Camp McCain, Mississippi.
July 1945.
The infirmary smelled of antiseptic and pine cleaner.
Afternoon heat pressing through screened windows despite the ceiling fans slow rotation.
Lieutenant Ruth Carson, Army nurse course, knelt beside a bed where 8-year-old Dier Schmidt sat, waiting for his physical examination.
His small frame rigid with the careful stillness of children who have learned to take up minimal space.
She smiled, trying to ease his obvious fear, and asked in simple English the question she asked every child patient.
“Do you have a favorite food? Something you really love to eat?” His answer, delivered in halting English, made her hands stop moving.
She would spend 60 years trying to understand it.
Camp McCain had been converted in May 1945 to house a unique population German families, primarily women and children who had been living in occupied Europe when Allied forces advanced.
They were classified under complex legal frameworks.
Some as prisoners of war, some as displaced persons, some as detainees awaiting classification.
All existing in bureaucratic limbo while authorities determined what to do with German civilians caught on the wrong side of history.
Dier had arrived with his mother Greta Schmidt in June.
They had been living in France when the war ended.
Greta working as a translator for German administrative offices.
Dier attending a German school in occupied territory.
When American forces liberated the area, all German nationals were detained for processing.
Some would be repatriated immediately.
Others held longer pending investigation of their roles during occupation.
Greta was 34, widowed in 1943 when her husband died on the Eastern Front.
She had fled Berlin with Dier in 1942 to escape the intensifying bombing, taking a position in France because it seemed safer than remaining in Germany.
By 1945, she had nowhere to go back to Berlin was in ruins.
Her family dispersed or dead, her apartment destroyed.
She existed in the strange state of being German but having no Germany to return to.
Dieter was small for 8 years old.
Malnutrition had stunted his growth, left him thin and fragile, his eyes too large for his face.
His movements careful as if his body remembered being hungry even when food was present.
He spoke limited English, learned from overheard conversations and patient observation, understanding more than he could articulate.
The camp held 200 such families, mothers and children primarily, a few elderly men, all living in converted barracks that had previously housed American trainees.
The conditions were adequate, but institutional rows of beds, communal bathrooms, mess serving regular meals, medical facilities providing basic care.
Compared to the chaos of war torn Europe, it was safe.
Compared to normal family life, it was prison.
Lieutenant Ruth Carson had been assigned to Camp McCain in April, transferred from a field hospital in Belgium, where she had treated combat casualties for 18 months.
She was 27 from rural Pennsylvania, the daughter of a doctor who had encouraged her to enter nursing school when women options for medical careers were limited.
She had seen terrible things during the war.
young men dying from wounds that medicine couldn’t fix.
Suffering that exceeded her ability to alleviate, the grinding horror of industrial warfare played out on human bodies.
The assignment to McCain was supposed to be easier caring for non-combatants, primarily children, providing routine medical services rather than emergency trauma care.
But she found it more complicated emotionally than frontline nursing had been.
Combat casualties were clear.
These were American soldiers who needed her help.
German civilian children were more ambiguous, technically enemies, but clearly victims, caught in circumstances they hadn’t created, suffering for choices made by adults they had never known.
Her duties included routine medical examinations of all camp residents, tracking health conditions, treating minor illnesses, coordinating with military doctors for more serious cases.
She saw dozens of children weekly checking for malnutrition, documenting growth, ensuring vaccinations were current, watching for diseases that flourished in crowded conditions.
Most children were frightened of her initially.
They had been taught that Americans were dangerous, cruel, unpredictable.
The medical setting amplified that fear white coat, stethoscope, instruments that looked threatening to young eyes.
Carson had developed techniques for easing their anxiety, speaking softly, moving slowly, asking friendly questions that required simple answers, trying to establish that she was safe before beginning examinations.
One question she asked reliably worked.
Do you have a favorite food? Children understood food.
They could describe it even with limited English.
The question created connection through shared human experience.
Everyone had foods they liked, foods that brought comfort, foods associated with good memories.
Their answers provided windows into their lives before the war, before captivity, before everything collapsed.
