The train whistled again and halted in the station, and men in patched and threadbare uniforms stretched out to touch those on the platform amid shouts and cheers. The Russians had not provided names of the POWS on the train, and before anyone was allowed to get off they had to wait patiently while officials from the Red Cross entered each carriage and collected a list of names for the benefit of the police, the commander of the refugee camp, and the VdH. Only when, after almost half an hour, this task was completed were the men finally allowed to step down from the train. A trumpet sounded, and for a moment it seemed as though the hour had truly arrived when those who had been in their graves were truly resurrected. And when they came forth from the train in their battered field gray they did indeed resemble recently interred corpses—so thin were their bodies, so gap-toothed were their smiles, so white their hair, and so old their weather-beaten faces. Some were filthy and shoeless. Others appeared stunned to be in a place that was not filled with cruelty or surrounded with barbed wire and empty steppe. Quite a few had to be carried from the train on stretchers. A great stink of unwashed bodies filled the clean air of Friedland, but no one seemed to mind. Everyone was smiling. Even a few of the POWs were, but mostly they were crying like stolen children now returned to their aged parents after many years in a dark forest.

D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille could not have directed a more moving crowd scene than that which was taking place on a railway platform at a small town in Germany. Even Vigée appeared moved to the verge of tears. Meanwhile, the brass band started to play the “Deutschlandlied”—a few of the crazier-looking prisoners started to sing the forbidden words—and, across the fields, a couple of kilometers to the north in Gros Schneen, the local church bells rang out.

I heard one of the POWs tell someone on the platform that it was only the day before that they’d learned they were to be released.

“These men,” said Vigée. “They look like they’re back from hell.”

“No,” I told him. “In hell they tell you what’s happening to you.”