Except:
If a POW in Dresden found a cache of food, he tipped other prisoners after returning to the shattered streets. A common ruse was for a POW to tell a guard he needed to go underground to take a dump. Once in the cellar, the prisoner devoured stored food as fast as he could. Rarely did the German soldiers follow a POW underground. The stench and risk of disease kept them away.
The danger came when a prisoner pocketed food, goods, or valuables. Plundering was a criminal offense for Germans and prisoners alike. It brought a sentence of death. Nonetheless, hunger won out over fear for prisoners such as Pfc. Kurt Vonnegut. Always the storyteller, after weeks of living on bread made from sawdust, water masking as soup, and ersatz coffee, he and his war buddie Bernie O’Hare shared descriptions of meals he planned to eat when the war was over. Often, if Kurt became too animated, someone in a nearby bunk at the slave barracks would snarl and ask him to knock it off.
Michael D. Palaia served with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division. He was a big fellow with a large appetite, a kid from South Philly who worried his pals because he couldn’t seem to stop sassing the German guards.
German soldiers captured the youth from South Philadelphia at the Battle of the Bulge in the same sweep that bagged Kurt Vonnegut as a prisoner. Palaia, 19 years old, had brown eyes and black hair. He stood six-two with a slender build. Like Kurt, he was one of the taller prisoners in the Dresden POW camp roll calls. Fellow prisoners described him in recollections as a nice-looking kid but hot tempered and prone to angering his German guards with complaints and profanity.
Vonnegut had made his older character in Slaughterhouse-Five, Edgar Derby, a high school teacher. It is possible that the teacher that led to that inspiration was a prisoner of war named Max Diller who had been born August 24, 1915, and thus was a much older 29 year-old man while in the Dresden camp.
Diller, a high school teacher and principal from Alma, Kansas, had been drafted despite his teaching occupation and supporting a wife and two daughters. His wife had received notification that her husband had been killed with his outfit, Company I, 423rd Infantry, when encircled by Germans. In reality, he and other soldiers had slipped past the Germans and ran into a Jeep filled with German soldiers dressed in American uniforms. Once more, Diller escaped, but many companions died under fire from a 50 caliber machine gun. He then was captured by a detachment of Luftwaffe that had been grounded by the bad weather, and he was able to write his wife Vivian and daughters Connie and Judy who had been grieving his death for many months.
Footnote: Mary Strnad, “Diller Recounts Life of Starvation , Slave Labor in WWII POW Camp,” The Bellville (Kansas) Telescope, November 5, 1992.
Diller’s slave duties in Dresden found him working in a bakery. Diller became proficient at stealing small amounts of bread. When he and a companion were put to work digging for corpses later, the other man barely escaped a shooting when caught with a tin of fish.
“You took your chances,” Diller later said about his plundering. “There isn’t one of us that couldn’t have been shot.
Diller recalled how Palaia, dressed in an oversized Soviet coat, spooned food out of a stolen jar at a fire on the street, trying to get warm.
Prisoner of war Louis John Grivetti, 19, a former employee of the Pittsburgh Coal Company, told this biographer that Palaia had stashed his find under a rock and then taken it out again.
“If he’d eaten them in the cellar, why, it would never have happened,” Max Diller recalled long after the war. “He had a new pair of English shoes that they buried him with. They wouldn’t let the boys (burial party) bring that back. There were lots of people who needed shoes.”
Footnote: Max Diller, “The Execution of Michael Palaia,” in Shadows of Slaughterhouse Five, by Erwin E. Szpek, Jr., Frank J. Idzikowski, and Heide M. Szpek, Bloomington, Indiana, iunivers, 2008, p. 347.
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Before leaving the barracks with guards, Palaia gave a slip of paper to fellow prison Harry Kingston. “Harry, I don’t know where I am going. They tell me I am going on a new commando. If you don’t hear from me again, see my mother, don’t forget 1825 S. 17th. So long for now. See you later. Michael Don’t lose the address.”
The grave diggers were Harry E. J. Kingston, Henry Edward Hall, Joseph Topicz and Floyd T. McLea. The truth was scattered in interviews and commentary by Dresden POWs in the 2008 book “Shadows of Slaughterhouse Five” by Ervin E Szpek, Jr. and Frank J. Idzikowski. The names of the grave diggers emerged rom the investigations of military war crime investigators Joseph Carpenter, William Busch and Joseph S. Smith.