She had heard many responses.
chocolate, sausages, her grandmother’s apple cake, bread with butter and jam, strawberries and summer.
The answers were always positive, always connected to happier times, always revelatory of childhoods that had existed before war consumed everything.
On July 17th, Dier was scheduled for his routine examination.
He came to the infirmary at 14:00 hours, brought by his mother, who waited in the hallway while Carson conducted the exam.
He sat on the examination table, thin legs dangling, hands gripped together in his lap, face carefully neutral in the way of children who have learned to hide emotion.
Carson began her usual routine checking height and weight, listening to heart and lungs, examining for obvious health problems.
Derer cooperated with mechanical obedience, neither resisting nor engaging, simply enduring the process.
His vitals were acceptable, but concerning underweight for his age, signs of past malnutrition, but stable now with regular meals.
She tried to put him at ease with her standard question, smiling warmly, speaking in simple English.
Do you have a favorite food, der? Something you really love to eat? He looked at her for a long moment, processing the question, formulating an answer in the foreign language he was still mastering.
Then he responded in halting English, his voice quiet but clear.
I like all food.
I am grateful for all food.
I do not have favorite because food is not for choosing.
Food is for eating when it comes.
Carson’s hands stopped moving.
A stethoscope hung forgotten around her neck.
She stared at this 8-year-old child who had just articulated a philosophy of survival that she, with all her wartime experience, had never fully grasped.
Carson asked him to repeat what he had said, not because she hadn’t heard, but because she needed to confirm that she had understood correctly.
Dier complied, using slightly different words, but conveying the same essential meaning.
Food wasn’t something to have preferences about.
Food was something to be grateful for when available.
The concept of favorite implied choice and choice implied abundance and abundance was not part of his experience.
After completing the exam, Carson asked Greta to come in.
She wanted to understand more about Der’s history, about what had created this response.
Greta entered hesitantly, her posture defensive, expecting criticism or trouble.
Instead, Carson asked gentle questions about their life during the war, about food availability, about what Dier had experienced.
Greta spoke in serviceable English, her answers creating a portrait of systematic deprivation.
Berlin in 1942 had been under rationing with food supplies decreasing as the war continued.
Their move to France had been partly motivated by hope of better food access in occupied territory.
But by 1944, France was also experiencing severe shortages.
By early 1945, they were eating whatever could be obtained, often bread, occasionally vegetables, rarely meat, never enough.
Derer had learned to eat anything offered without complaint or question.
He had learned that expressing preferences was pointless because preferences couldn’t be satisfied.
He had learned that food was uncertain, that today’s meal didn’t guarantee tomorrow’s, that gratitude for any food was more appropriate than desire for specific foods.
He never asks for particular foods, Greta explained.
Even now, when the camp serves meals regularly, he takes what is given and says, “Thank you.
He does not request more or different.
I think he believes if he asks, the food will stop coming.
” Carson felt something fundamental shifting in her understanding.
She had treated hundreds of patients during the war soldiers with terrible wounds, civilians with illness or injury.
But she had never fully comprehended what chronic deprivation did to children’s psychological development.
How it shaped not just bodies but minds.
How it created worldviews where abundance was inconceivable and preference was luxury beyond imagination.
She spent the rest of that day thinking about dieter’s answer, turning it over in her mind, examining it from different angles.
That evening, she wrote in her personal journal, “Today, a child told me he doesn’t have a favorite food because food is not for choosing.
” 8 years old, and he has internalized scarcity so completely that he cannot conceive of having preferences.
I have been treating malnutrition as a medical condition measuring weight, tracking growth, ensuring adequate calories.
But dieters’s answer revealed that malnutrition creates psychological effects I hadn’t considered.
He is physically recovering, gaining weight, his health improving, but his mind still lives in a world where food is uncertain and gratitude for any food is the only appropriate response.
How long does it take for abundance to feel secure? How many meals does a child need to eat before he believes he can have preferences again? Over the following days, Carson paid more attention to the children’s relationships with food.
