Re: A Living Hell

Date: January 17, 2004

"A Living Hell
By Joshua Dixon

When Wabasso farm boy Norman Rudenick was being interrogated by Nazi guards in 1944, he listed his occupation as a "baker." He figured if he was going to be put to work, it may as well be someplace where he could steal food.

Rudenick, now 83 and a retired highway worker in Redwood Falls, was a prisoner of war for nine months in Germany.

When he hitch-hiked home after the Second World War, the formerly strapping farm boy only weighed about 100 pounds.

His story began in September, 1942, when Rudenick and his brother Laurence were drafted.

"There were about 70 of us that all knew each other at the induction at Fort Snelling. We got to come back for two weeks at harvest time because there was no one to do the crops."

Before he left, Rudenick met a girl at a dance.

Elaine, also from Wabasso, promised to wait for him until he came home.

After a year and a half of training in a half dozen camps across the United States, Rudenick was an expert machine gunner. On the night before he left for England, Rudenick visited the Empire State Building in New York, and watched the city lights spread out from him in all directions.

Rudenick arrived in England in May, 1944. He spent his first few weeks overseas living in an abandoned house on the English Channel coastline, doing shore patrol in the evenings. One night the Germans lobbed a few V-2 rockets overhead and bombed buildings a few miles down the coast.

"We were all ready to load ships right before D-Day. We thought we were going in," Rudenick said. However, his unit was held back to offer support later. "We went in on the 6th of July: D-Day Plus 30."

As a machine gunner, Rudenick had to lead four ammunition carriers, who each carried 1,000 bullets.

"After a couple of days we got orders to take out every tenth bullet in the belt, all the tracer rounds," Rudenick said, explaining that tracers are bullets treated to glow in the dark to make aiming easier at night. "The tracers let the Germans see where we were."

Rudenick received the first of his three injuries soon after. A close-exploding German mortar shell drove two of Rudenick's fingers back into his hand, scarring him with burning phosphorus shrapnel.

He was shipped to a hospital in Manchester, England. When he was released, Rudenick discovered his unit had been almost wiped out - of about 70 original members, only five were left.

"Three or four days later, I was hit again, in the leg," Rudenick said, shrugging it off. "I stayed in the kitchen for a couple weeks so I wouldn't have to leave."

Now a platoon sergeant, Rudenick kept travelling where he was needed in rural France.

"My brother was over there at one point," Rudenick said. "We couldn't have been more than four or five miles apart. I didn't even know he was over there." The brothers didn't learn of their near encounter until after the war.

Once, out in the countryside, Rudenick saw 3,700 airplanes fly overhead and bomb a nearby French town. "The ground shook all night. The next day, the town was gone."

The American troops survived by taking what they needed from the French farms they passed.

"We got a lot of eats off the French farmers," Rudenick said. "(Most of them) didn't like us. We had to live off the land - no kitchen could get where we were.

One farmer had big cast-iron cookers for heating food for his cattle. About 40 of us got some chickens, and the farmer let us roast them over cognac, which is about 190 proof. It burns nice and blue. We had to cook them in the basement, so the Germans couldn't see us."

Rudenick saw what he thought would be a great meal at battalion headquarters a few days before Thanksgiving, 1944.

"They showed us the turkey we were going to have," he says. He never got to eat it.

Rudenick was captured by the Germans on Thankgiving day evening, near the French town of Hilsprick.

"The Germans had nine tanks around the town - 88s, big guns. We hid in a creek, then the company commander said let's wait an hour.

"When we got into the town, we had no tanks, no air support. We were just riflemen - we couldn't do nothing against a tank. I never even fired my machine gun. There was nothing to fire at."

The Germans spotted the American soldiers, and chased them into an abandoned house. "The commander told us to pile mattresses against the wall for protection. I don't think it did much good. The tanks would shoot at us point blank."

Rudenick was slightly injured in the fighting, but his commander got it worse. "The captain had his side all blowed up - we had to carry him out."

The Americans were lined up outside a brick building. The medics were taken out back and shot, while the rest were told to stand with their hands over their heads for over an hour.

That night, Rudenick and the other troops were led to trucks, and hauled to a German detention camp, one of several he would know as home for the next six months. "There were about 3,000 of us in that camp," Rudenick says.

From Thanksgiving until the following May, Rudenick lived in a dirty shed, eating nothing but rutabaga peels and, on occasion, horsemeat.

"When we were captured, the Germans took our jackets and shirts. They gave us all German stuff, so they could wear our clothes to go through the American lines."

Back in Wabasso, Rudenick's parents and Elaine only knew that Norman was officially M.I.A.

"We knew nothing. Every month we just got a letter telling us he was still missing in action," Elaine said.

"Because of the Geneva Conference, they weren't allowed to work us,"Rudenick said. "All we could do was lie around all day, wondering if we were ever going to get out."

At one point, Rudenick and two friends tried a half-hearted escape, stumped by a snow-swollen river and the fact that two of the soldiers couldn't swim.

One of his more surreal memories is of the guards singing Christmas carols to them in German.

"In May, the guards told us the war would be over soon. They were good to us for that last week," Rudenick said. "On May 8th, the American trucks came to get us. They gave each of us a can of C rations, but no more than that. Our stomachs couldn't handle it. They were afraid we'd get sick."

The American troops were in a hurry to get to Berlin, so they gave Rudenick and one other American the Germans' guns, and left them in charge of the camp.

"We took the shells out and gave them the guns back that evening. They couldn't do anything with them."

Rudenick left for home 20 days later, riding across the Atlantic in an old cattle ship. He hopped a train to Minneapolis, then hitchhiked out to Wabasso.

"My folks didn't even know I was a prisoner of war until I got back," Rudenick said. "It was a helluva nice feeling to get home. I tried to forget everything right away, but that wasn't possible."

During his leave, he and Elaine got married. Today, Rudenick is the father of seven, grandfather of 15, and great-grandfather of five. Two of his sons went into the military, and one of his great granddaughters is in the Air Force.

She is set to be shipped to Iraq soon.

"We'll never be out of war," Rudenick said. "We'll be fighting all the time. We had such a big shock when those two towers went down. I'd hate to see that in every town. I'd rather see the fighting over there than over here.""