Wiley searches, but he cannot find Lake Constance, which would be a sure landing in Switzerland.  Losing altitude, searching among the Alps that soar above 7,000 feet, he finds a cul de sac – an open field.  In the back, we are hanging on as he arcs in from the south with everything shot to hell.

Amazingly, impossibly, we set down in a gentle belly-landing, slipping and bouncing along on the field until we skid to a quiet stop.

Silence.  For the first time in hours, there is silence.  We are on the ground, though we do not yet know where.

It is still early afternoon as we exit through the waist hatch.  We have come down in a beautiful setting, a serene field that basks in sunshine, quiet except for the gentle sound of a brook just past the nose of the aircraft.  Around us, the Alps rise into a clear sky.

In the field beside us, our Flying Fortress is in tatters, and I find it all the more remarkable that Wiley and Demerath were able to bring her down.  Much later, I will learn that there are over 270 flak holes.  This aircraft, the B-17, has once again earned its reputation as a ship that will sustain incredible damage and remain flyable.  Yet, this takes nothing away from our pilots, whose training and native grit make them and the B-17 a unit.

We change into our GI shoes, then briefly discuss what we might destroy, for we don’t yet know whether we have come down in Switzerland or Germany.  But soon, our worst fears are confirmed when a large group of youths wearing swastika armbands comes toward us across the field.  They are Hitler Youth who have come on the run from a training school in the village nearby.

We realize that this group of Hitler Youth – Germany’s new elite – plans to execute us, or at least our officers, on the spot.  Sonthofen, where we have come down, is in the south of Germany, largely removed from the fields of war.  This is their chance to be a part of it and they are carried away with the possibilities represented by an American air crew offering no resistance.  Years later, I will learn that, about a month before we arrived, the British bombed the town, and then did so again the night before our emergency landing.  The town hall and the railroad station were destroyed in the only action seen here in four years of war.  Today, as a result, there is a temper in the town, and these adolescents are its advance guard.  They carry weapons, mostly automatic machine-pistols, which we know as “burp guns.”  We have no choice but to take them and their intentions seriously.  But there is no negotiation and Splude does not want to admit just yet that he speaks a little German.

Immediately, they separate our officers from the rest of us.  Within our view, they tie them to trees.  Resistance is impossible.  We have already abandoned our sidearms, knowing they will be useless in territory friendly or hostile.  At this point, too, we are a rather beat-up bunch of guys – two of us wounded, all of us exhausted.

We are in trouble.  But now, a German officer appears.  He had been strolling in the meadow when we landed.  Years later, I will learn that he was on leave after being wounded on the Russian front.  There is an argument, but the officer barks orders, and the youngsters obey.  He saves our lives, apparently telling the Hitler Youth that we are more valuable alive than dead – that we must be interrogated to find out why Allied warplanes are now coming so far south.

Now a group of Wehrmacht soldiers arrives.  Some are from a ski patrol, some from an Army training center based here.  They take over custody, give orders, and start to herd us into town.  I am supported, on this march, by two of my crewmates.  In the village, townspeople are lined up on the street with broomsticks and mops and bricks, forming a gauntlet through which we must pass.  They beat us with gusto, and our guards allow it.  I will learn years later that there is one particular Nazi adherent – a little Hitler in his own right – who is whipping up enthusiasm for this treatment of the captured Yanks.

My dog tags carry an H, indicating that I am Jewish, but I must wear them, for without them I can be shot as a spy.  Now I am doubly worried about how I will fare here, but there is a certain resignation that quickly overcomes us in our sudden status as prisoners:  What will be will be.

Nonetheless, at the building housing the jail, we find that there is also a small hospital, and my leg is examined, the torn muscle treated with sulfa, and bandaged.  While there is raucous conversation and laughter among the medical staff, I understand none of it.  I suspect that my Jewishness is somehow involved.  But they treat me, and I then rejoin my mates, who are behind bars, officers in one cell, enlisted men in another, pending the arrival of higher authority.

As evening nears, we are given bread, water, potatoes, and meat, and then we try to get comfortable sleeping on the floor.  We are kriegsgefangen – prisoners of war.

Our odyssey has only just begun.