She observed meal times, watched how they ate, listened to their conversations.
Many showed similar patterns to diet or eating quickly, cleaning plates completely, showing anxiety if meals were delayed, never requesting specific foods, or complaining about what was served.
She consulted with Captain Robert Harrison, the camp psychologist, a man in his 40s, who had studied child development before the war.
She described Dieter’s response, asked his interpretation.
Harrison nodded slowly.
It’s consistent with what we’re seeing across the population.
These children have experienced prolonged scarcity during critical developmental periods.
That experience shapes neural pathways, creates lasting patterns.
Even when objective circumstances improve, subjective experience lags behind.
Derer knows intellectually that food comes regularly now, but emotionally he hasn’t integrated that knowledge.
His survival strategies remain active.
How do we help them? Carson asked.
Time mostly.
Consistent positive experiences that gradually override previous negative patterns.
Keep providing regular meals.
Don’t pressure them to express preferences before they’re ready.
Let them discover slowly that abundance is real and sustained.
Some will adapt quickly.
Others will carry these patterns into adulthood.
Carson found this answer both helpful and distressing.
Time was the medicine, but time couldn’t be prescribed or accelerated.
These children would heal at their own pace, if they healed at all.
Carson couldn’t simply observe in wait.
She needed to do something, even if small, to help these children begin reclaiming the childhood experiences they had lost.
She developed a plan she called the preference program.
A systematic effort to teach children that having preferences was safe, acceptable, even encouraged.
She started simply during routine medical visits.
She offered choices.
Would you prefer to sit on this chair or that one? Should we check your height first or your weight? Do you want to look at this picture book while you wait or that one? Most children initially responded with confusion or anxiety.
They looked for the correct answer, the choice that wouldn’t cause problems.
Carson assured them there was no wrong answer, that they were genuinely free to choose.
Some children began selecting options hesitantly.
Others continued defaulting to whatever seemed safest.
Derer was in the second category.
When offered choices, he consistently deferred, “Either is good.
You choose.
I do not mind.
His refusal to express preferences was so deeply ingrained that even trivial choices felt dangerous.
Carson consulted with Greta, explained what she was trying to do, asked permission to work with Dier more intensively.
Greta was skeptical but willing.
If it helps, yes, but do not be surprised if he cannot do what you ask.
He has been this way for 3 years.
It is how he survived.
The intervention expanded.
Carson recruited other nurses and camp staff to participate.
At meal times, children were offered choices.
Do you want your potatoes mashed or whole? Apple or orange? Sit by the window or further inside.
Small decisions, nothing consequential, just opportunities to practice having preferences.
Some children embraced this immediately, delighting in the power to choose.
They requested specific foods, stated preferences clearly, began acting like children who expected their voices to matter.
Others remained hesitant, trapped between desire to please adults and dawning recognition that their preferences might be valued.
Dier remained resistant.
After two weeks of consistent exposure to choices, he still defaulted to acceptance of whatever was offered.
Carson began to worry that his patterns were too deeply set, that intervention had come too late.
Then one morning in August, something shifted.
Carson was in the mess hall during breakfast observing the meal service.
Dader came through the line, received his tray, sat at his usual table, but instead of immediately beginning to eat, he looked at his tray for a low moment.
Then he stood, walked back to the serving line, and spoke to the attendant in broken English.
“Please, may I have more eggs and less bread?” The camp fell silent.
Other children stared.
Dier had never requested anything, never expressed a preference, never deviated from accepting exactly what was given.
His request was so unexpected that it created a moment of suspended reality where everyone processed what had just happened.
The attendant, a corporal from Alabama, who had been briefed on the preference program, responded with deliberate casualness.
“Sure, kid.
Extra eggs coming up.
” He adjusted Dieter’s tray, giving him additional eggs and removing some bread.
Dieter accepted the modified meal, said thank you, returned to his table.
He ate slowly, methodically, but Carson could see something different in his posture, less rigid, less defensive, more relaxed.
After breakfast, she approached him.
Dieter, I noticed you asked for more eggs this morning.
