While Lamont and I were getting our things unpacked, George sat and talked with us about the work at the mine and what he expected us to do. As he talked he soaked his hand in his helmet liner filled with hot water. He had skinned one of his knuckles and an infection had set in. The doctors wanted to bring the thing to a head before lancing it the next day. I had noticed earlier that one of his hands looked red and swollen. But George hadn’t said anything about it. As he was not one to relish solicitous inquiries, I refrained from making any comment.
George outlined the local situation briefly. The principal bottle-neck in the operation lay in the selection of the stuff which was to be brought out of the various mine chambers. There were, he said, something like ten thousand pictures stored in them, to say nothing of sculpture, furniture, tapestries, rugs and books. At the moment he was concentrating on the pictures and he wanted to get the best of them out first. The less important ones—particularly the works of the nineteenth century German painters whom Hitler admired so much—could wait for later removal.
He and Steve and Shrady had their hands full above ground. That left only Sieber, the German restorer, who had been at the mine ever since it had been converted into an art repository, to choose the paintings down below. In addition Sieber had to supervise the other subterranean operations, which included carrying the paintings from the storage racks, dividing them into groups according to size, and padding the corners so that the canvases wouldn’t rub together on the way up to the mine entrance. Where we could be of real help would be down in the mine chambers, picking out the cream of the pictures and getting them up topside. (George’s vocabulary was peppered with nautical expressions.)
In the midst of his deliberate recital, we heard a door slam. The chorus of “Giannina Mia” sung in a piercingly melodic baritone echoed from the stairs. “Steve’s home,” said George.
A second later there was a knock on the door and the owner of the voice materialized. Steve looked a bit startled when he caught sight of two strange faces, but he grinned good-naturedly as George introduced us.
“I thought you were going out on the town with Shrady tonight,” said George.
“No,” said Steve, “I left him down in the village and came back to talk to Kress.”
Kress was an expert photographer who had been with the Kassel Museum before the war. He had been captured when our troops took over at the mine just as the war ended. Since Steve’s arrival, he had been his personal PW. Steve was an enthusiastic amateur and had acquired all kinds of photographic equipment. Kress, we gathered, was showing him how to use it. Their “conversations” were something of a mystery, because Steve knew no German, Kress no English.
“I use my High German, laddies,” Steve would say with a crafty grin and a lift of the eyebrows, as he teetered on the balls of his feet.
We came to the conclusion that “High German” was so called because it transcended all known rules of grammar and pronunciation. But, for the two of them, it worked. Steve—stocky, gruff and belligerent—and Kress—timid, beady-eyed and patient—would spend hours together. They were a comical pair. Steve was always in command and very much the captor. Kress was long-suffering and had a kind of doglike devotion to his master, whose alternating jocular and tyrannical moods he seemed to accept with equanimity and understanding. But all this we learned later.