Late the next afternoon, we are herded into a truck.  It may be there is some fear for our safety if we stay in Sonthofen jail, or it may be that the Germans are particularly eager for information from a first flight crew to be downed in this part of Germany.  In any event, we are taken to a large Luftwaffe base at Kaufbeuren and put into solitary confinement immediately.  For the next two days, I receive stew or soup, bread, and tea, twice a day.  The food is welcome, but this is mostly an uncomfortable experience of waiting in the simple vacuum of knowing nothing about what is planned for us.

We are all together again on February 28, three days after our emergency landing.  We find that the Germans have another B-17 crew.  This crew’s pilot is missing.  We presume he is dead.  Each of us is given three days of rations – bread, butter, and wurst – and we are told we will be taken to Frankfurt.  We are given over to a contingent of seven guards, with a diminutive sergeant in overall charge.

The trip is made by civilian train, sharing space with German soldiers and civilians on the move.  No one sees anything remarkable about us, and this is remarkable in itself, for we are 17 young guys in American flight gear and partial uniforms, most of us beat up, rather bedraggled and weary, some wounded.  We are marched through the aisles of one train after another, because we must transfer to repaired tracks at every city.

For the most part, we must stand, as a group, at the end of a car.  The trains are full.  Germany, it seems, has become a country of rootless refugees, moving from one bombed-out place to another, seeking shelter and a reliable source of food and water.

The short German sergeant – another little Hitler – carries a riding crop, and he makes much of his status as the man in charge, inflicting pain for the slightest infraction of some set of rules he has made up for our behavior.

This three-day journey becomes a memorable part of my experience as a POW.  Although we know our destination, it all has a distinctly random quality as we change trains, our guards coping with war-damaged tracks along the way.

In Augsburg, where we spend one night in a large army camp, a smooth young German takes me aside and attempts to engage me in a conversation about literature and politics.  I sense that he may be singling me out because I am wounded, perhaps more vulnerable.  He is disarming.  I realize that he may be doing this on his own.  He wants to know if I have read Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  He brings up other books, too, but he is talking with a 19-year-old who knows little of literature.  He wants to get me talking.  I give only name, rank, and serial number.

The next day, it is a new month – the first of March – when we leave the army base and travel through Augsburg to another railway station.  There, even before we travel, there is a bombing raid.  There are warning sirens, and the Germans get us off the train.  We hide in the woods near the tracks.  It occurs to me that if I were to attempt an escape, I would be a wounded man in an enemy uniform with no idea which way to go.

That night, in Regensburg, there is another raid.  This time, we are crowded into a disused public latrine, shoulder to shoulder among a crowd of perhaps 100 civilians.  The stench is horrible, and we stand for seven straight hours waiting for the bombing to end.  Our collective thirst is now a continuous nag, for we have had no water for the past two days; our captors seem to have forgotten that they, and we, will need a supply of water.

On March 2, we pass through Nuremberg.  The tracks are bombed out, so we must walk through the city from southern outskirts to northern edge.  Here, we see the results of bombing raids.  This is a snow-covered wasteland.  There is nothing standing.  There are few signs of real life in a scene animated only by the occasional fire.  Rubble is everywhere.

We pass tens of thousands of civilians lined up with buckets, waiting to take water from what may be the only two working faucets for miles around.  Some carry suitcases.  Their faces show the same total devastation as their city.  We are noticed, but there is no taunting – not even a harsh word.  These are people who no longer care.  In this tableau, we are only a passing and unimportant moment.  Our lives may be more secure and predictable than theirs.  They are refugees in their own country, automatons moving in service of only the most desperate of purposes.

Theirs are the faces of war.

There is water here, but only a little, and the lines are long, and for our third day, we and our guards go without.

Our train travel is mostly at night, for trains are being strafed as the Allies exploit their mastery of the skies over Germany. The night of March 2, we arrive in W�rzburg.  It is snowing, but the random flake is not enough liquid for anyone.  The sergeant in charge of us gets serious about finding water.  We are now all the more bedraggled, wearing wet clothing, bone tired, and desperate for rest.  At last, at a prison, the sergeant gets us some water, bread, and meat.  We finally sleep outside the prison, on the ground, sitting up.

Another day of travel, and we arrive at the Frankfurt railway station.  Like other European stations, it was built to be a beautiful, long, glass-enclosed shed, open at its ends for the passage of trains.  Now, it is porous, snow falling through a roof shredded by bombs.