Kurt Vonnegut was not near the execution and learned of it second hand.
Vonnegut upon his arrival home in Indiana from captivity as a Nazi slave in 1945 told his Uncle Alex Vonnegut about Palaia’s demise. While it is possible that Kurt claimed to be a grave digger, it’s also possible that Uncle Alex saw how overwrought his nephew was while telling family about the execution and wrongly assumed his nephew was present for the execution. At any rate, the execution of Edgar Derby became unquestionably one of the passages in Slaughterhouse-Five that wrings emotion out of readers.
German guards took Hall and the burial party out of the barracks without telling them the details of their mission. The Americans carried their shovels and at least one pick. “We walked for quite a while and crossed a bridge,” he later recalled. “I don’t recall seeing water but did notice the bomb craters that missed it. We came to a wooded place with barracks. Palaia was led past us by guards. He didn’t say anything and we didn’t either. I don’t think he realized what was going to happen. He had on his old blue looking uniform, a coat that was like ours but not as long . . . I did see Michael standing up there by a large tree with his hands tied behind his back but I couldn’t see him from where we were digging the graves. We had a hard time digging because the ground was still frozen and we kept hitting roots from that tree. We saw them shoot.”
Hall thought the other executed prisoner was a Russian and believed the crime was stealing a pack of matches. The most reliable sources believe the victim was a Pole. He watched the Germans take the victim’s fairly new English shoes, wishing he could give them to several fellow prisoners whose shoes were tattered.
Footnote: Henry E. Hall, “The Execution of Michael Palaia,” in Shadows of Slaughterhouse Five, by Erwin E. Szpek, Jr., Frank J. Idzikowski, and Heide M. Szpek, Bloomington, Indiana, iunivers, 2008, pp. 350-351.
Prisoner Tom Jones watched the grave diggers return. “Those guys on the burial detail came back, their eyes as big as saucers—they were scared—it really impressed them.”
Footnote: Tom Jones, “The Execution of Michael Palaia,” in Shadows of Slaughterhouse Five, by Erwin E. Szpek, Jr., Frank J. Idzikowski, and Heide M. Szpek, Bloomington, Indiana, iunivers, 2008, pp. 353.
Kurt Vonnegut used the death of Palaia in Slaughterhouse-Five, but he took creative license here. His composite character, “poor old Edgar Derby,” was portrayed as an older soldier, 44 years old. An Indianapolis high school teacher from Indianapolis, Derby came to Dresden by train with Billy Pilgrim.
Instead of fruit, Vonnegut’s Derby takes a Dresden china teapot from a cellar while searching for the corpses of the firestorm’s victims. Vonnegut may have believed that Palaia was shot for a teapot, as the author says in the opening paragraph of Slaughterhouse-Five, or he took creative license here. “All this happened, more or less,” Kurt wrote in the opening line of the novel. He also described a phone conversation with his war buddy from Pennsylvania, Bernard O’Hare, that recalled when Kurt said the climax of Slaughterhouse-Five should be the execution of Derby for taking the teapot. Later in the book, Kurt has Derby heroically defends Billy Pilgrim from the thug Paul Lazzaro, and he also denounces the American turncoat Howard Campbell.
Palaia was defended by a South African prisoner named Paul Brokensha who was stationed with his brother David Brokensha in another prisoner of war camp outside the city of Dresden. David Brokensha described the defense briefly in his memoir Brokie’s Way: An Anthropologist’s Story. Paul Brokensha served as the camp leader.
David Brokensha didn’t use Palaia’s name, and he thought the contraband was a tin of jam. He recalled waiting with anxiety at the compound for news of the trial, but his brother wanted to talk about an attractive secretary, likely a German, who had served as an interpreter.
David interrupted his brother to demand what happened to the American prisoner.
“Oh, he was shot.”
David wrote that he was shocked by what he thought was his brother’s callousness. “I later learnt that he had done all he could for the man, and [he] had pleaded with all the eloquence he could must, but to no avail. [Paul] was probably trying to hide from me his feelings of guilt at not being able to save the man. And so it goes—to echo Kurt Vonnegut’s refrain.”
Footnote: David Brokensha, Brokie’s Way: An Anthropologist’s Story. Cape Town: Amani Press, 2007.