She Marched Into Captivity Believing Every American Was a “Monster From the Radio,” Then in a French POW Camp a Chance Argument at the Fence—Beginning with “I Was Told to Hate You”—Ripped Open Everything Both Sides Thought They Knew About Enemies, Guilt, and What Comes After War

The first time she said it out loud, the words tasted like rust.

“I was told to hate you.”

The American on the other side of the wire blinked, as if she’d flicked something into his eyes.

For a moment his hand tightened on the coil of radio cable he’d been rolling, the muscles in his forearm jumping. Then he let out a breath and set the cable down on the crate beside him.

“Yeah?” he said, after a beat. “How’s that working out for you?”

Lotte Bauer almost laughed, which made her even angrier.

This was not how this was supposed to go.

She’d imagined confrontation in different shapes as she’d marched, ridden, and stumbled through the last months of the war—arguments with Party officials, with the officers who’d told them everything was under control, with the men who’d talked about “sacrifice” from warm offices far from the front.

She had not expected the first real one to be with an American corporal holding a mess of wires and a mug of coffee that smelled faintly of burned chicory.

She tightened her grip on the pail she carried, the handle biting into her fingers.

“Don’t make jokes,” she said. “I’m serious.”

“So am I,” he replied.

They were close enough across the inner fence that she could see individual stubble on his jaw, the way his dark hair refused to lie flat under the edge of his cap. Close enough that if the barbed wire hadn’t been there, she could have reached out and touched his sleeve.

Past him, behind the low American barracks, the camp’s outer fence glinted in the weak spring sun. Beyond that was France—real France, not the stripped, controlled one she’d marched through behind German lines. She could smell wet earth and the faint sour of manure. Somewhere, a cow lowed.

Behind her, the German women’s compound was all hard angles: sheds, latrines, a barrack that still smelled of the disinfectant they’d thrown around when they’d arrived.

She could also smell cabbage.

The American’s coffee smelled better.

“You were told to hate us,” he repeated, rolling the phrase around as if trying it on. “By who?”

“Everyone,” she said. “School. Radio. Posters. The Party women. The men who came to the factory to talk about morale. My own husband.”

She lifted her chin.

“They said you were… decadent. Weak. Greedy. That you would do anything for money. That you would never understand discipline. That you were cowards with machines. That you were…” She groped for the word the propaganda lecturer had liked so much. “…soulless. Like… industrialists. With guns.”

“Soulless,” he repeated. “That’s a new one.”

“You dropped bombs on our cities,” she said. “You killed children in their beds. What is that, if not… empty?”

His eyes flicked away for a second, toward the towers, toward the sky that was so clear now, so deceptively calm.

“You’re not wrong about the bombs,” he said. “We did that.”

She hadn’t expected him to say it so easily.

He picked up the cable again, twisting it into a neater loop. His dog tags clinked softly against his chest.

“And you were told to love the people who ordered them,” he added. “That’s the part your lectures left out.”

The camp loudspeaker crackled in the distance, announcing something in English Lotte couldn’t catch. A truck rumbled past outside the outer fence, gears grinding as it took a corner.

Lotte shifted her weight.

She hadn’t meant to start this conversation. She’d come to the fence because the guard on their side had waved her over, thrust a battered tin pail into her hands, and pointed at the small gate between the inner and outer compounds.

“Kitchen,” he’d said in German. “The American wants the waste boiled for pigs. You take it.”

It was the first time she’d been this close to the Americans without a line of women around her.

She’d walked through the narrow passage with the wire on either side feeling oddly exposed, as if the metal eyes in the towers could see under her skin.

The corporal had been waiting by the kitchen steps, hand shading his eyes, looking younger than she’d expected up close. Younger than her, she realized, with a small jolt. She was thirty-two. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five.

He’d nodded in a way that was not quite a greeting, then jerked a thumb toward the kitchen door.

“Bucket,” he’d said in slow German. “There.”

She’d filled it with the slop the Americans scraped from their plates, trying not to inhale too deeply. There was too much meat in it. Too much bread. Too many things her body remembered as smells from home and her mind rejected as coming from the enemy.

When she’d come back out, he’d been sitting on the crate, coffee steam curling up around his face.

He’d said something about the weather, a simple, harmless “Cold today, huh?” in German that startled her with its accent.

She’d answered without thinking, the words slipping out.

“I was told to hate you.”

