Undress me.
Two words.
The American officer’s voice is flat.
Leisel’s hands won’t stop shaking.
She’s standing in the officer’s quarters.
Wooden walls, single lamp, a bed in the corner, and him, tall, watching, waiting.
He hands her something.
Not a weapon, not rope, something she doesn’t recognize.
11 million German soldiers surrendered by May 1945.
Only 1,200 were women.
Leisel is one of them.
23 years old, former Vermach telephone operator, captured near the Rine 3 weeks ago.
And now this.
They taught us.
She knows what happens next.
The training camps, the whispered warnings, the older women who said American soldiers were worse than the Soviets, just better at hiding it.
So when he says, “Undress me,” her mind fills in the rest.
The lamp flickers.
Her throat tightens.
The object in her hand is cold metal, curved at the end.
She stares at it.
A hook, brass, small enough to fit in her palm.
Start with a collar.
His voice again, still flat.
He turns around, shows her his back.
The buttons on his uniform catch the lamplight.
12 of them.
Brass, running from collar to belt.
She doesn’t move.
The buttons, he says, their regulation, sewn tight.
I can’t reach the top three.
Her fingers tremble.
She steps forward.
The floorboards creek.
She can smell wool and tobacco and something else.
soap.
American soap.
Clean.
She hooks the first button.
It pops free.
Then the second.
Then the third.
He doesn’t turn around.
Her heart is hammering.
Waiting for the moment.
The grab.
The shove.
The thing she’s been told comes next, but his hands stay at his sides.
His breathing stays even.
The fourth button releases.
In the barracks, her friend Rinat said it would happen fast.
They don’t wait, Renati whispered.
They don’t explain, but this officer is waiting and explaining and standing still while a German prisoner holds a metal hook near his throat.
Why? She reaches the fifth button.
Her knuckles brush the wool, rough, military grade.
She’s unbuttoned Vermach uniforms before.
Her brothers, her fathers.
This one feels the same, just a different color.
The sixth button pops.
She’s halfway down his back now.
The lamp flickers again.
Outside, someone shouts in English.
Boots crunch on gravel.
The seventh button releases.
Then the door opens.
The door opens.
A woman stands in the frame.
American uniform.
Women’s Army Cors patch.
Short hair, glasses.
She’s holding a clipboard and looking at Leisel like she’s expected her.
Lieutenant Mercer, you’re needed in block C.
The officer, Mercer, nods.
He steps away from Leisel.
The eighth button still fastened, the hook still in her hand.
Finished tomorrow, he says, and walks out.
Leisel doesn’t move.
The woman with the clipboard steps inside, closes the door.
Her boots click on the wooden floor.
Geneva Convention, 1929, Article 27.
Prisoners may be employed for labor not connected to war operations.
Leisel memorized it during processing.
Laundry, cooking, cleaning, valet service.
All legal.
Assault court marshall offense.
Zero tolerance.
That’s what the intake officer said.
She didn’t believe him.
I waited for the strike.
It never came.
The woman speaks German.
Perfect German.
Berlin accent.
I’m Corporal Viven Hartman, translator.
Your Leisel Brandt, signals division.
Captured March 12th.
Leisel nods.
You’ve been assigned to officer quarter duties, uniform maintenance, boot care, bed arrangement.
Starts at 1,800 hours, ends at 2100.
Hartman checks her clipboard.
You’re not the only one.
312 women rotating through these duties.
No incidents, no reports, no exceptions.
Leisel’s grip tightens on the button hook.
Why? Why? What? Why let us near them? Near their throats.
Hartman looks up.
Her eyes are sharp.
Because they’re not afraid of you, and they want you to know it.
The words land like a slap.
Leisel feels her face burn.
She’s been trained to fear them, but they’re not trained to fear her.
The symmetry is humiliating in a way she can’t name.
Hartman turns to leave, stops at the door.
One more thing, the boots.
What about them? You’ll understand tomorrow.