He looked worried immediately.
Was this wrong? I should not ask.
No, not wrong at all.
I’m glad you asked.
I’m curious why eggs instead of bread.
He considered the question carefully.
I like eggs better.
Eggs have more more taste.
More dot dot double quotes.
He struggled for the English word settled on.
More interesting.
Carson felt tears threatening.
This 8-year-old child had just expressed a food preference for the first time in years.
had identified that one food was more interesting than another, had acted on that preference by requesting it.
It seemed like a tiny thing choosing eggs over bread, but it represented a massive psychological shift.
She knelt to his eye level.
Derer, you can ask for what you like.
You can have preferences.
Having preferences doesn’t mean the food will stop coming.
Do you understand? He looked at her with eyes that had seen too much, that carried understanding beyond his years.
I am learning this, but it is hard to believe.
Food has stopped before many times, I know, but it won’t stop here.
We have plenty of food.
You can choose what you like.
He nodded slowly, not quite believing, but willing to consider the possibility.
Der’s breakthrough created ripples throughout the camp.
Other children noticed that he had expressed a preference and the world hadn’t ended.
They began tentatively requesting their own preferences.
More of this, less of that.
This option instead of another, the camp’s atmosphere shifted subtly, became less like a detention facility, and more like a place where children were children, allowed to have opinions, permitted to express them.
Carson documented the changes in her weekly reports to camp administration.
Colonel Marcus Bennett, the camp commander, was initially skeptical.
Why devote resources to teaching children to have food preferences? But he couldn’t argue with the results.
Discipline problems decreased.
The children became more cooperative, more engaged, healthier in ways that medical examinations couldn’t fully measure.
The psychological impact extended beyond food.
Children who learned they could choose what to eat began expressing preferences in other areas.
Which activities they preferred during recreation time, which books they wanted from the camp library, which friends they wanted to sit with at meals.
They were reclaiming agency that war and displacement had stripped from them.
But the process was uneven, complicated, often painful.
Some children couldn’t make the leap to expressing preferences.
They remained locked in survival patterns where gratitude for any provision was the only safe response.
Carson learned to accept these limitations to understand that not every child could heal on the timeline she hoped for.
Greta watched her son’s transformation with mixed emotions.
Pride that he was recovering some childhood normaly.
fear that learning to have expectations would make him vulnerable if circumstances deteriorated again.
Sadness that he had needed to learn this at all, that having preferences wasn’t automatic, but had to be relearned like a foreign language.
She spoke with Carson one afternoon in August.
Thank you for helping Daider.
I could not teach him this.
I am still learning it myself.
Carson understood.
Greta had survived the same deprivation, had developed the same patterns.
She also ate whatever was provided without requesting alternatives, also showed anxiety about food availability, also couldn’t quite believe that abundance would continue.
We’re all learning, Carson said.
The war taught everyone to live with scarcity.
Now we’re all figuring out how to live with enough again.
In September, as the camp prepared for repatriation of prisoners back to Germany, Carson faced a difficult question.
What happened to these children’s progress when they returned to a homeland it was still experiencing? Food shortages still recovering from comprehensive destruction? Would they regress immediately, lose everything they had gained during their months in American custody? She had no answers, just concerns.
Germany in 1945 was a disaster.
Cities in ruins, infrastructure destroyed, food production collapsed, millions displaced and starving.
Sending these children back seemed like returning them to the exact conditions that had created their trauma in the first place.
But the alternative was keeping them in indefinite detention, separated from extended family who might have survived, prevented from reuniting with the homeland that destroyed as it was, remained home.
There were no good options, just varying degrees of problematic choices.
Diager and Greta were scheduled for repatriation in October.
They would be transported to Hamburg, what remained of it, to attempt rebuilding lives from fragments.
Greta had received word through Red Cross channels that her sister had survived, was living in a displaced person’s camp near Hamburg.
It was something family connection reason to return.
Carson met with Dieter the week before his departure.
She wanted to check his progress to ensure the patterns he had developed wouldn’t collapse immediately upon return to scarcity.
