“Tell Us What You’ll Betray to Go Home Alive”—The Cruel Questions Guards Used to Break German and Japanese Women POWs, and the One Quiet Act of Defiance That Haunted an American Interrogator for the Rest of His Life

The first time Lieutenant Daniel Hayes saw the women behind the wire, he thought, They look like anybody.

Not enemies.
Not symbols.
Not “the Germans” or “the Japanese” the way the posters in town painted them.

Just women:

Tired eyes.
Wrinkled uniforms.
Hair tied back roughly with string.
Hands tucked under their elbows against the wind that slipped through the camp like a thin, persistent knife.

The POW compound sat on the edge of a broad, flat plain, far from any city, where the horizon rolled out in a line so straight it made Daniel’s teeth hurt. Barbed wire glittered in the morning light. Guard towers leaned a little in the cold. A flag moved listlessly on a pole near the command hut.

Daniel had been in Europe first, then in the Pacific, but he’d never stood in a place like this—never in a camp built specifically for female prisoners, a temporary station before they were moved on to more permanent facilities.

“Eyes front, Lieutenant,” said the captain beside him. “They don’t need your sympathy. They need to understand we’re in charge here.”

“Yes, sir,” Daniel answered automatically.

But curiosity tugged at him all the same.

He had been told his job would be simple: ask questions.
He spoke good German and passable Japanese. The Army had decided that made him useful.

“No rough stuff,” they had said.
“No bruises. Just pressure. Just… persuasion.”

“Pressure how?” he’d asked.

The officer in charge of interrogation—a major with sharp features and a voice like cold water—had smiled without humor.

“Words, Lieutenant. It’s not the fists that break most people. It’s the questions.”

1. The Game

They called it “the game” in the mess hall, though never in the official logs.

You didn’t write things like that down.

It was born one late night in November when boredom and frustration tangled together. They weren’t getting much. Names that didn’t matter. Units that no longer existed. Vague references to supply depots already bombed.

“Sir, these women are small fish,” a sergeant complained. “Nurses, radio operators, clerks. They probably don’t know anything worth the ink it takes to write it down.”

The major didn’t like that answer.
He didn’t like useless prisoners.
He didn’t like his time wasted.

So he came up with something new.

“Fine,” he said. “If they don’t know enough, we’ll find out what scares them. Frighten someone enough, and either they talk… or they show you what they’re made of.”

The next morning, the guards brought in the first three.

Two Germans—one tall and angular, the other round-faced and nervous.
One Japanese nurse, her posture straight as a blade, her gaze lowered but not broken.

Daniel sat at the table, pen and notebook ready, though he already hated the feel of the assignment.

No slaps. No bruises.
Not here. Not in this room.

Just questions.

The major walked slowly around the table like a teacher circling a line of students.

“All right,” he said, almost casually. “You want to go home someday. We all want to go home someday. But war is a series of bargains, isn’t it?”

He stopped behind the German nurse.

“What will you trade?” he asked.

She stared straight ahead.

No answer.

He smiled tightly.

“That’s today’s game,” he said. “Tell us what you will give up to go home. Your unit’s positions? Names of officers? Supply routes?”

He tapped his pen against her chair.

“Or will you trade something else?”

2. Lotte

Lotte Bauer had not enlisted to be anyone’s enemy.

She had wanted to be a nurse.
A real one. In a quiet hospital with clean sheets and fresh air and patients whose injuries did not smell of gunpowder and burned meat.

But history had other plans.

By nineteen, she was in uniform.
By twenty, she was in North Africa.
By twenty-one, she was pulling shrapnel from boys’ legs and stitching wounds under a sky that shook with planes.

Later, when the Allies pushed, she was pulled back and reassigned. Her last stop before capture had been a field hospital in Italy, just ahead of a retreat that went too slowly and a frontline that moved too fast.

Now she sat on a wooden chair in an American camp, the splintered edge biting into the back of her legs through the thin fabric of her skirt, while a man in a crisp uniform asked: What will you trade?

In front of her, another man—this one younger, with tired eyes and a notebook—waited.

She wet her lips.

“I am a nurse,” she said carefully in German. “I know patients. I know bandages. I do not know where your troops are or where mine are. I have nothing to trade you.”