The door closes.
Leisel stands alone in the officer’s quarters, the lamp still flickering, the bed still made, the eighth button still fastened on a uniform that isn’t there anymore.
She looks at the hook in her hand, brass, curved, harmless.
She was ready to die holding it, ready for the worst.
Instead, she got buttons and a clipboard and a woman who speaks her language.
Outside, boots crunch, voices in English, laughter.
Someone’s playing a harmonica in the distance.
Leisel sits on the floor.
She doesn’t know what to feel, so she feels nothing.
Tomorrow, she’ll learn about the boots.
Corporal Hartman speaks German like she was born in it, because she was.
Milwaukee, 1920.
German parents, Lutheran church, sauerkraut on Sundays.
Then 1941, Pearl Harbor.
Suddenly her German became useful and suspicious.
She enlisted to prove something.
Now she translates for prisoners who remind her of her grandmother.
Leisel learns this over powdered coffee the next morning.
847 German female PSWs processed through Camp Ashb.
312 assigned to officer duties.
Zero assault cases filed.
Zero.
Leisel doesn’t believe it until Hartman shows her the log book.
Names, dates, duties completed.
No redactions, no gaps.
We were trained to stay silent.
No one taught us what silence without violence meant.
The barracks door opens.
Another woman enters, taller than Leisel, blonde hair matted, eyes red.
Anelise, Hartman says, block D, Captain Morrison’s quarters.
Analise sits on the nearest bunk.
Her hands are trembling.
Not from cold, from something else.
What happened? Leisel asks.
Anelise looks up.
The boots.
What about them? I had to remove them from his feet while he sat there.
Her voice cracks.
I touched his feet for two hours, polishing, cleaning while he read a newspaper.
In German culture, feet are intimate, private, reserved for spouses or servants at their lowest.
Analisa wasn’t assaulted.
She was humiliated in a way the Americans might not even understand.
Hartman’s expression doesn’t change.
Did he say anything? One word at the end.
What word? Anna’s jaw tightens.
Donka.
The room goes quiet.
Thank you.
In German.
Said by an American officer to a German prisoner who just polished his boots.
Leisel’s chest tightens.
This isn’t cruelty, but it isn’t kindness either.
It’s something in between.
Something she has no word for.
Hartman finishes her coffee.
Captain Morrison served in the Pacific.
Lost three toes to jungle rot.
His feet are scarred.
He can’t reach them without pain.
She pauses.
He learned dona last week from me.
Anelise stares at the floor.
Leisel stares at Hartman.
The lamp flickers outside.
A truck engine rumbles.
Canvas flaps against metal.
Tonight, Hartman says, “You’re back in Lieutenant Mercer’s quarters.
Buttons and boots full service.
She stands.
And Leisel? Yes.
Don’t ask about the breakfast table.
Not yet.
The door closes.
Leisel looks at Analisa.
Analise looks at the floor.
Neither speaks.
But both are thinking the same thing.
What happens at breakfast.
The boots are heavier than she expected.
American issue.
Leather.
Mudcaked.
Leisel kneels on the wooden floor.
Lieutenant Mercer sits in the chair above her.
His feet are bare now, the boots beside her, a tin of polish in her hand.
She expected this to feel like violation.
Instead, it feels like labor.
Vermachked women were told American soldiers committed three times more assaults than any documented Allied force.
Actual verified cases in P camps, 0.
4%.
Leisel doesn’t know this statistic yet.
She only knows her knees hurt and the polish smells like pineand touching feet in Germany only for wives.
And I wasn’t a wife.
Her brush moves in circles.
The leather darkens.
Mercer doesn’t watch her work.
He’s reading something.
A letter maybe.
Handwritten.
His lips move slightly as he reads.
Who’s the letter from? she asks.
The words come out before she can stop them.
He looks down, not angry, surprised.
My sister, Ohio, she’s pregnant.
Third one.
Leisel keeps polishing.
