Part 2: ‘There was no mercy’
THE STORY SO FAR: German army soldier Edward Sakasitz has spent almost two years on the Russian front. Now, in January 1944, his anti-tank unit heads south.
Second of two parts.
From Russia, six weeks on a train took us into Italy, below Rome. We rolled to Frosinone and beyond, to the village of Sora. One morning, it was dark yet, I had to go on my motorcycle and didn’t see that our telephone guys were pulling a wire across the road. It hit me just below the throat and threw me off.
We went on to Villa Latina, San Giuseppe to the Gustave Line in the Abruzzen Mountains. I had to use a donkey to carry food and ammunition to the guys on the mountain.
It was terrible in Italy, much worse than the war in Russia. The American artillery and bombers made life for us almost impossible. We were bombarded day and night and had to pull back every other night. Our artillery would fire 20 to 25 shells at the American positions and get 20,000 shells in return.
Many times we wished our artillery wouldn’t fire at all, because the Americans fired back so many more shells. It was almost unbearable. We lost a lot of men.
The Americans had what we called uebermacht, supremacy. We had Messerschmitts in the air, but they had Thunderbolts, Mustangs and Lightnings. Did we get nailed!
We pulled back north toward the Po Valley, where the American planes pounded us, especially in Pisa, the city with the leaning tower. We crossed the Po on pontoon bridges, hoping we would end up in Austria. Many guys talked about deserting. But after we made it to Verona, we turned left toward the French border.
South of Turin, near Saluzzo, I had to go on a motorcycle to carry a message to a company or battalion and ran into machine gun fire. It was Nov. 29, 1944. I was on a little winding road, going real slow because it was nighttime and I didn’t have any lights.
A machine gun in the woods opened fire on me. I saw the bullets fly. It seemed like there was at least 50. One went through my right thigh and four went through my left leg, one breaking my shin. I was knocked off the motorcycle. Some Germans coming behind me in a vehicle fired back at the machine gun. I guess they picked me up. I don’t know who shot me, but we had heard there was a Canadian division nearby.
The next few days I don’t remember. I ended up in a German field hospital near Turin. Just before Christmas, I was transferred to a village near Milan. I heard there were 4,000 German wounded there; the room I was in had 48. Most of the hospital workers were Italian boys with the Red Cross who couldn’t speak German. One of them gave me an Italian/German dictionary. I studied it and tried to be nice to the boys. Next to me was a German officer who said he hated the Italians. I told him, ‘’I need them. I need their help.’’
Dr. Rauther, from Vienna, wanted to amputate my left leg. But he came in one morning, looked at my chart and said, ‘’You’re over the mountain.’’ I could keep my leg. After 115 days in bed, they gave me a bath. Did that feel good! By Easter 1945, I could walk with crutches outside along the garden.
‘Adolf ist verrueckt’
I fought in the Wehrmacht because I lived in Austria and Hitler took over Austria. I didn’t really know what I was fighting for.
But I was careful, you know. You had to be, otherwise they’d lock you up. I never volunteered for anything. I never refused to do anything. In the army, you had to be lucky, you had to be on the ball, you had to not make any mistakes. There were no excuses.
Many times in the army, you had to listen to the Fuehrer’s speeches on the radio. If an officer caught you half asleep or sleeping and asked you what the Fuehrer said and you didn’t know, ha! They punished you.
I hated Hitler’s speeches because he always talked so rough. You know: ‘’Who does not work does not eat!’’ But you had to watch what you said. You could not even trust your old friends.
Many in the German army said, ‘’Adolf ist verrueckt,’’ he’s crazy. I thought he was crazy, too. I didn’t think so from the beginning when he took over, but in 1942 Germany was spread out too far, in Russia, in Africa, in Norway, in France. We were told there were 25 Russkies to one German. How long can you hold on, 25 to 1?
We saw that Hitler could not win the war. We were too thin. It was hopeless. You know what we said in the German army? ‘’We lost the First World War. We’re going to win this one, too.’’ We didn’t care if we won, as long as the war was over.
We hoped maybe something would happen to Hitler. People were trying to kill him, but it didn’t work out. We felt that was the only way, because he always said, Wir werden nie kapitulieren. ‘’We’ll never give up the war.’’ If he were dead, the war would be over and we could go home. When we heard they tried and failed to assassinate him in July 1944, we were disappointed.