Now, standing in the narrow lane, her boots muddy, the pail heavy, she wondered if she could take them back.

“I don’t love the men who ordered the bombs,” she said. “That’s what you think. That we all stood on the roofs and cheered.”

She looked down at her hands.

“I thought I should,” she admitted. “At first. When they said the war would be quick. Clean. That we were correcting… injustice. After a while, I just hoped the bombs didn’t fall on my street.”

She lifted her head, meeting his eyes.

“They did,” she said. “Three streets over.”

He studied her face.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She wanted to laugh again.

“What good is ‘I’m sorry’?” she demanded. “Does it bring back my sister’s kitchen? Her baby? The corner where the bakery used to be?”

“No,” he said. “It just means I know it was wrong. That’s all it can do.”

She took a step closer to the wire without quite meaning to.

“What were you told about us?” she asked. “Did they tell you to hate us too?”

His mouth twisted.

“Depends who you ask,” he said. “The captain says, ‘They’re the enemy, but they’re prisoners now, so you treat ‘em right.’ The chaplain says, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself, even if your neighbor wears a swastika.’”

He shrugged.

“The guys in the line say, ‘You shoot at what shoots at you,’” he added. “Or, if they’ve lost enough buddies, ‘Kill every one of those bastards.’”

He took a sip of his coffee, then made a face.

“Me,” he said, “I was told mostly not to think about you as people. Not too hard. They told us about ‘the Hun’ in the last war. The bayoneted babies. The poison gas. Then they showed us the newsreels from the camps.”

He looked up at the tower where the American flag flapped idly in the not-quite-breeze.

“That last part stuck,” he said. “It stuck so hard I can’t scrape it off.”

Lotte’s fingers tightened on the pail.

“We didn’t all—” she began.

“I know,” he interrupted. “Not all. That’s what makes it worse.”

She blinked.

“Worse?” she repeated.

He nodded.

“If it was just a handful of cartoon villains,” he said, “you could hang ‘em and be done. But it was clerks, and housewives, and teachers. People who liked Beethoven and digging in their gardens and reading poetry. People who probably would have smiled at me if I’d come by with my dad’s fruit truck before the war.”

He put the coffee down.

“People who also signed forms that sent trainloads of folks to nowhere,” he said. “Or looked away when something ugly happened in their street. Or told their kids to hate people they’d never met.”

Lotte’s cheeks burned.

“I never signed any forms,” she said. “I was a nurse. I took pulses. I sponged fever. I changed bandages.”

She heard the defensiveness in her own voice and hated it.

He tilted his head.

“I’m Corporal Joe Moretti,” he said. “Eighteenth Signal Battalion. New York. I ran cable in the mud outside Kasserine. Fixed radios in trucks that took guys to Omaha Beach. Now I keep wires from tangling in a camp in France.”

He gestured at her.

“You got a name?” he asked. “Or should I call you ‘Enemy Nurse’?”

“Lotte,” she said automatically. “Lotte Bauer.”

“Okay, Lotte Bauer,” he said. “You took pulses. You changed bandages. You probably held hands when they were scared. You also handed those same boys back to officers who sent them back into a war they shouldn’t have been fighting in the first place.”

Her hand tightened on the pail.

“And you?” she shot back. “You laid wires so the orders could travel faster. So the bombs found the right cities. So men like my husband heard the voice tell them, ‘Hold this position,’ until they died in a field.”

She sucked in a breath.

“And now you carry buckets of our leftovers through the fence,” she added. “We have both travelled very far from the first orders we got.”

He nodded slowly.

“That’s what I mean,” he said. “They told us to hate. To fear. To keep it simple. And here we are, in a muddy lane between two fences, talking about kitchen corners and cables.”

He looked at her, really looked, his gaze tracing the hollow under her cheeks, the faint line of an old cut above her eyebrow.

“Do you still hate me?” he asked, not mocking now.

She opened her mouth.

Closed it again.

“I don’t know you,” she said. “Only your uniform. Your flag. Your… food.”

She glanced pointedly at the leftovers in the pot.

“Try not to hold the food against me,” he said. “The cooks take enough grief as it is.”

Her lips twitched.

“You eat like kings,” she said. “Even your waste smells like my mother’s Sunday table.”

He winced.

“Yeah,” he said. “We do all right. That’s part of what I think you were supposed to hate. Plenty.”

He waved a hand vaguely at the outskirts of the camp.