Boy or girl? She doesn’t know yet.
Wants a girl this time.
He folds the letter.
You have siblings? A brother? Eastern front.
Missing since Stalenrad.
The room goes quiet.
The brush keeps moving.
circles on leather, pine smell rising.
Mercer clears his throat.
I’m sorry.
She stops polishing, looks up.
His face is neutral, but his eyes aren’t.
There’s something there.
Recognition, not pity, something closer to understanding.
In training, she says, they told us what you do to women.
What did they tell you? Everything.
The worst things.
He nodded slowly.
They told us things too about German women.
What you’d do if you got the chance.
And And here you are holding boot polish, not a weapon.
Her jaw tightens.
Is that supposed to be funny? No.
He leans forward.
It’s supposed to be the point.
She finishes the first boot, sets it aside, picks up the second.
Her knuckles ache.
The polish is getting under her fingernails.
the propaganda,” he says.
On both sides, it’s the same machine, different language, same lies.
She doesn’t respond, but something shifts in her chest.
A crack, small, barely noticeable.
The second boot gleams.
She sets it down, stands.
He looks at her.
Tomorrow, same time.
And Leisel? Yes.
Breakfast is at 0700.
You’ll sit at the table.
Her stomach drops.
With you, with everyone, Dunca, one word.
Captain Morrison learned it three days ago.
He practices in the mirror each morning.
The pronunciation still isn’t perfect, but he says it anyway.
Anaisa stands in his quarters.
The boots are polished, the uniform hung, the buttons fastened.
She’s done everything right.
And now this American officer with scarred feet is thanking her in her language.
US Army Psychological Operations Memo, March 1945.
Courtesy reduces resistance.
One German word per interaction equals 40% faster compliance without force.
The Americans weaponized kindness.
And it’s working.
One word.
Just one word.
And everything we believed shattered.
Analisa returns to the barracks.
Leisel is waiting.
So is a third woman, older, maybe 30.
Dark hair stre with gray.
Name Doraththa.
Former army nurse, longest serving P in the compound.
4 months now.
You heard Dana? Dorotha says not a question.
Analise nods.
I heard it too.
First week.
Thought it was mockery.
Doraththa lights a cigarette.
It wasn’t.
Leisel sits on her bunk.
Why do they do it? Because it breaks us faster than beatings would.
Dorotha exhales smoke toward the ceiling.
Violence, we understand.
We were trained for violence.
But kindness from the enemy that wasn’t in the manual.
The barracks falls quiet.
Wind rattles the window frame.
Outside, the sun is setting.
Orange light bleeds through the cracks in the walls.
Leisel thinks about the buttons, the boots, the letter from Ohio, the sister who wants a girl.
She’s supposed to hate Lieutenant Mercer.
She’s supposed to fear him.
Instead, she knows his sister’s name is Elellaner, and she lives near Cleveland.
“What happens at breakfast?” Leisel asks.
Dorotha smiles, but it’s not a happy smile.
You’ll see.
Tell me.
No, you need to experience it.
the first time.
The way it hits.
She takes another drag.
That’s what makes it stick.
Anelise is still standing near the door.
Her hands have stopped trembling.
I don’t understand any of this.
Neither do I, Dorothia says, and I’ve been here 4 months.
The cigarette burns down.
Ash falls to the floor.
Leisel lies back on her bunk.
The ceiling is wooden slats, gaps between them.
Through the gaps, she can see insulation, straw, old newspapers.
Tomorrow, she’ll eat breakfast with the enemy.
Tonight, she’ll try to sleep.
The lamp flickers, then goes out.
Darkness, breathing, the smell of tobacco, and somewhere outside a harmonica playing something slow.
There’s a place setting with her name on it.
Leisel stands at the entrance to the messaul.
Long wooden tables, American soldiers eating, laughing, passing bread, and at the far end, four empty chairs with handwritten cards, German names.
Hers is third from the left.
