Lin had to tell us the rest of her story. We could not stop her. She talked as if she wanted to cast away those tragic memories forever. “When I left the hospital, I saw Huang talking to some strange soldiers. They were the Communists. I still cannot imagine why he had turned so hostile. We were always good to him. When his son was ill, my father drove them all the way to Shanghai, to the hospital. We gave them food, clothes, toys for his children. But then I saw he was wearing a big red star—like the ones the Communists wore. I tried to run away but the soldiers caught me and… dragged me… into…”
She began to weep again. “I… I cannot tell you what they did to me… until I was pushed into a wagon with many other people… They took us to a camp, and we had to work in a brick factory three miles away. We walked there and back, every day. By the end of the year over a hundred of us had died. Our huts were cold and wet and the food was something we could chew and swallow but it was not food. They always told us that if we worked well we would be taken into better barracks in another camp with good food. We worked like animals to gain admittance to that other camp but they never moved us. We were taken out to bury people whom they had shot. There were thousands of people executed every week… Then one night a big storm came and the wind wrecked the watch towers and a part of the fence. I fled.”
She glanced at me. “I walked for two weeks eating only what I could find, then I crossed the border and walked… until the cars came.”
Daybreak was showing through the slightly opened shutters when at last Lin fell silent.
“You had better get some sleep now,” Madame Houssong said. “Come, cherie—and try to put those things forever out of your mind.”
Lin rose and looked at me deeply. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you…” Lin’s story had a truly happy ending. Colonel Houssong wrote a long report on her to the British Consul, who in turn forwarded the data to a competent authority in Hong Kong. Three weeks later Lin received her British passport and a letter stating that a search to find her father’s relatives in England was under way.
During the next two months we saw each other often; I took her out to a dinner or to dance and became rather attached to her. I think she too felt the same way. “What’s bothering you, Hans?” she asked one evening after a long and passionate kiss. “Something’s wrong?” I only embraced her again and held her close. There was plenty wrong, I thought. She was only eighteen. I was thirty-six and still a “death candidate.”
When Lin was born, I was already entering the army. We were far apart both in time and in space. It was painful but also a relief when her uncle came flying down a week before her birthday. He was a jovial, middle-aged English businessman who was completely overjoyed at having found his niece after three years of gloom. He had been informed of John Carver’s death in Communist China and Lin was listed as “missing,” probably dead too.
“If you ever need anything, or if you ever come to England, please do not fail to call me,” he said before their plane departed for Singapore and from there to London. He handed me a small envelope and we shook hands. I embraced Lin and she kissed me openly. Her eyes were filled as she whispered, “Please write me soon… Write always.”
“C’est la vie,” Colonel Houssong said quietly as the plane started to take off. “Had it not turned out so well, we would have adopted Lin .. . but it is better this way.”
In the envelope I found a very nice letter of appreciation and a check for five hundred pounds. A small card with Lin’s letter read: “I love you… I love you… I love you.”
The cruel war went on.
Near Hoa Binh we discovered the mutilated corpses of two German Legionnaires. Both men had been disemboweled and castrated, with their private parts cut away and placed in their hands. A macabre Viet Minh joke.
Two days later we captured the four terrorists responsible for the murder and mutilation. They were stripped, and a thin cord was fastened around their private parts with the other end tied to the jeep. The vehicle was driven at a speed that the prisoners could pace by easy running and so avoid having their testicles torn from their bodies. In such fashion we brought them to the dead Legionnaires, about two miles down the road. Then the driver shifted gears and accelerated. The jeep sprang forward and the prisoners tumbled. Screaming in agony they rolled in the dust. We bayoneted them as they lay bleeding. The score was settled.
Bomb for bomb! Bullet for bullet! Murder for murder! We were never particularly soft toward captured terrorists but for murder and mutilation we retaliated with the most brutal third degree that man or devil could conceive. Among them were methods learned from Karl Stahnke. The one-time Gestapo agent and our former companion had entertained us with stories of their use during our long sea voyage from Oran to Indochina. Stahnke used to call his methods “educational exercises.”
All of them sounded incredibly uncivilized and inhumane but every one of them worked. After what Stahnke had told us, we understood why our former State Secret Police could invariably obtain all the information it wanted to gather. But has there ever been an unsuccessful secret police in history? No one had ever refused to sign the “statement” for the French Deuxieme Bureau. In the dictionary of the secret police such words as “failure,”
“blunder,” or “innocent” are seldom present. All secret police prefer results and they do not willingly admit failures. How the Soviet GPU or NKVD handle their prisoners is well known. The brutality of the Gestapo had been featured in countless publications. But I have also spoken to a former German POW who had to submit to the entire range of CIC third degree, and the Americans proved themselves not much gentler than their so much publicized Nazi or Red counterparts had been.
The POW was not beaten and he was burned only occasionally with cigarette butts. But he was kept chained to a hot radiator, naked of course, for ninety-six hours in such manner that he could neither sit nor bend. On the second day his ankles began to swell. At the end of the ordeal they were swollen to the size of grapefruits and he could not flex a muscle. During that ninety-six hours, he was given very spicy food and only one small cup of water per day. Installed twenty inches from his ears a pair of loudspeakers kept blaring distorted music without a break. Occasionally the music stopped and he could hear the desperate screams and pleas of a German woman, coming from a nearby cell; she was obviously being tortured and abused in the most brutal fashion. Every now and then a CIC agent would enter the POW’s cell to inform him about the mental or physical state of his wife confined next door. The agent also made a few acid remarks related to the woman’s private parts or sexual behavior. The prisoner could often overhear the tormentors calling the woman “sigrid,” which was indeed the name of his wife. Only months later did he learn that his wife had been at home all the time and no one had ever questioned her about anything. There had been no woman at all in the next cell and the brutal torture scenes had been only cleverly recorded sequences. The cruel ruse had caused the prisoner weeks of mental anguish and in order to save his wife from further “torments,” he confessed to everything the American Counter-intelligence wanted him to confess to.
Who knows how many “war criminals” went to the gallows because their “confessions” had been obtained in a similar fashion. Sometimes a man is ready to die if his death will save the lives of his loved ones.
The Americans proved that results can be obtained without beating a prisoner into an insensible pulp of swollen flesh. Instead of squeezing a prisoner’s balls, they would squeeze his soul. Some American parents should see what their clean-cut sons are doing in some CIC interrogation chambers. But whatever they do, it is done behind yard-thick concrete walls and steel doors. No books were ever printed about the American Counter- intelligence except maybe a few glamorous adventure stories in the tradition of James Bond.