Dieter, you’re going home soon, he nodded.
Home was an abstract concept.
He barely remembered Hamburg, had spent most of his conscious life moving between temporary shelters, had no real home to return to in Germany.
Food might be difficult again for a while.
Things are still being rebuilt.
If you don’t have many choices about food, that’s okay.
But remember, you still have preferences.
You can still know what you like, even if you can’t always get it.
Does that make sense? He thought about this carefully.
I can like eggs even if I eat bread.
Exactly.
You can prefer one thing even if you have to accept another.
Having preferences doesn’t require having choices.
It just means knowing yourself, knowing what you like.
This distinction between preference and choice, between internal knowledge and external options was sophisticated for an 8-year-old to grasp.
But Dier had been forced to sophistication by circumstances, had developed psychological complexity that childhood shouldn’t require.
Carson never saw Dieter again after his October repatriation.
But she thought about him regularly through the decades that followed, wondered if he had survived postwar.
Germany, if he had kept the ability to have preferences, if the lessons learned in Camp McCain had persisted or dissolved under renewed scarcity.
She returned to Pennsylvania in 1946, resumed civilian nursing, eventually married, and raised three children of her own.
She never mentioned dieter to them until they were adults.
Couldn’t explain during their childhoods why their casual food complaints.
I don’t like peas.
Do I have to eat this? sometimes made her pause and feel grateful that they lived in circumstances where preference was automatic, unremarkable, assumed as natural right.
But in 1978, she received a letter that arrived through military mail forwarding services.
It was from Germany, written in careful English, signed Dieter Schmidt.
He had tracked her down through veterans networks, wanting to thank her for what she had done 33 years earlier.
The letter read, “Dear Lieutenant Carson, I do not know if you remember me.
I was a child at Camp McCain in 1945.
You asked me about my favorite food, and I told you I did not have one because food was not for choosing.
You spent many weeks teaching me that I could have preferences, that expressing what I liked was safe and acceptable.
” I want you to know that this lesson changed my life.
When I returned to Germany, conditions were very difficult.
Food was scarce for years.
But I remembered what you taught me, that I could know what I liked, even if I couldn’t always get it.
That having preferences was part of being a complete person even when circumstances were hard.
I am now 41 years old.
I am a chef in Hamburg, running a restaurant that serves traditional German food.
Every day I help people choose what they want to eat.
Every day I think about the lesson you taught me that food is for choosing when possible and having preferences makes us human.
My children have never experienced hunger.
They complain about vegetables, request their favorite meals, take abundance for granted.
I am grateful they live in a world where food is for choosing.
But I also tell them about the time when I could not imagine having a favorite food and about the American nurse who taught me that preference was not just possible but important.
Thank you for seeing me as a person who deserved to have opinions, not just a child who needed to be fed.
You gave me back part of my humanity that war had taken with deep gratitude.
Dieter Schmidt.
Carson read the letter three times, crying quietly, processing the knowledge that a simple question and its unexpected answer had created effects that rippled through three decades.
She had asked about favorite foods trying to make a frightened child comfortable during a medical exam.
She had received an answer that revealed depths of deprivation she hadn’t fully understood, and from that moment had grown in intervention that had shaped a life in ways she couldn’t have predicted.
She wrote back immediately, beginning a correspondence that continued until her death in 1,998.
They exchanged letters three or four times annually sharing life updates, discussing their families, reflecting on how the war had shaped both their lives.
Guider sent photographs of his restaurant, his wife, his children.
Carson sent pictures of her family, her retirement, her quiet life in Pennsylvania.
In 1985, Gueder visited the United States for the first time since his repatriation 40 years earlier.
He traveled to Pennsylvania specifically to meet Carson in person.
They were both older Carson, 77, died 48, but the connection remained immediate.
He brought her a meal.
He had prepared traditional German dishes made with careful attention to preference, to choice, to the idea that food was not just sustenance, but expression of culture and care.
They talked for hours about Camp McCain, about those months in 1945, about the question and its answer that had started everything.