We board a local short-haul train for Oberursel – a place we will come to call “the sweatbox.”  When we arrive at 1:00 a.m., we are put into solitary confinement and are given bread and tea.  There are no latrines, no way to wash, and it is cold.  After a week in captivity, we are in the same clothes and the misery of our bodies is beginning to penetrate our minds.  But here, at least, we are no longer traveling.  Now, I can at least attempt to sleep.

When morning comes, I am photographed, fingerprinted, and taken back to my cell.  Oberursel is an interrogation center, like a large prison, set up to intimidate and break down Allied airmen.  Each of us is put into a separate cell, dark except for one bulb, always on.  My cell is furnished only with two chairs, on which I try for the occasional few moments of sleep.  There are no bathroom facilities, no food, no water – there is nothing.  I cannot know if it is day or night, and I have trouble tracking the passage of the hours.  From time to time, my cell door is opened, and I am taken to an interrogation room where, after the sixth or seventh time, the routine becomes familiar and wearing:  Sergeant Rubin, says the officer in perfect English, we know where you were flying from, what you ate that morning...  Can you just verify...  And my response:  George Rubin, Staff Sergeant, Serial number 32991833.

These sessions last half an hour or more, the German calmly suggesting that, if I cooperate, it will help end this phase of my imprisonment.  I do not cooperate, but my stay here is brief anyway.

On March 5, we arrive at the best camp we will see during our time as prisoners of war.  At this Dulagluft, prisoners who need it are deloused.  We receive fresh clothing, a blanket, shoes, a toothbrush and razor.  We eat in a dining hall, and some meals are even hot.  This is a reception center, with a strong Red Cross presence, where the ranking American prisoner is a colonel known as “Loquacious Lou” Stark.  He is a personable P-47 Thunderbolt pilot who can talk the Germans into things he feels are necessary for the comfort and sustenance of Allied prisoners.

Our stay – we are still together as a crew – lasts ten days.  Then we learn that we are to be shipped back to Nuremberg, to a permanent camp, Stalag 13D.

On the evening of March 15, we are given one Red Cross parcel each, and we are put into locked boxcars, each holding 47 prisoners, each in the charge of four guards.  We begin three days of travel, mostly at night.  One night, wherever we are, there is bombing, but we are kept in our boxcar, locked in as our guards jump from the train and seek shelter from the bombing.  At long last, as the bombing becomes more threatening, someone reluctantly unlocks the door, and we tumble out and run for the woods.  When the bombing ends, the Germans call us back.  Everyone returns.

Stalag 13D is a vast prison camp, holding 20,000 or 30,000 prisoners, all airmen.  Here, we live in tents in Compound 2, sharing our space with an infestation of rats and other vermin.  Our meals consist only of Red Cross parcels and scanty German rations served out of a communal mess.  The Red Cross parcels are supposed to come weekly, but we soon start receiving only half a parcel, and this is made worse by German soldiers ordered to prevent tinned food from becoming part of escape supplies.  They bayonet every tin so its contents will spoil if not used immediately.

Keith Splude and I bunk together in a vast tent with 400 or 500 men.  We find the days flat and colorless – absolutely a grinding, repetitive bore.  By 7:30 each morning, the German sergeants come through the tent yelling, and we all file outside to be counted, wearing everything we have.  The German officer and the highest-ranking American officer stand by for the count, which must match that of the day before.  Then, breakfast, but little to eat and afterward, little to do.

There are few acts of defiance available to prisoners of war, especially when on the move, unable to settle or organize with fellow prisoners.  My own personal act of defiance is that I keep a daily chronology – a kind of compressed diary that I hide anywhere on my body that I can.  Later, I will expand it from memory.  But it is only a small relief from boredom.

Splude and I pass the time by making up menus and lists of food we would love to eat when we get home.  Mine is very ethnic Brooklyn, including Nathan’s hot dogs.  Keith’s is very ethnic Wisconsin German.  We also tell each other – in fine-grain detail – about our lives at home, where we live, and what our families are like.  I soon feel that I might walk up to his house in Wawatosa, Wisconsin, go up on the porch to meet his mother as she sits in her chair, pet the family dog, and go through every room as though I lived there.  He knows the same about my family.  If we are homesick – who wouldn’t be in a place like this? – we are at least visiting each other’s homes through our long conversations.

Other men pass the time by playing ball, or telling stories in groups.  Some sleep.  The days are excruciatingly tiresome.

