During the supper preparation on their third day of K.P., Zyskowski put eight huge hams on the counter. With a long, thin knife he started slicing off the outer layer of fat and pushed great white slices to the side of the counter.
Maurice’s stomach rumbled. “What are you going to do with that?” he asked.
“Just throw it out,” the cook shrugged. “The boys don’t eat it, anyway.”
“Well, let us take it. Our people love that.”
The cook shrugged and waved his hand.
Maurice and Basil ran to the Tkaczes’ tent, thinking only of not dropping the ham fat. Jaroslav was trying to wash his clothes in a leaky wooden bucket. “What the hell do you look so happy for?”
“Shenka, Jaroslav! Ham!” Maurice could barely keep from shouting, but did not want to start a stampede. Every refugee was hungry.
Jaroslav’s eyes grew wide. He grabbed one of the fattest pieces from Basil and stuffed it in his mouth.
“Oh, it’s been so long since I had any ham, or anything good to eat!” Jaroslav stuck his tongue out a few times because he had gotten dirty laundry water on the ham. He looked intently at his nephew. “Where did you get it?”
Maurice bent close, careful to keep the rest of the ham fat out of Jaroslav’s reach. “The Americans just throw it away!”
“Throw it away!”
“In the garbage. The cook said we could have it. He didn’t care.”
Jaroslav shook his head. “These cowboys don’t know what’s good. We can make skvarke. Can you get any onions?”
Maurice shook his head. “Let’s not push our luck, Jaroslav.”
Basil stoked up the fire in front of the tent and set up a fry pan. Maurice cut up the ham fat into tiny chunks and dropped them in. Lana and Perenye brought some bread and salt they had scavenged from somewhere and they dipped chunks of stale bread into the melting ham fat. It wasn’t very good, with stale bread and no seasoning other than a little salt, but it reminded Maurice of home. He began to cry. Basil saw the tears on his cheeks and nodded. He was weeping, too.
The Americans’ garbage became the salvation of a growing number of D.P.s. At the end of each day, Basil and Maurice took buckets of discarded ends of roasts and hams, vegetables, loaves and other food and distributed it to hungry refugees. At first, it was just the tents near them; then, other Ukrainians; then more people from, it seemed, every part of Europe.
It’s getting out of control, Maurice thought a week later. Every time he came back to his tent, there was a crowd of people looking at him hopefully. Every day, the crowd got bigger, but he never had more food. It was getting harder and harder to ration the food out fairly, and no one was getting enough. And rather than feeling better, Maurice started to feel more and more pressured, more like he was surrounded by enemies than friends. It’s not much better than the POW camp, he thought.
No, that’s not true. There is enough food here, and no one is going to shoot us for leaving
“Zyskowski. That is Polish name?” Maurice asked in English one day.
“Yah. Ma and Pop came to Milwaukee from Poland,” Zyskowski answered as he set several cabbages on the counter.
“I have an idea for something special,” said Maurice. “How would you like I’ll make you a special recipe of my mother’s?”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Cabbage rolls.”
The corporal smiled slowly and widely. “I don’t believe it! My ma makes great cabbage rolls! Where the hell are you really from?”
“Montreal. But my mother is from… Poland.” It had been Poland when she was born there. Maurice hoped again that his mother and sister were all right, and also that his face did not betray his feelings.
“I haven’t had any Polish cooking since I joined the goddamn army. If you know how to make good goląbki, be my guest. How many cabbages do you want?”
Maurice picked up the best-looking one. “Just this. Do you have any rice?”
The sergeant happily brought Maurice everything he asked for: salt, butter, pepper (which Maurice had not seen since before the war), onions. Maurice put a big pot on to boil and began chopping onions. As the cabbage leaves gradually separated from the head in the boiling water, he fried the onions and started cooking the rice.
Making a pot of cabbage rolls takes hours. Maurice hummed to himself as he fried the onions with some leftover hamburger from the previous day’s meal, and he had to keep himself from singing as he spooned the rice and onions onto softened cabbage leaves and rolled them closed. He put them into an iron pot, put the pot in the wood oven, stoked up the fire a little…and waited.
Just before the GIs’ lunch, he filled a plate with cabbage rolls, topped them with a spoonful of fried onions and presented it to Corporal Zyskowski. The army cook smacked his lips and dug in, chomping down huge mouthfuls. “Oh, Morrie! Geez, these are almost as good as Ma’s!” He swallowed and shoveled in another huge bite. “Ya know, if you have a sister and she has this recipe, tell her I’ll marry her!”
Maurice took a small pot for the Tkaczes and himself, but he knew it would only be enough for a taste for each of them. He felt happy, at least a little, for pleasing Zyskowski. But cabbage rolls were not such a hit with the officers.
“What is this?” said Lieutenant Gardner.
“Morrie there made a special recipe from his ma,” said the sergeant. “It’s good—”
“Get this away from me and bring me some decent American food!”
The new pattern did not last long. In early July, orders came from somewhere to close down the Ingolstadt camp. “We’re moving south, to Austria,” Lieutenant Gardner said. “All the D.P.s will move to a new camp in Landeck, Austria.”
On the last day in Ingolstadt, July 7, 1945, Lieutenant Gardner surprised Maurice with a letter typed on tissue-thin, army-issued paper.
To whom it may concerns:
The following two men, Maurice Bury, and Tkacz Bazyli, have been working for us as K.P.s for the last xxxxx month, and we have found there work to be very satisfactory.
We recommend them very highly.
“It’s a letter of reference,” Corporal Zyskowski said. “I asked him to write it. It’ll help you get work.”
Maurice could not think of anything better to say than “Thank you.”
As they walked away, Basil said to Maurice, “They got my name backwards. ‘Tkacz Bazyli’?”
“I thought you couldn’t speak English.”
“That’s what I wanted them to think.”
Maurice waved the letter under Basil’s nose. “Still want that?”
The GIs herded the refugees out of the camp to the train station. Clinging to the few possessions they had, they climbed onto passenger and freight cars. As the train lurched forward and began to roll out of the station, Maurice saw several of the women crying.
“Do you think the Americans are sending us back to the Russians?” Lana asked, her eyes wide. Maurice saw her hands trembling. Behind her, her grandmother wept with her hands over her face.