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188 D Chapter Fifty-Five d Joining the british On June 1, the American 82nd Airborne unit moved out of the area. Charles, my liberator, and I bid each other a tearful farewell,after which he disappeared in his jeep,leaving a cloud of dust behind him. This twenty-two-year-old boy with the guts of a Rhett Butler had left my life. On the slim chance that we might meet again some day, we exchanged addresses. I gave him mine in Berlin, just in case.31 A unit of the British REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers) moved into the village. The commander, Major John J. McGraw, a stout Scotsman, inquired politely if I was American. Why did I speak English with the funny Yankee accent? The officer, with iron-gray hair to match his iron determination and a remarkable ability to hold liquor, accepted me as an interpreter,so my life did not change all that much,except that I fell in love with my new boss. He told me that he was married and had two children, but the marriage existed only on paper since his wife had left him, not for another man, which would have been bad enough, but for a woman. Although I was treated with the same courtesy I had enjoyed before, the new rulers turned out to be very different from their predecessors. After all, from the very beginning of the war in 1939, their country had been battered by the German Air Force—brutal attacks explicitly directed against the civilian population right up to the end of the war. So their attitude, although proper, was restrained, if not downright frosty. Nonfraternization laws stiffened considerably, and they were enforced as much as possible. Again, however, there remained the horizontal gray area, which proved very difficult to prevent. But even the ladies noticed that their new customers, not overly eager to share their sparse rations, were certainly in no mood to promise matrimony. One morning, I had to accompany the major on a lengthy trip by jeep up north near the Danish border,for some negotiations in a German POW camp run by the BritishArmy. Presenting me to the camp commandant as his interpreter, he was informed that my services were not needed because they had their own camp interpreter.The man in question,a German POW, displaying ostensibly submissive behavior, walked through the door. Taking one good look at me, he suddenly seemed to freeze and, like Lot’s wife, almost turned into the proverbial pillar of salt. The monstrous ring with the SS insignia was missing from his big hand, the hand I had felt so painfully on my face less than a year before, in the Berlin Gestapo headquarters. He stared at me like a rabbit at a rattlesnake. But while once I had Destruction unlimiteD 189 been the rabbit and he the snake, our roles were now definitely reversed. He was correct in his assumption that this totally unexpected and not very cordial reunion would at once terminate his lucrative job. His trial would take place in Lübeck at a later date, and I found out that I had not been the brute’s only victim. John, after learning all the gruesome details connecting me to the former SS officer, promised to personally check on my parents’ fate. At this point, he let me in on the secret that within a few days, before July 1, the British and the American Armed Forces would withdraw from the area they had conquered and occupied since the first days in May. As far as our area in Mecklenburg was concerned, the Russians were already waiting in the wings to move into what had been determined at the Yalta Conference to be their assigned territory. The REME unit was assigned new headquarters somewhere north of Hamburg. John decided that not only would he take me with him, but Arabella, too.We should travel separately, but in style. He simply declared the horse property of the British, even though his only attempt to mount her had ended in disaster, netting him a badly bruised leg. The snow-white mare had just stood there in her favorite but treacherous pose of an angelic camel, ogling him with what seemed an ingratiating expression in her deep blue eyes. She had tolerated him on her back for no longer than a split second, and before the rider could even get his right foot into...

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