October 12th, Thursday-Sleeping in the Kitchen

Oct 12 Kitchen brought over chow-
Cleaned up filth-
Now 8 of us occupy two top floor rooms-
Bruno, Ludwig, Gunther and I (Heydril) sleep in kitchen-
good stove
Filled mattress

Cliff Hope from his book: After the kitchen brought us breakfast, we went on detail back to the Gotterdammerung to get our stove, the command post tent, and other items left behind. We lunched near the schoolhouse and spent the afternoon getting straw to sleep on. Survey Party Two took the third floor of the school; Okie, Mac' Winsor and I were in what had been a kitchen: and Grathwol, Peltz and Thompson were in an adjoining room. We hung our clothes on the stove at night. Eight men shaved at one table with water heated on the stove. We drank cocoa and ate sardines and fired potatoes. The beds and bed rolls took up most of the floor space. "From the Gotterdammerung to a New York East Side tenement in one day," Grathwol observed.

I had a field day sorting through the library books and pamphlets in the volksschule (Primary school). One book, published in 1941, was entitled Das Amerikanische Ratsel (The American Enigma). The enigma was none other than Preident Roosevelt. A large collection of photographs at the end of the book portrayed everyone with a Jewish name in FDR's administration. I stashed a good bit of the schoolroom literature in the bottom of my duffel bag.

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