Here, we learn to make meals with grass and dried milk, called “klim“ – “milk” spelled backward.  Prisoners have become resourceful, and we learn to use the empty klim cans to make a blower to use as a bellows in starting fires.  We make our own utensils.  We rely on Red Cross parcels, but there is never enough.  There is much thought of food – and we experiment with turning dandelions into a meal.  I develop some proficiency in that department, but this is the tail end of a harsh winter, and there is little nourishment to be commandeered from nature.  A dinner, supplied by our jailers, might consist only of a watery potato stew or thin soup from a huge caldron.  There is bread, in stamp-dated loaves baked in preparation for war, but sawdust is a primary component and the stuff is hardly edible.

At 7:00 or 8:00 each night, a curfew descends.  The camp is flooded with light, and there are guards and dogs everywhere.  Nobody can leave the barracks, not even to go to the latrine.  It is quiet, except for a few occasions when the British bombers come over, and the men cheer or applaud, then are ordered by the German guards to shut up.

This is war in a country under continuous attack, and there is never a settled feeling.  On April 4, at the morning count, we learn that we will be leaving immediately – with just two hours to gather our clothing and possessions together – on a long march.  We are not told where we are going, but it is clear from an increased pattern of bombing runs that this camp is no longer viable. 

At 2:30, as we leave, walking on the main highway, we hear Nuremberg being bombed.  We get only a few kilometers before we are strafed by four P-47’s.  The target is apparently a small marshaling yard, but we are mistaken for a column of troops.  Three of our officers, marching at the head of the column, are killed, and another five badly wounded.  We hide in the woods, then come out, march a short distance, and then camp for the night.  A decision is made among our officers that volunteers will precede the marching column and use toilet paper to spell out “PW” on the road ahead in the hope this will prevent further death from the guns of our own aircraft.

We hear, as the war draws closer to the center of Germany, that Red Cross trucks are being strafed, and their drivers are refusing the trips.  Later, I learn that American POWs are volunteering to drive the trucks once they have crossed from Switzerland into German-held territory.

On April 5, we start marching at 8:00 a.m. and walk continuously until 2:00 p.m.  When we break at the side of the road, we see Nuremberg being bombed behind us.  Then, it begins to rain and, by evening, when we are still marching, our clothes are heavy with water.  At Neumarkt, we are given some soup and bread, and I choose a haystack as a place to sleep out of the rain.

It is still raining April 6 when we start marching again.  We are a grimy mass of men, supremely wet and forlorn.  Each man holds onto the man ahead of him and we plod, heads down, hour after hour, wearing all our clothes, carrying extra underwear and socks in a pack with a blanket.  My own clothes and possessions, by now, are heavier than I am.

This goes on for days, though we are given two days off on this march, during which we can attempt to sleep and eat from the parcels the Red Cross has brought, catching up with us on the road.  We sleep overnight in barns or at the side of the road.  A week into our march, on April 13, a formation of British bombers drops clusters of incendiary bombs on the little town we are passing.  The men scatter and none are injured, but there is a feeling of being attacked from all sides – by nature, by a lack of food, by tiredness, and from the air by our friends.

Food remains an intense preoccupation whenever we are not marching.    The Red Cross trucks catch up with us from time to time, but not enough is getting through.  Some prisoners attempt to beg food along the way, violating German orders.  I try this myself, forming the shape of an egg with my hands, gesturing to a mystified German farmwife.  I am caught, yanked back by a guard, and taken to an officer who speaks English.  He metes out my punishment: I will be on latrine duty throughout a day of rest.  But there are no latrines.  I am to clean up with my bare hands.  From this punishment, I get an infected finger, and I will eventually lose a fingernail.

Now a day we will never forget.  We are told, in what we think must be just so much German propaganda, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt has died.  For a day, we don’t believe it, but our commanders confirm it on April 15, a day on which my diary reads:  Splude and I made a delicious grass soup.  When we are marching, Splude is my mainstay.  My leg is still in bad shape.  He is constantly at my side, making sure I don’t fall behind.  The Germans shoot stragglers.

On this two-week trip, our guards are men in their 60’s and 70’s.  Losses on the eastern front, and now the western, are so great that there are no young soldiers available for this duty.  One of our guards is a German who had been living in America and found himself trapped as a visitor in Germany at the start of the war.  At his age, a rifle is a heavy burden.  Sometimes, we carry it for him.