German Vermach rations, 1945.
1,200 calories per day for women auxiliaries.
US P camp rations, 2,800 calories.
They’re eating more as prisoners than they ever did as soldiers.
confined.
We ate with the enemy, and the enemy gave us more than our own country.
She walks to the table.
Her boots echo.
Conversations pause.
Eyes follow her.
American eyes.
She keeps her gaze forward.
Lieutenant Mercer is already seated.
He nods, pulls out her chair.
She sits.
in front of her.
Eggs, toast, bacon, coffee.
Steam rises from the mug.
The smell hits her.
Real coffee, not the Özots grain substitute she’s been drinking since 1943.
Private first class Raymond Kowalsski, 19, Messaul duty, slides a plate toward her.
Eggs are fresh.
Got a shipment yesterday.
She stares at the plate.
Anelise sits beside her.
Then Doraththa, then a fourth woman, Breijgit 20, captured last month.
Still jumpy around loud noises.
Four German women, 12 American men.
Same table, same food, same time.
Mercer picks up his fork.
Eat.
Leisel picks up hers.
The eggs are soft, salted.
Better than anything she’s tasted in two years.
Her throat tightens.
She doesn’t know why.
Kowalsski is talking to Doraththa asking about Munich.
He’s got family there, distant cousins, lost contact in 1939.
Doraththa tells him the bakery on Schwanthaler Strasa was destroyed in the bombing.
Kowalsski’s face falls.
This is wrong.
All of it.
Enemies don’t share breakfast.
Enemies don’t talk about bakeries.
Mercer slides her a folded paper.
Don’t open it here.
She palms it.
slips it into her pocket.
The meal continues.
30 minutes.
Laughter.
Forks scraping plates.
Someone tells a joke about a sergeant and a chicken.
Breit almost smiles.
When it’s over, Leisel stands.
Her plate is empty.
She walks back to the barracks.
The paper burns in her pocket.
She doesn’t open it until she’s alone on her bunk.
Door closed.
Three words.
Handwritten English.
You’re going home.
Her hands start shaking.
Not from fear this time, from something else entirely.
You’re going home.
Three words.
She reads them seven times.
They don’t change.
Leisel sits on her bunk.
The paper trembles in her hands.
Outside footsteps, voices, the clang of a distant bell.
But inside her head, there is only silence and those three words.
By August 1945, 67% of German female PSWs were repatriated.
Average detention 4.
7 months.
Leisel has been here 6 weeks.
She’s on the early list.
Heimgain Abberhin Alisar Asha going home.
But where too? Everything was ash.
The door opens.
Hartman steps inside.
Clipboard in hand.
Expression unreadable.
You’ve been processed.
Low-V valueue intelligence.
No war crimes.
Cooperative.
She checks a box.
Transport leaves Thursday.
You’ll be in Frankfurt by Saturday.
Frankfurt, the city where she was born.
The city that burned in March 1944.
800 bombers, 1100 dead in one night.
Her parents’ apartment was in the Alchat.
What’s left? Leisel asks.
Hartman pauses.
I don’t know.
Leisel nods.
She didn’t expect a better answer.
Analise appears at the door.
Her face is pale.
Did you hear about Breijit? Leisel stands.
What happened? She’s being transferred.
Different camp.
Interrogation priority.
The words hit like cold water.
Breit.
20 years old.
Jumpy.
Scared.
The one who almost smiled at the chicken joke.
Leisel pushes past Anelise.
runs across the compound.
Mud splashes her boots.
She finds Breijgit standing near the motorpool.
Two MPs flanking her.
A truck idling.
Breijgit.
Breijit turns.
Her eyes are wet.
They said I know things from my unit.
Communications.
I don’t know anything.
Then tell them that I did.
Her voice cracks.
They said they’ll find out.
Leisel’s chest tightens.
This is it.
The thing she was warned about.
The interrogation rooms, the questions, the things that happen when doors close.
Captain William Strauss appears.
