The Upstander by Jori Epstein

Author:Jori Epstein [Glauben, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642937855
Publisher: Post Hill Press
Published: 2021-01-20T09:13:24+00:00

Max grins remembering the clever solutions he devised to salvage mess-hall challenges.

Sometimes, he made alcohol from scratch. He intricately explains how he used a five-gallon water bottle, thermos pot, and brass tube—how he would first ferment raisins and sugar and then add them to a boiling pot. Next, he would insert the brass tube into the boiling pot and fasten a thin, spiraled copper wire atop ice. The resulting steam and liquid, he says, was 100 percent alcohol. To make the alcohol last longer, Max would mix the strong liquor into half-empty cola bottles before doling them out to guards and POWs alike. He stashed away several cans. He would barter them for more kitchen ingredients.

Max bartered candy and cigarettes too, necessary in 1945, during a meat shortage when the American butchers went on strike. Max convinced farmers to sell him a live cow anyway. He recruited a Polish guard with butchering experience and the camp doctor, Lieutenant Mogil, to help.

“I brought in the cow, they slaughtered the cow, the doctor inspected the meat, and we were eating it,” Max says. “This is the truth.”

Another night, Max needed to prepare a banquet. The Numeir Kabel Werke staff was hosting a big-draw show with a visiting French dance troupe. What would Max cook for the crowd? He wanted to serve them goose, but he would need to find some first.

Max had only recently learned how to drive—just barely. In Nuremberg, a factory officer had showed him how to start a jeep (no key, Max learned) then set him free in a field with exploding bullets. Max tried to navigate that field, confused where the bullets were coming from. He learned later that when the war had ended, the Germans had stashed much of their artillery in a ditch near that field. The day Max first got behind the wheel, Army soldiers had decided to pour gasoline on the artillery and light it on fire. And thus, Max’s first drive was among exploding bullets. He never took a formal lesson.

With that experience, Max revved up a 2.5-ton truck headed southeast toward a farm near Munich. He doesn’t remember how exactly he bought or bartered for the geese but thinks the methods were illegal.

“So I have a truck with geese, and if you ever heard geese bock-bock-bock,” Max says, you would know his ride back with the gaggle was raucous. He wondered if the police car he spotted behind him would pull over the suspicious cargo load. But the truckload made it back to the kitchen unscathed. A German POW stuffed every goose with flour to fatten them up. The day of the French dancer show, the geese were killed and cooked. Dinner was served.

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