The major looked briefly amused.

“Oh, everyone has something,” he replied, switching into German that was more accented than Daniel’s but perfectly understandable. “Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But we’ll find it.”

He moved on.

The Japanese nurse’s name was Sato Hana.
She bowed her head as he spoke.

“You were at a field hospital on Saipan,” the major said. “That’s what the paperwork says. You saw aircraft come and go. You heard officers talk. You relayed radio messages. Did you not?”

“I followed orders,” she answered in Japanese. Daniel translated softly.

“You followed orders,” the major repeated. “Good. Then follow mine. You will tell us everything you heard: names, units, rumors, even the jokes the officers made about their commanders.”

“I do not remember jokes,” Hana replied. “I remember screams.”

A flicker passed across Daniel’s face.
The major’s expression didn’t change.

“You remember enough,” he said. “And if you don’t, we’ll help you remember.”

3. The First Question That Cut Deep

That afternoon, Daniel sat alone with Lotte.

The major had left to report to headquarters, satisfied that his “game” had begun. The guards outside the interrogation hut leaned on their rifles, smoking and talking about anything but the war.

Inside, the air felt too still.

Daniel put down his pen.

“We don’t have to do this like he does it,” he said quietly in German. “I just need information. If you know anything useful, say it. If you don’t, then say that.”

She looked at him in surprise.
Her blue eyes were rimmed red from lack of sleep.

“We are enemies,” she pointed out.

He nodded.

“Yes,” he said. “But you are still a person. War doesn’t erase that.”

She studied him more closely.

“You are… American?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Have you ever been bombed?”

He hesitated.

“I’ve been in cities that were bombed,” he answered. “But not like… not like some of yours. Or some of ours, either. Not like London. Or Hamburg. Or Tokyo.”

He flipped the notebook to a clean page.

“Tell me about your hospital,” he said. “About your superior officers. Did they discuss movements? Incoming divisions? Anything like that?”

The questions were standard.
The answers were mostly useless.

She told him about shortages of morphine.
About surgeons fighting over who got the last roll of sterile bandage.
About soldiers arriving without boots, without jackets, without hope.

When he pressed for details about troop movements, she shook her head.

“I wrote patient names, not maps,” she said. “And now many of those names are dead, and you ask me for their regiments as if that matters more than the faces I cannot forget.”

Her anger was quiet, but it was there.
It was, he realized, not just for him.

He could have pushed harder.
The major would have.

Instead, he made a misstep.

He tried to humanize the conversation.

“How did you end up a nurse?” he asked, leaning back slightly. “Did you always want that?”

She blinked.

For the first time, her guard dropped a fraction.

“My mother,” she said slowly. “She died when I was sixteen. The doctor who treated her was kind. He could not save her, but he was kind. I thought… I would like to be that person for someone else.”

Daniel nodded.

“That makes sense,” he said. “My father wanted me to be an engineer. I learned languages instead. Parents usually…”

He stopped.

Something had changed in her posture.

“That was not an official question,” she said.

“I know,” he replied.

“You will write it down anyway?”

He hesitated, then shook his head.

“No,” he said. “This stays between us.”

“You are wrong,” she answered. “Nothing stays between us. Everything said in this room exists forever for someone.”

He had no answer for that.

4. The Japanese Nurse and the American Memory

A few days later, it was Hana’s turn again.

The major was in a worse mood. Headquarters wanted results. The higher command was obsessed with numbers and reports—even this late in the war, when much of the outcome was already clear.

“Sit,” he ordered, and she did, folding herself neatly into the chair like she was kneeling on tatami mats at home.

Daniel translated.

“You were in Saipan,” the major repeated. “You saw the planes. You heard the codes.”

“I heard screaming,” Hana said again. “From both sides.”

“We have your file,” he told her. “Don’t play innocent.”

Daniel read the file later.
She wasn’t innocent.
She was… ordinary.

A girl from a small town, sent to nursing school, then to war. Her letters home, seized when she was captured, were full of tiny details: a brother’s mischief, a neighbor’s new baby, the taste of persimmons in autumn.

Nothing that suggested any desire to conquer anyone.
Just the life of someone swept into a storm bigger than she was.

Today, the major changed tactics.

He motioned to Daniel.