Carson asked what he remembered most clearly.
I remember your face when I answered, Dier said.
You looked shocked, then sad, then determined.
I did not understand at the time why my answer affected you so strongly.
Now I understand you realized something about what war does to children and you decided to do something about it.
That decision changed me.
Before he returned to Germany, Dier asked Carson one question.
What is your favorite food? She smiled, understanding the significance of him asking.
Probably my mother’s apple pie.
The smell of it baking.
The taste of it warm with ice cream.
It reminds me of home, of safety, of times when life felt simple.
Diet or nodded.
That is a good answer.
That is the answer of someone who has always had the luxury of preferences.
I am glad you have that.
I am glad my children have that.
I hope everyone can have that someday.
When Lieutenant Ruth Carson asked 8-year-old Der Schmidt what his favorite food was in a camp infirmary in Mississippi in July 1945, she expected a simple answer, chocolate or sausages or something predictably childlike.
Instead, she received a philosophy of survival that revealed how profoundly war and deprivation had shaped a child s understanding of the world.
I do not have favorite because food is not for choosing.
Six words that stopped her cold.
Six words that contained within them the entire experience of wartime childhood, the hunger, the uncertainty, the adaptation to circumstances, where preference was luxury beyond reach.
Six words that revealed how malnutrition affected not just bodies but minds.
Not just present health, but future relationship with abundance.
The questions wait not from what Carson asked, but from what she heard.
She had asked casually using a technique that usually worked to ease children’s anxiety.
She heard an answer that forced her to confront how little she understood about what these children had survived, how their experiences had shaped psychological patterns that would persist long after physical health was restored.
But the real weight of the question came from what Carson did with the answer.
She could have simply documented it, noted it as interesting, moved on to the next patient.
Instead, she recognized it as a call to action.
If children couldn’t conceive of having preferences, then someone needed to teach them that preferences were safe, acceptable, important.
If war had stripped them of agency, then someone needed to help them reclaim it.
The preference program that emerged from dieter’s answer was small, modest, focused on trivial choices, eggs or bread, chair or that chair, apple or orange.
But those trivial choices represented profound psychological work teaching children that their voices mattered, that their opinions had value, that expressing preferences wouldn’t result in punishment or deprivation.
For dieters specifically, learning to have preferences became the foundation for rebuilding a life.
His career as a chef was an accidental.
He had built his adult identity around helping others choose what they wanted to eat, around celebrating food as something to be enjoyed rather than simply endured, around the idea that preference was central to human dignity.
The 33-year gap between his repetriation and his letter to Carson demonstrates the lasting impact of seemingly small interventions.
He had carried that lesson through childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middleage, never forgetting the American nurse who had taught him that food was for choosing, that having favorites was not just possible but important.
Their eventual reunion in 1985 brought full circle a story that had started with a simple question and an unexpected answer.
By then, both understood the profound implications of that moment in ways they could not have grasped in 1945.
Carson understood that her work had shaped a life beyond what any medical intervention could have achieved.
Guer understood that the lesson she taught had become the foundation for who he became.
The story challenges simplified narratives about wartime nursing.
Carson as most significant medical intervention was in treating physical illness or injury.
It was recognizing psychological damage and creating a path toward healing.
Her most important nursing action wasn’t a procedure or prescription.
It was asking a question, listening to the answer, and responding with sustained effort to address what the answer revealed.
When Carson asked about favorite foods, she opened a door into understanding childhood trauma that most adults never fully see.
When Dieter answered honestly, he provided a window into experiences that shaped an entire generation of wartime children.
And when Carson acted on what she learned, she demonstrated that healing requires not just feeding bodies, but teaching souls that abundance is real, preferences are acceptable, and childhood can be partially reclaimed, even after war has stolen so much.
The question was simple.
The answer stopped her cold.
But what emerged from that moment proved that sometimes the most profound transformations begin with the smallest recognitions.
Nurse noticing what a child cannot say, understanding what it means, and deciding that teaching a non eight-year-old to have a favorite food might be as important as any medical treatment she could provide.