Army intelligence, German fluent.
He’s holding a folder with Breijit’s name on it.
Miss Brandt, he says to Leisel.
Step back.
Where are you taking her? Camp Richie, Maryland.
Intelligence processing.
What happens there? Strauss looks at her.
His eyes are calm.
Questions, coffee, paperwork, nothing more.
Leisel doesn’t believe him.
Bridget is helped into the truck.
The canvas flap closes.
The engine revs.
Leisel stands in the mud watching the truck disappear.
Hartman appears beside her.
She’ll be fine.
How do you know? Because I went through Richie myself.
1943.
Hartman’s voice is quiet.
They asked questions.
I answered.
That’s all.
The truck vanishes around the corner.
Leisel isn’t sure what to believe anymore.
Breit worked in communications.
She intercepted signals, decoded fragments.
She heard things she shouldn’t have.
Troop movements, supply routes, the names of officers.
Now the Americans want to know what she knows.
Camp Richie, Maryland.
The interrogation of prisoners of war school.
9,000 personnel trained there.
The curriculum rapport building psychological pressure patience physical coercion forbidden 94% of actionable intelligence obtained without force they asked just asked.
No hits, no threats, just questions and coffee.
Leisel doesn’t know this yet.
She only knows her friend is gone.
Three days pass.
Boot duty.
button duty.
Breakfast at the long table.
Mercer talks about his sister.
The baby is due in June.
He’s hoping to be home by then.
Leisel listens but doesn’t hear.
On the fourth day, a truck arrives.
Bridget steps out.
Leisel runs.
Mud again, boots slipping.
She reaches Bridget at the barracks entrance, grabs her shoulders.
What happened? What did they do? Breit looks different.
Not broken, not bruised, just tired.
Deeply tired.
They asked questions for three days.
Same questions, different ways.
She sits on her bunk.
They gave me coffee.
Real coffee.
And cigarettes.
American cigarettes.
Did they hurt you? No.
Did they threaten you? No.
Breit reaches into her pocket, pulls something out.
They gave me this.
A photograph.
Black and white.
Breijgit standing in front of a building, American flag in the background.
She’s not smiling, but she’s not afraid either.
They let me send it, she says, to my mother in Stogart.
Leisel stares at the photograph.
Doraththa appears in the doorway.
The photographs, they send them to families.
Proof of life, proof of treatment.
Why? Propaganda.
Counter propaganda.
Dorotha shrugs.
They want German families to see their daughters alive, unharmed, fed.
Leisel sits beside Breijit.
The photograph is small, maybe 3 in, but it means something.
Something she can’t articulate.
What did you tell them? She asks everything I knew, which wasn’t much.
Breit looks at the ceiling.
They seemed disappointed but polite about it.
Anaisa enters, sees Breijit.
Relief floods her face.
The barracks fills with the sound of reunion.
Small sounds.
Quiet sounds.
A hand on a shoulder.
A whispered name.
Leisel holds the photograph, studies it.
Her friend went to interrogation.
Her friend came back with a photograph and a story about coffee.
Everything she was taught says this is impossible.
But here’s the photograph.
And here’s Breijit alive.
12,000 photographs sent from US P camps to German families in 1945.
Postwar surveys, 73% of recipients said it changed everything about their perception of Americans.
My mother cried, not from grief, from relief and shame that she’d believed what she was told.
Private Kowalsski takes the photographs.
He’s got a Kodak brownie.
Military issue, slightly dented.
He sets up near the flagpole.
Morning light, clean backgrounds.
Leisel stands in line.
Behind her, Annaise behind Analisa.
Doraththa Breijit already has hers.
Look at the camera.
Kowalsski says, “Don’t smile if you don’t want to.
Just look.
” Leisel looks.
The shutter clicks.
She’s wearing the same clothes she was captured in.
Washed now, mended, but the same.
Her hair is shorter.
Lice prevention.