“Ask her about… personal things,” he said in a low voice. “Not sex. Not that. Just… memories. Make it emotional. Make her feel like a person again, then steer it back. People talk more when they feel seen.”

Daniel didn’t like it.
But he obeyed.

“Hana,” he began in Japanese, “the major wants to understand the conditions you lived through. Before the war… what is your strongest memory? Not of war. Of being… young.”

She stared at him.

Then, surprisingly, she answered.

“Rice fields,” she said. “In summer. My sandals stuck in the mud. The sound of frogs.”

He translated.
The major remained silent, listening.

“And… your family?” he asked.

“My mother’s hands,” she said. “Rough from work. Gentle when she tied my hair.”

He translated that too.

The major nodded slowly, as if ticking boxes on some internal list.

“Good,” he said. “Now bring her closer.”

So Daniel asked more.

“Did you go to festivals?”
“Did you have friends?”
“Did you…”—he almost said “fall in love,” then caught himself and veered away—“…ever think about doing anything other than nursing?”

She answered carefully, sparingly, never giving more than a glimpse.

Finally, he shifted.

“At Saipan,” he said, his tone subtly changing, “do you remember the day the American troops came close? The injured officers? The messages you took?”

Her eyes sharpened.

She saw the turn clearly.

“You try to make me talk more,” she said softly. “Because I remember frogs, you think I will give you everything.”

Daniel swallowed.

“I—”

“Do you remember anything from before this war?” she asked him suddenly.

It caught him by surprise.

“My mother’s cinnamon bread,” he blurted, before he could stop himself. “Cool autumn mornings. Baseball on the radio.”

She nodded.

“We have that too,” she said. “We all have that. It is not a trick. It is where we go to remember we are not just numbers on your papers.”

The major broke in.

“Tell her,” he said through gritted teeth, “that if she doesn’t cooperate, she will be here a very long time while her country loses everything.”

Daniel translated.

She listened, then bowed her head slightly.

“I have already lost everything,” she replied. “Now I have only myself. This, I will not trade.”

Her voice did not rise.
It didn’t need to.

Somewhere in Daniel’s chest, something shifted.

5. The Question No One Should Have Asked

The game escalated.

The major began to rotate the women through sessions with different interrogators—Daniel, another lieutenant, a seasoned sergeant who drank too much but could read people the way some men read maps.

The rules were unspoken:

No visible harm.
No threats that would look bad on paper.
But inside those lines, push. Always push.

The questions multiplied, like barbed wire in the mind.

“What will you admit?”
“Who will you blame?”
“What will you betray to shorten your captivity?”

For some, it was too much.

One German communications operator broke down after a week of questioning and gave them a detailed description of codes that had already been changed months before.

Hana and Lotte did not break.
They yielded small, harmless facts.
They withstood the rest like slow, grinding waves.

Then, one evening, the major crossed a line that even he hadn’t meant to cross.

It was late.
The sky outside the interrogation hut was a deep, heavy blue.
A storm was gathering.

Lotte sat at the table, exhausted.
They’d staggered the women’s sleep, meals, routines—nothing dramatic, nothing that would show up as torture, but enough to create constant, low-level disorientation.

Daniel was off duty, nursing a headache in the barracks.

The major conducted this session alone.

“Fraulein Bauer,” he said, speaking rough but understandable German. “We’ve been at this a while. I’m bored. Are you bored?”

She did not answer.

“You tell us about bandages. About soup. About bedside kindness.” He snorted. “I am not here for fairy tales. Tell me something real.”

She shifted slightly in her chair.

“I have told you what I know,” she said. “If it does not satisfy you, then your questions are wrong, not my answers.”

He felt his temper flare.

It had been a long week.
Reports from the front were grim.
Supplies were tight even here.
He was tired of feeling that everyone—enemy and ally—was lying to him.

“What about guilt?” he asked sharply. “Do you have any of that for your part in this? For our dead?”

Her eyes flashed.

“I carried both German and foreign boys on stretchers,” she said. “Their blood looks the same.”

He stepped closer.

“Tell me your worst memory,” he said suddenly. “Not of bombs. Of yourself.”

Silence.

“That is not… relevant,” she replied.

“Oh, I think it is,” he pressed. “We all have it, that one memory we don’t speak. You want to go home, don’t you? You want to forget this place? I’ll make a deal with you.”

