Interview with a Prayer Book

Interviewer: You look like you’ve been through the wars.

Prayer Book: I have. One, anyway. Foxholes in France, barbed wire prison camp in Poland, trek through frozen wastes of God knows where, more barbed wire prison camp. I’ve been through them all.

I: How did that happen?

P: Ro gave me to Dale just before he shipped overseas. Partly because of my metal jacket front and what you see etched
here: May this keep you safe from harm. She believed prayer would get you through anything, though she could never
have imagined what we’d be going through. I suspect she picked me out because he’d just converted a few months
before, and she figured he could use some reminders for things she’d been breathing in since childhood.

I: What kinds of things?

P: You wouldn’t think it to look at me—I’m made small to fit into a breast pocket—but I hold tons of Catholic essentials.
The Mass, for example. I have the whole thing here, the Latin with that cluster of Greek eleisons and an English
translation alongside, along with cues to stand up, sit down, or kneel. All the things you need to examine your
conscience about before going to Confession—not that he was going to get many chances for sin or Confession. A
handy litany or two, a table with the dates for all the movable feast days by year. At the very beginning, just after the
rules about fasting, I spell out the procedure for lay baptism. That could come in handy if any of his men wanted to
convert while dying.

I: What was it like being taken off to war? Did he use you a lot?

A. I was with him throughout, but he never thumbed through me much.  As you noticed, my metal cover is badly
scratched up, but my pages are like new. Look here: not even one tiny rip on my red-tinted edges, not a muddy
thumbprint anywhere. He sure kept me safe. Maybe like clasping Ro close to him. So I didn’t get to see much. Not his
expressions, not the surroundings. But I could hear what went on around him, and his heartbeat gave me some idea
what he was feeling. At times it got awfully intense.

I: Could you give an example?

P: Well, for starters, when he got to the front. That was just before Thanksgiving 1944. First there was a constant far-off
thumping; that was artillery fire. Since at first his heartbeat stayed steady, it must have been from our side. Then I could
feel hundreds upon hundreds of trudging footsteps, sometimes with sloshing or sucking sounds. I could hear rain
falling for what seemed forever, sometimes just small plinks on his helmet but other times like a constant drumbeat,
but he never let me get wet. He shivered a lot, so between that and the sucking sounds when he walked, I figured it was
cold and muddy. A few days in—I could tell night from day by the way his heartbeat and breathing slowed—the
thumping got louder and his heart sped up. So I figure, probably incoming artillery. We had this staccato rhythm going:
slosh suck slog, thump, hit the ground, slosh slog, repeat. I got some of my scratches then, since he kept landing full
force, pack and all, on top of me. That went on a couple of days. Then I heard volleys of rifle fire and some big guns,
maybe tank cannon, and men screaming, and oh heavens his heart—I thought it would jump out right through me.
Suddenly, there was silence all around us, though I could hear explosions at some distance. His heart did one big leap,
and then slowed down but every beat hammered me. After a lull, he started walking slowly, and I could hear a lot of
voices, mostly not speaking English, shouting what sounded like orders. I could feel him lifting his arms and putting his
hands behind his neck.

I: That must have been when he was captured.

P: Most likely. As I said, I couldn’t see anything, but the situation sure changed dramatically.

I: What happened after that?

P: He marched for a long time. I could hear some hushed voices around him, speaking English, and an occasional shout in
some other language. He wasn’t talking. Maybe he was trying not to cry; I could feel him all tensed up. After a few
hours we stopped, and somebody yanked me out of his breast pocket, said something like Zigaretten, and Dale said no.
There was more marching, and then he clambered up on something and we were crammed together with a lot of other
bodies. I heard a heavy rolling noise, like a sliding door closing, then a metallic clatter and a lock shutting. After a while
a whistle shrieked and we started lurching back and forth. He nearly fell but I guess he fell against somebody; I heard
him say Sorry! Then he fell against others or against the wall, and said more sorries, but after a bit he stopped saying
sorry.

I:  That must have been when he was shipped with other prisoners in one of those “40-by-8” cattle cars. How long did
that last?