“You see those farms out there?” he said. “They’re not rich, most of ‘em. But they’ve got roofs. Fields. Chickens. We send trucks to buy eggs and milk. We pay in real money. We deliver sacks of flour and sugar from the Quartermaster when we can.”

Lotte frowned.

“Why?” she asked. “They’re French. They should hate you too.”

“Some do,” he said. “Some don’t. Depends who strafed their village last. But if your fields glow in the dark from unexploded shells and somebody shows up with fertilizer and a roof repair, you don’t ask too many questions about their accent.”

He gestured at the pail.

“And you,” he said, “hate us because we have enough to throw out.”

She felt heat rise in her face.

“You burned our cities,” she said. “You flattened houses that had stood for centuries. Is it wrong to… resent that your garbage looks like feasts?”

“No,” he said quietly. “It’s human.”

He leaned forward, forearms on his knees.

“You know what I hate?” he asked. “Not you, exactly. Not even your uniform. I hate that by the time we got here, there were already pictures. Piles of bodies. Children in stripes. I hate that my cousin Tony died in Sicily and never got to see the people who ordered those trains in a courtroom. I hate that I saw a camp with my own eyes and smelled something I hope you never smell.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw.

“They told me to hate you,” he said. “The pictures. The speeches. The stories. They worked. For a while. Then you started showing up.”

He nodded toward the women’s barrack.

“Hungry. Lousy. Crying when somebody shaved your head. Laughing anyway when somebody told a bad joke in line. Muttering about your mother’s recipes.”

He spread his hands.

“Now I don’t know who to hate,” he admitted. “And frankly, it’s exhausting.”

She stared at him, thrown off balance by the admission.

“You think I didn’t see things?” she said. “In the East. In the hospitals. I saw men broken by our own discipline. I saw… villages. On the march. I shut doors so I didn’t have to see more.”

“Me too,” he said. “Different direction. I shut mine on the Atlantic. They told me enough to keep my aim steady. Not enough to slow my feet.”

Silence stretched between them.

Behind her, in the women’s compound, a voice called her name.

“Lotte! Where did you go with the bucket? We need it back!”

Klara.

She’d slipped away without asking permission, too wrapped up in the sudden chance for something that wasn’t peeling potatoes.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Yeah,” Joe said. “Me too. Wires don’t roll themselves.”

She didn’t turn immediately.

“I still hear the speeches in my head,” she said. “The ones that told me you were… all the same. That if I met you, you’d laugh at my accent and grab at my…” She gestured vaguely at herself.

He looked pained.

“Some guys would,” he said. “We got our share of jerks. We court-martial ‘em when we catch ‘em. Sometimes we don’t catch ‘em.”

He met her eyes.

“Maybe you were told to hate the worst version of us,” he said. “We were shown the worst version of you. Maybe we both deserved better introductions.”

She almost smiled.

“The best introduction to Americans I could imagine,” she said, letting sarcasm cover the tremor in her voice, “would have been no introduction at all.”

“Fair,” he said. “But here we are.”

She looked down at the pail.

“I don’t know how not to hate you,” she said quietly. “Not yet.”

He nodded.

“Start small,” he said. “Hate the war first. We can work our way down to individuals later.”

She snorted.

“Practical,” she said. “I thought Americans were supposed to be sentimental.”

“Only in the movies,” he replied. “Real life, we complain about rations and wonder if our shoes’ll hold for one more march.”

She adjusted her grip on the handle.

“You’re wearing better shoes than we are,” she said.

“Not by the end of this shift,” he answered. “Mud’s democratic.”

Their eyes met one last time.

“I was told to hate you,” she said again, softer now.

“I was shown reasons to,” he said. “Then somebody gave you a bucket and me some wires.”

He shrugged.

“We’ll see what happens,” he said.

“LOTTE!” Klara yelled. “If you don’t bring that slop back, the pigs are getting our bread instead!”

Lotte rolled her eyes toward the sky.

“What a tragedy,” she murmured. “They’ll be devastated.”

Joe suppressed a grin.

“Go feed your pigs,” he said. “I’ll go untangle someone else’s mess.”

She turned away, walking back through the narrow gate, the pail heavy, her thoughts heavier.

Behind her, Joe picked up the cable again.

He made it three loops before anger flared in his chest, hot and sudden.

He slammed the coil down on the crate.

“Dammit,” he muttered.

The guard in the tower above him called down.