The POW camp at Moosburg is worse than anything we have yet seen.  Hitler is marching all his prisoners to this hell in the Bavarian mountains – now there are some 80,000 of us – in the hope that he can use us to bargain for conditions on Germany’s ultimate surrender.  The camp is little more than an infestation of rats, bedbugs, ticks, and lice, surrounded by guards and machine-guns.  There is barely any food.  Here, there is no roll call.  There is no way to have one – no way to keep count of this incredible concentration of captive humanity.  Again 400 to a tent, we are all dirty and there is no relief from misery.  It is a matter of hoping for war’s end, and surviving to see it.

The camp is an international assembly of men who have fought the Germans.  There are Poles, French, English, Canadians, Americans.  Russians are kept separate from us, and treated differently, for Russia is not a signatory to the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war.  Desperate for any food, they fashion little implements from materials they can scrounge, and we barter with them through a fence.  When we are caught, we are reprimanded.  When they are caught, they are shot dead.

This is the day for which we all have prayed, have known would come, and have wanted to survive to see.  I have lost over 40 pounds.  My fingernail is gone.  My leg is still unhealed.  And my bearded face is infected with impetigo.  But it doesn’t matter.  This is to be our day of liberation.

From the ranking Americans in the camp, we learn that American forces are just two kilometers away.  There were negotiations for the camp’s surrender, conducted by the neutral Swiss, but now SS officers have arrived and have ordered our camp defended.  There is going to be shooting.

We start digging foxholes to move ourselves out of the line of fire.  When bullets start to fly, many prisoners are wounded.  Some are killed.  I find myself in a hole with two Canadian seminarians.  They give me a set of their beads, and I learn the Hail Mary as a battle rages.

After two hours, at 1:03 p.m., the Germans raise a white flag, and the tanks of the 14th Armored Division of Patton’s Third Army enter the camp and take control.  We, like France and Poland and Italy – and the rest of Germany yet to come, are liberated.

American officers open the gates, but they ask us to stay in the camp.  They want to bring in food and medical help, and arrange for our transport.  I do not celebrate.  I feel none of the exultation of freedom.  I am only tired.  Many of the Russians, inflamed with pent-up anger over their treatment, leave the camp and take their revenge on Moosburg.

Because Jim Maurides speaks several languages, he is taken from among us to work with the mix of prisoners from so many nations.  He gets a telegram out to his parents, who then wire my own parents and the families of the rest of the crew.  For me and for them, the war is over.

Why have I made this journey?  Fifty-five years after my crewmates and I became prisoners in Germany, I have returned to a modern country where there are faint traces of war around young people who have no memory of what happened here or why.  This is my own search for meaning and reconciliation.

In the years after the war, I abandoned religion.  Then, with my wife, Margery, I discovered the Quakers and pacifism and a fit with the feelings I brought back from battle in enemy skies.  Coming here to Germany is a kind of completion and closure.

Today, I stand in the field where our B-17 came down – where we were captured – where we started a bizarre nine weeks as prisoners.  Standing alone here, I remember the men with whom I flew and fought and survived captivity.

I have come to Germany with my wife and my German-born American friend, Horst Berger, and his wife, Gay.  Horst is the cutting-edge architectural engineer who designed the Denver airport and is the master of soaring tent-like structures seen all over the world.  Both he and Gay speak fluent German.  While he agreed to return to the country of his birth partly to serve as my linguistic bridge, he has memories of World War II, as well.  As a 15-year-old, he was conscripted into the Wehrmacht’s anti-aircraft corps.  During our journey, we compare war diaries – each of us has held his all these years – and we find that long ago, on a day when our countries were at war and I flew a mission over Mannheim, Horst was on the ground, part of a unit trying to shoot me and my mates out of the sky.

The mayor of Sonthofen, Hubert Buhl, knowing that we are coming, has prepared for our visit.  I meet the officer who stopped the execution of our own officers, the man who was mayor in 1945, and another who, as a young boy, saw us come down and later took small parts from our aircraft to build a model car.  Their stories, vivid and personal, draw me back in time to my own experience, and I am moved.

In the field where our aircraft came down, I am joined by the mayor.  Together, in reconciliation and memorial, we stand in silent worship and think of war’s victims, living and dead.