Nazi Fugitive by Eugen Dollmann

Author:Eugen Dollmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781510715974
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-07-28T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER V

IRON CURTAINS

OUTSIDE the drawn blinds of my room the rain was still pouring down. My blinds were no longer of curtain material but of iron. I had exchanged my private quarters with its sexual library for a small and gloomy cell in the American military prison in Rome. Even apart from that I wasn’t feeling too cheerful. There was iron, iron and still more iron all around me, and beyond the iron there was rain. I sat on my hard American field-bed and looked through the iron door, actually it was a gate. Through that I could see another iron gate, and through that a third one. Beyond the third one was a cold and narrow corridor. Just under the ceiling there was a thin slit which older prisoners declared was a window. Having nothing else to do I had already spent two days trying to decide whether that wretched slit could properly be called a window, and in the end I came to the conclusion that as a result of their long stay in prison the older prisoners had just lost all idea of what a window really was. Putting it at its best, I should have called it an air-hole. Ten days previously I had been brought through that corridor past the airhole by military police and lodged in the cell I was now occupying behind the three iron gates. When I think of the circumstances that brought me there I get wild even now.

When Jim and Joe dumped me in my old quarters after rescuing me from the hands of the Italian police I fell on my bed and went to sleep at once. I was awakened the next morning by the ringing of the door bell. Putting on Bridge’s rain-coat, which I used instead of a dressing-gown, I went to the door. There they were, the pair of them. I wasn’t feeling particularly cheerful, for one thing it was still raining, but they were on top of the world. They burst into the room, sat down as though thoroughly exhausted in armchairs and, of course, put their feet on the table. Then they poured out all the news they had read or heard of—concerning me of course. They had brought piles of newspapers with them, Italian and others, and in all of them my name was on the front page complete with disagreeable commentaries and awkward questions. “What is Colonel Dollmann doing in Rome?” one of them wanted to know. “Hitler’s Italian agent in American hands” another informed its readers. Jim and Joe assured me that I was quite safe, but I was not altogether confident. I didn’t like the sound of it all in the least.

And my feelings in the matter were well founded. A few days later they arrived with more newspapers and the disturbing news that I was not so safe after all: they could no longer guarantee to protect me here. It appeared that the big Communist bosses had put their foot down.

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