“Problem, Moretti?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Joe said, looking up. “I ran out of people it’s easy to hate.”

---

The next time they spoke, it was not by accident.

News traveled faster than mail in the camp.

Within a day, everyone in Barrack Two knew that “Lotte talked to an American at the fence.”

By the second day, the story had grown extra branches.

“She told him to his face they were murderers,” one woman said proudly.

“She begged him for extra soup,” another said disdainfully.

“He told her he loved Goethe,” a third added, for reasons that escaped everyone.

“You just stood there?” Greta demanded that evening as they scrubbed pots in the kitchen. “Talking? To him? What if someone saw? What if they think you’re… collaborating?”

“With what?” Lotte asked, dunking her own pot in the scalding water. “His wire?”

“With their… narrative,” Greta snapped. “They will say, ‘See? The Germans admit we were right.’”

“About what?” Klara asked. “About their coffee being terrible? Because that part’s true.”

Greta scowled.

“You know what I mean,” she said. “About the war. About the camps. About everything.”

“I said nothing about camps,” Lotte replied, too quickly.

“You thought about them,” Greta shot back. “I can see it in your face.”

Lotte’s hand slipped on the slick metal, the pot clanging against the side of the bucket.

“That doesn’t mean he did,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter what he thought,” Greta said. “It matters what you show. We have so little left. If they see us being… friendly…”

“Friendly?” Klara echoed. “We were at the bombs part by the second sentence.”

“At least he listened,” Lotte said quietly. “More than most of ours did.”

Greta’s expression flickered.

“That,” she said, “is not the victory you think it is.”

---

On the American side, the gossip machine had been chewing too.

“Moretti was jawing with one of the Fro lines,” someone said over cards.

“Not French,” another corrected. “One of the German girls. The nurse.”

“The skinny one with the sharp eyes?” a third asked. “The one who spoke to Doc about lice?”

“That’s the one,” the first said. “He says she told him straight up she’d been told to hate us.”

“You tell her it worked?” a fourth said.

“Not exactly,” Joe replied, dropping a card. “I told her I didn’t have the energy to return the favor.”

“Careful,” someone muttered. “You get too chatty, next thing you know, they’ll have you teaching them English and signing up for joint picnics.”

“We’re not staying long enough for picnics,” Tom Daley said, dealing the next hand. “We’re here ‘til they ship ‘em home or somebody invents a new war.”

He glanced at Joe.

“You growin’ a conscience?” he asked.

Joe shrugged.

“I saw what their people did,” he said. “I can’t unsee it. But I’m starting to see the people who didn’t. Or didn’t in ways I can point to. And I don’t know where that leaves me.”

“In France,” Tom said. “With mud on your boots.”

“Thanks, Socrates,” Joe said.

“Anytime,” Tom replied.

---

It was Lotte who engineered the second meeting.

“Take this,” the guard said, thrusting the pail at her again a week later. “You know the way.”

“Do you?” Greta asked from behind her, low.

Lotte ignored the barb.

She walked to the gate without looking back, boots squelching in the still-damp track between the fences.

Joe was there, coiling more cable, as if his life were one long loop.

“You again,” he said.

“Me again,” she replied.

“You break any other habits since last time?” he asked.

“I scratched my head less,” she said. “Thanks to your doctor’s powder.”

“Glad to be of service,” he said dryly.

She handed him the empty pail.

He held onto the handle a second longer than necessary.

“I thought about what you said,” he said.

“Which part?” she asked. “The kitchen or the bombs?”

“The hate,” he said.

She looked away.

“It is not a switch,” she said. “On or off. It is… a habit. Like biting your nails. Or lying.”

“Or doing what you’re told,” he added.

She nodded.

“I lied to myself,” she said quietly. “For years. Told myself the stories were true. That we were… victims. That the treaty was unfair. That the humiliation would kill us if we didn’t… stand up.”

“And?” he asked.

She spread her hands.

“I am in a camp,” she said. “Draw your own conclusions.”

He chuckled once, without much humor.

“They say we fought this war to crush your government,” he said. “Your ‘ism.’”

“It worked,” she said. “It is gone.”

He shook his head.

“I don’t think it is,” he said. “Not up here.”

He tapped his temple.

“Not for you,” he added quickly. “For everybody. Us too. We all like simple stories. Good. Bad. Us. Them. It takes work to remember the messy parts.”

She thought of his words all evening, as she peeled potatoes and listened to Greta warn against “letting your guard down” with the Americans.

