reached a savage peak of barbarism. At Krinovaya, an Italian Alpini soldier raced across the compound to find his priest, Don Guido Tuna.
“Come quickly, Father,” he begged. “They want to eat my cousin!”
The startled Tuna followed the distraught man across the compound, past quartered stomachs, headless cadavers, arms and legs stripped of flesh and meat. He arrived at the barracks door to see madmen smashing at it with their fists. Inside was their quarry, shot and mortally wounded by a Russian guard. The cannibals had followed the trail of warm blood to the door and now tried to pound it down to get at the terrified man.
The sickened Tuna screamed at the cannibals, telling them theirs was a heinous crime, a blot on their consciences, and that God would never forgive them. The flesh-eaters slunk back from the door; a few begged the priest for forgiveness. Father Tuna went inside to the dying soldier and heard his last confession. When the boy begged the priest to save him from the cannibals, Tuna sat beside him in his final moments. The cannibals left his corpse alone. They had thousands more to choose from.
In another barracks at Krinovaya, two Italian brothers had sworn to protect each other from cannibals in case death separated them. When one brother succumbed to illness, the cannibals crowded around the fresh corpse. The other brother straddled the dead man’s cot, and warned off the jackals hovering around the bed. During the long night he stood guard while the cannibals urged him to let them take care of the victim.
As dawn approached, they increased their verbal assault, telling the brother it was pointless for him to stay any longer. They even offered to bury the body for him. As he weakened, they moved closer to the bed and gently picked up the corpse he had sworn to defend. Exhausted from his vigil, the surviving brother threw himself on the floor and began to howl hysterically. The experience had driven him insane.
The Russians shot every cannibal they caught, but faced with the task of hunting down so many man-eaters they had to enlist the aid of “anticannibalism teams,” drawn from the ranks of captive officers. The Russians equipped these squads with crowbars and demanded they kill every cannibal they found. The teams prowled at night, looking for telltale flickers of flame from small fires where the predators were preparing their meals.
Dr. Vincenzo Pugliese went on patrol frequently and, one night, he turned a corner and surprised a cannibal roasting something on the end of a stick. At first it looked like an oversized sausage, but then Pugliese’s trained eye noticed the accordion-like pleats on the object and with a sickening start, he realized that the man was cooking a human trachea.
Prisoners who refused to eat human flesh used other tricks to survive. At Krinovaya, a group of Italian entrepreneurs retrieved excrement from huge latrine ditches and with bare hands picked out undigested corn and millet, which they washed and ate. German prisoners swiftly improved the process. Setting up an assembly line of sieve-like tin cups, they strained the feces through them and trapped so much grain that they started a black market in it.
At Susdal, Dr. Cristoforo Capone employed his fertile imagination to save himself and his comrades. Still a charming rogue who found humor in the darkest moments, he devised truly elaborate schemes. When a truck filled with cabbages parked outside the fence, Capone organized a group that stole the load and hid it under beds, in latrines and mattresses. While his friends ate voraciously, Capone then spread a trail of cabbage leaves from the empty truck to a nearby Rumanian barracks. The theft was finally discovered, and the Russians followed the trail and fell upon the Rumanians with clubs. Meanwhile, Capone’s friends ate every other piece of evidence.
The inventive doctor found yet another macabre way to sustain life. Divided into fifteen-men squads, the Italian POWs lived in ice-cold rooms where they walked incessantly to keep from freezing. Each morning a Russian guard entered, counted the men present and left rations for that exact number. As men began to waste away and die, Capone decided their corpses could serve a better purpose than being thrown onto the pile of bodies in the yard. From then on Capone propped bodies upright in their chairs and when the Russian guard made his daily count, he and his companions engaged them in spirited conversation. The guard always left the fifteen rations; soon Capone and his companions were looking better, feeling better.
Because the frigid temperature kept the corpses from decomposing, the doctor kept them for weeks. When his own room was “bursting with protein,” he felt compelled to help neighboring prisoners so he instituted a form of “lend-lease.” Each day, he carried the petrified bodies back and forth to different rooms, dropping them off wherever increased rations were needed.
By May of 1943, the Russians began to feed the prisoners better. As one captive explained, “They wanted some soldiers to go home after the war.” Doctors and nurses moved in to care for the survivors; political agitators roved the camps, seeking candidates for anti-Fascist training. After several months of indoctrination, one German exclaimed, “I never knew there were so many Communists in the Wehrmacht!” In most cases, those who turned on Hitler and Mussolini had a specific goal in mind. Cooperation meant extra food.
Thousands of German families still waited for word of their loved ones at Stalingrad. In Frankfurt on the Main, Kaethe Metzger watched while American planes leveled the city in 1944. When Allied armies crossed the Rhine in 1945, she fled to the suburbs and, after Frankfurt fell, she returned to her old neighborhood several times to see if anyone had heard news of Emil. Kaethe never doubted that she would see him again, even though each time she asked her friends if her husband had contacted any of them, they shook their heads and turned away.
After the war, Frankfurt slowly surged with life as the rubble was carted away and the city became headquarters for the Allied Army of Occupation. When construction began on apartment houses and stores in the downtown area, Kaethe found a small flat for Emil and herself. Through the years of the cold war she waited—the Berlin airlift in 1948 and the first trickle of prisoners to return from behind the Iron Curtain. Kaethe refused to give up hope. On July 7, 1949, a yellow telegram arrived from Frankfort on the Oder, inside the Russian zone of East Germany. It said simply, “
Kaethe cried all that day. Then she began to worry about what to wear when she met Emil at the train station. Like a schoolgirl, she prepared for her husband’s return.
Peering nervously through a train window, Emil Metzger was traveling across his fallen nation. Passing lush farmlands, he recalled the terrible devastation he had seen in Russia and the six years he had spent in a Siberian prison camp. How long, he wondered, would Germany remain divided, bankrupt, a pariah in the family of nations. Would there be any place in the new world for a man who had served so discredited a cause?
The train slowed and pulled into the enormous yards at Frankfurt. His heart pounding, Emil rose and stretched. His right foot throbbed painfully from the bullet still imbedded in his heel, but he paid no attention to it as he descended to the platform and was carried along by the frantic rush of fellow passengers. Suddenly he was in the midst of a screaming, hysterical group of civilians. Someone shouted his name and he nodded absently at an old friend thrusting a bouquet of flowers at him.
Then he saw her, standing quietly apart from the crowd. Pushing through the people in front of him, he never took his eyes off Kaethe, looking radiant in a colorful print dress. He reached out, their hands touched and then they were together, sobbing and clinging desperately to each other. But as he smothered his wife with kisses, Emil was suddenly afraid. The woman he held was almost a total stranger. Although he had never spent an hour in prison camp without thinking about her—about her smile and laughter and how much he wanted to be with her—it struck him forcibly that, in their nine years of marriage, this was only their fifth day together as man and wife.