They said her face is thinner, but her eyes are the same.
Send it to who? Kowalsski asks.
My mother, Ingred Brunt, Garten Strasa 14, Frankfurt.
She pauses.
If it still exists.
Kowalsski writes the address.
We’ll try.
Leisel steps aside.
Analisa takes her place.
Click.
Doraththa is last.
She approaches slowly, stands in front of the camera, but she doesn’t give an address.
No one to send it to, Kowalsski asks.
No.
Her voice is flat.
Husband died at Kursk.
Parents in Dresden.
February bombing.
Kowalsski lowers the camera.
I’m sorry.
Don’t be.
You didn’t drop the bombs.
But someone did.
British American.
It doesn’t matter now.
The fire ate everything equally.
Leisel watches Doraththa walk away.
No photograph for her.
No proof of life to send.
No one waiting.
That night, Leisel lies on her bunk.
The button, Mercer’s button, the one she asked to keep, sits in her palm.
Brass, tarnished now.
She’s held it every night since he gave it to her.
Tomorrow she leaves.
Thursday transport Frankfurt home or whatever’s left of it.
She closes her eyes, tries to picture the apartment, the kitchen, her mother’s curtains, the smell of bread baking, but the images won’t hold.
They blur, fragment, dissolve into smoke.
Doraththa speaks from the next bunk.
You’re lucky.
I don’t feel lucky.
You have somewhere to go.
Someone waiting.
Doraththa turns to face the wall.
That’s more than most of us.
Leisel doesn’t respond.
She holds the button tighter.
Outside, the harmonica plays again.
Something slow, something sad.
And somewhere in Stoodgart, a mother opens an envelope.
Inside, a photograph.
Her daughter alive.
65 years later, a woman named Leisel Brandt stands in a museum in Washington, DC.
She’s 88 years old now, white hair, thin hands, a granddaughter beside her, 17, curious, named after a man the girl never met.
The display case is small, glass, backlit.
Inside a single brass button, tarnished, dented.
A card beneath it reads Camp Ashb, Belgium 45.
Donated by Leisel Brunt, former P Undress me.
I hated those words for 65 years.
Then I understood them.
Her granddaughter leans close.
What does it mean? Leisel touches the glass, cold against her palm.
It means I was wrong about everything.
4,200 German female PSWs eventually worked in Allied hospitals postwar voluntary.
Doraththa was one of the first.
She stayed at Camp Ashb, treated American soldiers, former enemies, died in 1978, buried in Arlington.
Her headstone says she chose to heal.
Lieutenant Daniel Mercer returned to Ohio, married his high school sweetheart, had three children, wrote to Leisel once a year until he died in 1987.
She kept every letter.
Leisel named her son Daniel.
She named her granddaughter Elellanor.
The museum is quiet.
Footsteps echo.
Somewhere a child laughs.
Leisel’s throat tightens.
the same feeling from the breakfast table, from the first time she tasted real coffee, from the moment she understood that kindness could be a weapon and a gift.
Grandma, Ellaner’s voice soft.
Are you okay? I’m okay.
Leisel steps back from the glass.
I’m just remembering in war, the most dangerous weapon isn’t a gun.
It’s a story.
And the Americans that winter told a different one.
They told her she was the enemy.
Then they gave her buttons to unbutton, boots to polish, breakfast to share, a note that said she could go home.
They didn’t attack her.
They didn’t threaten her.
They unmade her gently, systematically with courtesy and coffee and one German word at a time.
Dunca, that’s what Captain Morrison said.
That’s what Lieutenant Mercer said.
That’s what she hears now, standing in a museum 65 years later.
Thank you for what? For surviving? For staying human? For holding a button hook near an enemy’s throat and choosing not to strike.
Elellanor takes her grandmother’s hand.
They walk toward the exit.
The button stays behind.
Brass, tarnished, silent.
But the story it tells, that story leaves with them.
Undress me.
Two words.
She finally understands what they meant.