P: Who knows? He was standing the whole time and barely slept, so I couldn’t tell day from night by his heartbeat; it
seemed to go on forever. At one point, I could hear a few weak voices singing Christmas carols but he didn’t join in.
Then the train stopped with a screech and I could hear explosions and did his heart ever pound then—the worst yet. A
lot of the men were yelling “Let us out!” but all I heard after that was explosions coming faster and louder, and he was
whispering some prayers that sounded like Oh my God Oh my God, and then a huge explosion like the end of the
world, and shrieks like souls being thrown into hell, then only silence and an occasional moan or scream. A lot of the
men in our car were sobbing. Dale was.

I: What happened?

P: I’m pretty sure the next car over was hit. From the sound of it, the ones who died immediately were the lucky ones. His
heart was doing things I don’t want to remember. Please, I can’t talk about that anymore.

I: Okay, I won’t press you. How about something you recall from later?

P: Well, eventually the train chugged into motion again and after a long stretch, could have been days or weeks, he started
walking, stepped down and then walked a bit with a bunch of others. He’d been shivering all this time, and still was. It
sounded like we came indoors, where he stopped shivering for a while, but right after that I can’t tell you what
happened to him, because somebody yanked me out of his pocket and walked away with me. I could hear him
protesting but the person holding me shouted something in that other language, and kept walking, put me down on
something wooden, dumped other stuff on top of me, and left me for a while. Next thing I felt, the pile over me
gradually lightened and then some fingers grabbed me and started flipping through me. Something thudded on my title
page. It was a stamp; you can see it here in purple, saying “3 Geprüft Oflag 64” in fancy Gothic script. The purple sank
right through onto my Imprimatur on the next page! After a bit of a wait, somebody walked me back to him. When he
slipped me back into his breast pocket, I noticed that he smelled a lot better. I forgot to mention how stinky things got
in that cattle car; you’d think they were all pissing and shitting right in there. Maybe they all got showers in this new
place. I heard somebody say it was a prison camp for American officers.

I: Were you with him for the rest of the war after that?

P: Indeed I was. But still, he rarely opened me. Say, why are you asking me all these questions? You seem to know quite a
lot about this already.

I: He was my father. I know just a few things that my mother told me. In fact, she was the one who left you to me for after
they died. But since then, I’ve done some research.

P: You mean he never told you anything about his combat experiences or the POW horrors?

I: Barely a word. When anybody asked him, he just said nobody who hadn’t been through it would be able to understand
it. Maybe like the way you couldn’t bring yourself to talk about that railcar blown up with all the prisoners in it.

P: He never talked about the war with you at all?

I: The one thing I remember is that when we complained about my mother’s cooking (which was godawful), he’d get
gruff and say that in prison camp he got nothing but bean soup with beetles in it and was grateful for it.

P: I can imagine that he’d be sensitive about food. He was starving all those months, along with the rest of them. I never
heard them eating much. On that freezing January march to the second camp, they barely ate at all for a couple of
weeks. But they talked constantly about food. One guy in the barracks—his voice came from overhead when they
talked at night—he’d been a chef in New York. They discussed dream menus for hours on end. In fact, one of the few
times Dale opened me, it was to mark up my two blank endpiece pages. He penciled in some clumps of words separated
by lines. See here, on my last page:

Assorted Soft Rolls – Coffee
Chef’s or Club Salad
Apple pie & cheese

_________________

Double Thick Baked Ham Sandwich
Hot Chocolate with Whipped Cream
Pineapple Pie & Vanilla Creme

_________________

Chicken or Turkey Barbecue
Ginger Ale or Root Beer

When Ro tucked me into his breast pocket, I closed with the finale of a Latin prayer: dignum et justum est. It is right
and just.

Now I end with Root Beer.

I: Did it offend you that he wrote that in you?

P: Prayer can take many forms.

Hecate Foley is a recovering academic and retired grantmaker who, when not teaching in the USA, spent many years abroad teaching, doing research, and supporting committed and creative people working towards grassroots democracy. Under her original name, she has published widely in academic fields ranging from revolutionary history to agricultural development to the political uses and misuses of the Internet. She now lives, reads, and gardens in the Connecticut River Valley. Under her pen name, she writes essays interweaving memoir, family history, and the history of the northern Michigan town in which she grew up. She blogs on the connections between gardening and broader social and environmental issues at inconstantgardener.com.