Gerry Grossman

This was around Christmas time and they sent us up the line; and I remember one day, some Americans turned up and we let them through, and then we discovered that they were Germans; you know the Germans disguised themselves as Americans. We had some action there, lots of patrols and then we crossed a river, I forget which river it was, not the River Rhine. We engaged the enemy on the other side, and then we were lucky to get back. I remember one scary night in a quarry. Well, you know, battle stuff. And then we went up to Holland eventually. We were stuck in the floods in Holland. My platoon got decimated; and I was one of three survivors. In Holland, we had leave occasionally. We were sitting with a Dutch family and they had a stove in the middle of the room with the pipe going up to the roof; and we all sat there with our feet on the pipe to keep them warm. We shared some of our army rations with them; and it was just the very warm atmosphere I remember. One case … [SS General Carl] Oberg was the Butcher of Paris, you know, the German Gestapo [Nazi secret police] general, well, he was not Gestapo, he was an army general, but he worked very closely with the Gestapo. They tortured prisoners in Paris and, you know, he was pretty ruthless. We also captured some German intelligence officers. They were a really clever bunch. There was one German general where we the interpreters looked after his daughter because she was left destitute. She had nowhere to go; she didn’t know what to do. So you get weird things happening.