She looked up, wary.

“You give me one thing that costs you something,” he said. “One memory you’ve never told anyone. And I will mark your file as cooperative. Maybe that gets you a transfer earlier. Maybe it doesn’t. But at least you won’t sit in this camp forever.”

Her fingers tightened on the edge of the chair.

“This is your game,” she said slowly. “Not mine.”

But the seed was planted.
He saw it in the tiny flicker at the corner of her mouth, the way her eyes lost focus for a moment.

Memories, he knew, could be more painful than any physical blow.

The session ended without her giving him what he wanted.

But the question lingered like smoke in her lungs.

6. The Quiet Collapse

The next morning, it wasn’t the major who saw the results of his words.
It was Daniel.

He found Lotte in the yard during the brief exercise hour.
The sky was leaden, the air damp and biting.

She walked slowly along the fence line, counting her steps.
He approached carefully.

“Fraulein Bauer,” he said, switching to German, “may I walk with you?”

She shrugged, which he took for assent.

For a few minutes, they walked in silence.
Gravel crunched under their boots.

“When do you go home?” she asked finally.

He was taken aback.

“I don’t know,” he said. “When the Army says so.”

“But you will go,” she pressed. “To your mother’s cinnamon bread. To baseball on the radio.”

He frowned.

“You remember that?”

“I remember everything that does not belong here,” she said. “It is how I know I am still someone other than prisoner number whatever-you-call-me.”

He nodded, ashamed.

“I’m sorry for yesterday,” he said. “The major pushed too far.”

She laughed bitterly.

“You say that like yesterday is different from the other days,” she replied.

He hesitated.

“There are lines,” he said. “Even here.”

She stopped walking, turned to face him.

“Tell me something, Lieutenant,” she said. “Do you ask yourself the questions you ask us?”

He shifted under her gaze.

“I am not the one behind the wire,” he muttered.

“Not now,” she said. “But memory is its own wire.”

He thought of Hana talking about frogs and rice fields, about her mother’s hands.
He thought of the major’s face when someone refused to give him what he wanted.

“I… try to,” he answered honestly. “But sometimes it is easier not to.”

She studied him.

“I had a brother,” she said abruptly. “You haven’t asked me that. Perhaps it is not in your file.”

He stayed quiet.

“He was younger,” she continued. “Too young to be sent to the front, they said. So he joined the Hitler Youth. They gave him a drum. A uniform. He was so proud.”

Her eyes clouded.

“He died when the Allies bombed our town,” she said. “The house collapsed. We found him under the table where my mother had told him to hide. His drum was in pieces.”

She looked back at the fence.

“Is that the kind of thing your major wants?” she asked. “Is that a good trade? My brother’s drum for a note in my file that says cooperative?”

Daniel swallowed hard.

“No,” he whispered. “It isn’t.”

“Then what will you do with it?” she asked.

He had no good answer.

7. The Major’s Reckoning

A week later, an inspection team arrived at the camp.

They wore clipped expressions and carried clipboards.
They asked pointed questions:

About the food.

About the medical care.

About the number of prisoners.

About interrogation methods.

The major answered smoothly, proudly.
He had nothing to hide—nothing official, anyway.

Daniel watched from the sidelines.

When the inspectors reached the interrogation hut, one of them, a colonel with years of political experience, asked:

“Any issues with compliance? Complaints?”

The major shrugged.

“They don’t like being asked hard questions,” he said. “No one does. But we stay within policy. No hands. Just… conversation.”

“Good,” the colonel said. “The world is watching now. We don’t need scandals. Even with the enemy.”

They moved on.

Later, in the mess, the major sat across from Daniel.

“You look like a man who swallowed a nail,” he observed.

Daniel stirred his coffee.

“Do you ever wonder what we’re doing to them?” he asked quietly. “Not their bodies—their minds.”

The major snorted.

“They’re prisoners of war,” he said. “We’re asking questions. They made their choices when they put on those uniforms.”

“And we made ours,” Daniel replied.

The major tilted his head.

“You’re getting soft,” he said. “This is how wars are won—by information, by pressure. Somewhere, a pilot lives because one of those women tells us which rail line carries fuel. You want that on your conscience instead?”

