Nazis

April 1944. After he locked up the café at eight o’clock each night, my father would put me in the car to take us for a short drive before going home. Sometimes we’d head down Algona’s one diagonal street, imaginatively called Diagonal Street, toward the train station to watch the night train come in. One night the regular train did not arrive. Instead a military train came loaded with Germans. Prisoners of war. Enemies. Nazis. Plain soldiers. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them. It was the spring of 1944, and they had come to live among us in the flat, beautiful, rich, and private family farmlands of northern Iowa decades before agri-business was born. I was not yet five years old. My eyes almost popped out of my head as I saw these big men jump out of the boxcars to form up as ordered by American soldiers shouting at them in the station’s dim lights. Then they marched off in the darkness toward the camp that had recently been built just outside town. They would have gone north, down one of the few hills in town, crossed the Upper Des Moines River, then headed west and up another hill, past a wealth of corn and soybean fields, grain elevators and silos, along the highway toward Emmetsburg, before finally turning south onto a gravel road that ushered them into Camp Algona. Not all of them arrived that night, of course. Fully ten thousand prisoners of war were housed in the camp at various times from April 1944 to February 1946. Algona itself had only about five thousand residents.

My father, Alex Dermand, was a Greek immigrant. He had come to Ellis Island in typical fashion, steerage class, in 1914 when he was eighteen years old, part of the great wave of Mediterranean immigrants. He was penniless, had no English, no formal education, and nothing but his wits to guide him. By 1944 he had become a successful businessman in a small midwestern farm town. He owned a few commercial buildings in town. He owned Dermand’s Café. He was the only Greek in Algona. My mother was not Greek.

He felt the full brunt of World War ii more than most in Algona because his entire Greek family remained in war-torn Greece. By the time the pow camp opened, the Nazis had been carrying out their worst atrocities for months in his village, in Athens, and throughout the country. Starvation was widespread. My father had held two Greek war-relief days at the café, sending the day’s receipts to the cause. He dressed my older brother, Leonidas, in the Greek fustanella—the elaborate white full-skirted uniform worn by Greek soldiers who stand guard outside Parliament in Syndagma Square in Athens even today.

At age four I was sent to kindergarten, and I also started working at the café. As soon as morning kindergarten was over, I would run the two blocks from school, turn left down the alley, and enter the café’s back door, kiss my father in the kitchen, and then start working the busy lunch hour in the front of the café. I was a miniature waitress.

Commander Lobdell, the American commander of Camp Algona, and the commandant of the German pows came into town to have lunch at our café most Fridays. Two or three military officers accompanied them. They always sat in the big round booth at the front of the café. When the commander and the commandant arrived, I would rush to deliver their setups, which consisted of water, silverware, bread for their bread plates, butter on their individual butter dishes, individual creamers for the coffee that soon would come, and white cloth napkins. Commander Lobdell always patted my head and told me how pretty my brown hair was.

“Katerina, how are you today?” Commander Lobdell would ask.

“I’m fine,” I’d reply. “My father has fixed a nice meal for you today.”

Often I took cash, which meant I stood at the cash register. My parents had a two-step wooden stool...