I was not a Nazi. Not one man in our unit belonged to the Nazi Party, that I know of. Nobody ever mentioned anything about the Nazi Party, and I never met a Nazi leader or spoke to one.
We heard about the concentration camps, but I didn’t know that they were so big. I didn’t know that they killed so many Jews during the war. We heard about it afterward. Most of what I heard was when I came in this country.
In Nazareth after the war, my brother asked me how long I was in the German army. I told him five years. He said, ‘’I would never have stayed that long. I would’ve gone home.’’ He had no idea. He didn’t understand. You go home, they put you away or shoot you. There was no mercy, I mean it!
Help from Dr. Klug
‘’Get up,’’ Dr. Rauther and his assistant, Dr. Jackson, told us the morning of April 25 or 26, 1945. We had to leave the hospital in the village near Milan for the train station. A Red Cross train was ready to take us to Germany. About 40 of us took a bus to the station, but the train had left. An Italian officer got a locomotive and a railroad car, and we caught up with the train at Monza.
Pretty soon, nasty Italians of the Brigada Nara, the Black Brigade, came on board. ‘’Who has weapons? Who has weapons?’’ they demanded. They acted like heroes, but to us they were cowards, for the simple reason that everyone on the bus was badly wounded and helpless. None of us could walk.
We came into Switzerland and I looked out the window and saw something I hadn’t seen in years: buildings with windows. Can this be? At the first train station, a Swiss general named Wolf told us the northern border was sealed off by the American and French armies. We had to stay in Switzerland as internees until further notice.
About a week later, we learned der Krieg ist vorbei. The war is over.
I was in a hospital near Lugano, where a Swiss doctor named Klug took a lot of damaged bone out of my left leg. Soon after that, I could walk without crutches.
Six of us were transferred to Zurich, then to Lyss, where we lived in clean barracks. Because I had good handwriting, I worked for the Red Cross writing cards to families in Germany and Austria about their sons and husbands who were prisoners of war. I copied the information onto the cards from microfilm with very fine print.
On Dec. 5, 1945, we got the message that everyone from Germany and Austria who lived in an American, French or British zone could go home, but not the ones living in a Russian zone. I lived in a British-occupied zone.
Back home in my village of Fladnitz, I lived with my Aunt Mary again and worked at the same truck repair garage I left in 1940. Mostly I was a diesel engine mechanic, but I also drove trucks and buses. In 1949, I left the garage because the boss’s wife, who had lost two sons and a stepson in the war, always remarked that the good men didn’t come back from the front. I didn’t like that. It wasn’t my fault I survived.
I moved to a town near the Yugoslavian border, Ehrenhausen, and met and married my first wife, Anna, and we had a daughter.
Meanwhile, my father was trying to help me come back to America. But the American Embassy in Vienna, seeing that I had served in the German army, wouldn’t grant me a passport. That was in 1947. My father got in touch with a lawyer from Allentown, Geza Bolez, and they worked it out, telling the American Embassy that when I was drafted into the Wehrmacht, I was under 21, a minor and not responsible.
Finally in August 1953, I got a letter from the embassy, which had moved to Salzburg, saying I should come and pick up my passport. My father had passed away just before that. I didn’t know if I should go. I asked the buergermeister of Ehrenhausen, the mayor, for advice. He said, ‘’Eddie, the United States is not the Soviet Union. If you don’t like it there, you can always come back.’’
Epilogue
Eddie Sakasitz arrived in New York City on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 26, 1953, aboard the new, ill-fated Andrea Doria -- three years later, it collided with another passenger ship and sank off the coast of Nantucket, Mass.
His brother and sisters welcomed him home. His sister Rosi, who lived in the Bronx, told him she had a turkey in the oven. Eddie, who couldn’t speak English, wondered: ‘’Are they frying Turks?’’ When they got to her apartment and she opened the oven, he realized she meant a bird, a Truthahn, not a person.
Sakasitz settled in Nazareth. Six months later, his wife and their little girl, Renate, rejoined him. The child died of an illness at age 5. The couple had another daughter, Cynthia Corpora, who has three sons.
Eddie worked at paper box factories in the borough and Easton, retiring in 1985.
After Anna’s death in 1986, Sakasitz remarried. His second wife, Catherine, has four children from a previous marriage. She and Eddie have taken many trips to Europe.
‘’Today, I have no regrets,’’ Eddie Sakasitz said. ‘’I made it through the war. So many, many didn’t.’’
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