Daniel stared at the table.

“What if she tells us about her brother’s drum?” he asked.

The major frowned.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Daniel said.

But it wasn’t nothing.

It was the moment he realized that the war might end, but the questions would not.

8. Years Later

The war ended.

The camps emptied.

Some prisoners went home to ruins.
Some went home to nothing.
Some never found home again in the way they had known it before.

Lotte survived.
So did Hana.

Decades later, in different countries, under different skies, they lived quiet lives that did not make the news.

Lotte worked in a civilian hospital in a rebuilt German town, her hands steady as she changed dressings, her eyes kinder than she believed the world deserved.

She married, late, to a widower with two children.
She told them bedtime stories that never mentioned bombs.

Sometimes, at night, she dreamed of wire and questions.
She woke up, listened to the gentle ticking of a clock in her bedroom, and reminded herself that no one was waiting outside with a notebook.

Hana returned to a Japan that was healing and changing.
She found her brother alive—thinner, more serious, but alive.
Her parents’ house stood, scarred but standing.

She worked as a midwife eventually, helping bring new life into a world that had tried so hard to destroy itself.

On festival nights, she lit lanterns for the friends who did not come back.
She burned incense and remembered frogs and rice fields and mothers’ hands.

Both women carried memories of the questions that had tried to strip them of something essential.

Both refused, in their own ways, to let those questions define the rest of their days.

9. A Letter in a Box

As for Daniel?

He went home.

He tried not to think about the camp.

He married, had children, worked as a teacher after the war.
He taught languages, explained the delicate bridges between words and meaning.

He did not talk much about his time as an interrogator.
When people asked, he skimmed over it:

“I translated. I took notes. Others made the big decisions.”

But he knew that wasn’t the whole truth.

One autumn, decades later, cleaning out an old trunk in his attic, he found a notebook wrapped in a cloth.

It was one of his wartime notebooks, long thought lost.

He sat on the floor, the house quiet around him, and opened it.

Inside were names, dates, scribbled notes about troop movements, units, code words.

Between them, on a page he had never torn out, were three lines written in a different hand—careful, sharp, slightly slanted.

He remembered them at once.

He’d asked Lotte to write something in German, to compare her handwriting to a signature in a captured letter.

She had taken the pen, paused, and instead of her name, she had written:

“Ich bin nicht nur ein Feind.
Ich bin ein Mensch.
Vergiss das nicht.”

“I am not only an enemy.
I am a human being.
Do not forget that.”

He had meant to tear the page out and destroy it.
It was not “useful information.”
It was dangerous, in a different way.

But war is chaos, and he had forgotten.

Now, sitting in the dust of his own attic, Daniel traced the letters with his finger.

He realized that this, more than any code or map, was what had stayed.

Not the “game” the major invented.
Not the reports that satisfied headquarters.

This.

The simple demand not to be reduced to a label.

10. The Secret That Could Not Be Filed

Historians tend to like clear lines: treaties signed, offensives launched, battles started and finished on dates that can be printed in bold.

The little interrogation camp on that wide, flat plain did not change the course of the war on its own.

No single answer given under that roof stopped an army.
No single refusal toppled a regime.

And yet, in that place:

A German nurse reminded an American lieutenant that grief has no uniform.

A Japanese nurse taught him that memory can be both refuge and shield.

An American officer learned that questions can leave marks you can’t see.

The major wrote his reports, turned them in, and moved on to other assignments.
On paper, the “game” had worked just fine.

In reality, it was something else.

It was a moment when the people behind the barbed wire were asked to trade pieces of their souls for the promise of a quicker release.

Some did.
Some didn’t.
Most did something in between, because that is what people do.

The war ended.
The camp was dismantled.
The towers came down.
Grass grew where the huts once stood.

But in attics and hospital corridors and narrow townhouses, the quiet survivors carried something with them:

a decision, made under pressure, about what they would and would not give up.

Most of their stories will never be written in thick histories.

But once in a while, someone opening an old notebook might find a line like the one Daniel found.

Not a confession.
Not a secret code.

Just a reminder—sharp as barbed wire, clear as fresh ink—that even in rooms where questions are used as weapons, there are answers that refuse to bend.

And that is its own kind of victory.

THE END