She thought of them days later, when a transport came and took ten women away, their names read off a list none of them had ever seen.

“They’re going home,” the interpreter said.

“To what?” Greta asked.

He didn’t answer.

She thought of them at night, when the snores and coughs and occasional muffled sobs in the barrack merged into a kind of background hum.

She wondered what Joe thought about when he lay in whatever cot the Americans had in their warm huts.

She hated that she wondered.

---

Months later, long after the barbed wire had rusted and the huts had been sold for scrap, years after men in different suits had signed papers in different cities saying “never again” and “reconciliation,” a woman in her forties would stand in a small apartment in a rebuilt German town and watch her teenage daughter slam a book down on the table.

“They make us read about it over and over,” the girl said. “This war. Your war. As if we were there. As if we should feel guilty for something that happened before we were born.”

Lotte dried her hands on a dish towel, the movement automatic.

“They want you to remember,” she said. “So you don’t repeat.”

“Repeat what?” her daughter demanded. “Being bombed? Being ashamed? Being told to hate people I’ve never met?”

Lotte sat down.

“All of it,” she said.

The girl frowned.

“Did you hate them?” she asked. “The Americans?”

Lotte thought of Joe’s face behind the wire, the way his fingers had tightened on the coffee mug when she’d said “bombs,” the way he’d said “I’m sorry” without flinching.

“I was told to,” she said.

“That’s not an answer,” her daughter shot back.

“No,” Lotte agreed. “It isn’t.”

She folded the towel neatly.

“I hated what they did,” she said. “When the sirens went off. When our neighbors’ house disappeared. When my sister didn’t come back from the shelter.”

She paused.

“I also hated what we’d done,” she added softly. “Once I saw. Once I let myself see.”

Her daughter shifted.

“And the soldier?” the girl asked. “The one from your stories. The one with the wires.”

“Joe,” Lotte said. “Corporal Moretti. Yes.”

“Did you hate him?” her daughter asked.

“Sometimes,” Lotte said. “On bad days. When the old pictures were too bright. But other days…” She smiled, a little sadly. “Other days I was grateful he listened.”

Her daughter made a face.

“I can’t imagine talking to someone who bombed our street,” she said.

“Neither could I,” Lotte replied. “Until I did.”

“Why?” the girl asked.

“Because I couldn’t stand the weight of simple hate anymore,” Lotte said. “It’s heavier than buckets. Harder to carry than stretchers.”

She tapped the book her daughter had slammed.

“They will teach you dates,” she said. “Treaties. Names of battles. You’ll memorize them, pass an exam, and forget half.”

She leaned forward.

“Remember this instead,” she said. “That I stood in a lane between two fences in France. That I told a man in the uniform I’d been taught to hate that his bombs had killed my sister. And that he didn’t look away.”

Her daughter’s eyes were very bright now.

“What did he say?” she asked.

“He said he was sorry,” Lotte replied. “And that he’d been told to hate me too.”

The girl snorted.

“Maybe they should stop telling people who to hate,” she said.

“Yes,” Lotte said. “Maybe.”

The girl hesitated.

“Do you… still hate them?” she asked. “Now?”

Lotte thought of the smell of coffee in the cold air. Of the taste of slop in the pail. Of the buzz of clippers and the ache in Anna’s legs. Of a baby’s photo. Of rifles lowering.

“No,” she said slowly. “Not as a people. Not like they told me to.”

She smiled faintly.

“I save my hate,” she said, “for ideas now. For people who stand in warm rooms and tell others to do things they’ve never done. For anyone—ours or theirs—who says, ‘It would be simpler if we didn’t see them as human.’”

Her daughter was quiet.

Then, very softly, she said, “I was told to hate, too. Not Americans. The new ones. The Russians. The… others.”

“Yes,” Lotte said. “The names change. The tune doesn’t.”

She reached out and took her daughter’s hand.

“You don’t have to sing it,” she said.

Her daughter looked away, then back.

“Maybe,” she said, “if someone hands me a bucket and a fence, I’ll see what happens.”

Lotte laughed.

“I hope,” she said, “you never have to.”

But somewhere inside, a woman who had walked through mud with a pail of enemy leftovers and a head full of propaganda wished, fiercely, that if her daughter ever did, she’d find someone on the other side of the wire willing to put down their cable and listen.

Even if both of them had been told, all their lives, to hate.

THE END