‘The Americans Said, ‘Try the Club Sandwich” | Female German POWs Had Never Seen Three Stories

The winter of 1944 did not arrive in Massachusetts with the gentle fall of snow; it arrived with a biting, industrial severity that rattled the corrugated metal of the barracks at Fort Deans. For Leiselotta “Lee” Shriber, twenty-four years old and huddled under a threadbare wool blanket, the cold was merely an extension of the internal void she had carried since the German retreat through the Ardennes.

She had been a communications auxiliary, a cog in the vast, grinding machine of the Wehrmacht. She had been taught that the Americans were a nation of decadent, soft-bellied cowards, an empire built on thin foundations that would surely collapse under the weight of German steel. She had been told that capture meant starvation, torture, and a slow, agonizing erasure.

When the transport trucks finally ground to a halt at the gates of Fort Deans, Lee stepped out, expecting the roar of angry captors. Instead, she found a strange, haunting silence. There were no whips, no shouts of derision. There was only the sound of her own shivering and the crisp, clean air of New England.

Major Dorothy Caldwell, the camp commander, stood by the mess hall. She was a woman of precise, measured movements. Her uniform was crisp, her eyes devoid of the hatred Lee had expected to find. “You are cold, you are hungry, and you are tired,” Caldwell said, her voice amplified by the quiet of the yard. “You will be processed. You will be fed. You will have a bed. You are no longer soldiers of a war that is already lost. You are human beings, and you will be treated as such.“

Lee looked at the women around her—fifty-eight ghosts in gray tunics, their faces sunken, their eyes wide with the predatory caution of the starving. They did not believe it. They could not.

The first meal was a shock that threatened to tear their reality apart.

The mess hall was brightly lit, a cavernous space filled with the smell of roasting beef, simmering gravy, and the sharp, clean aroma of baked bread. Sergeant Floyd Hutchkins, a cook with a face like a weathered map of the American Midwest, stood behind the serving line. He did not look at them with suspicion; he looked at them as one might look at a stray dog found on a winter road.

He ladled a portion of beef stew onto a metal tray. It was dense with chunks of meat, potatoes, and carrots. Beside it, he placed a thick slab of buttered bread and a tin mug of coffee.

Anna Fischer, a nineteen-year-old girl whose bones seemed ready to pierce her skin, stared at the tray as if it were a bomb. She looked up at Hutchkins, her eyes brimming. “Why?” she whispered in broken English. “Why do you give this to us?“

Hutchkins paused, his ladle dripping. “Because,” he said simply, “it’s lunchtime.“

Lee took a bite. The meat was tender, rich with fats she hadn’t tasted in three years. Her body, accustomed to the sawdust-filled bread and frozen cabbage of the retreat, reacted with violence. She felt lightheaded, a wave of nausea fighting against the overwhelming surge of nutrition. Around her, the mess hall was filled with the sounds of weeping. Some of the women were eating with the frantic, animal desperation of the long-famished; others were simply pushing the food around their trays, paralyzed by the sight of abundance.

That night, the cognitive dissonance set in. They had been told America was starving. They had been told the American economy was a fiction of propaganda. Yet here, in a prison camp, they were eating better than the average civilian in Berlin.

As the weeks bled into winter, the physical transformation was undeniable. Color returned to their cheeks. Their hands, once cracked and shivering, began to lose the tremulous quality of malnutrition. But as their bodies knit themselves back together, their minds began to unravel.

Lee found herself working in the kitchen under the watchful eye of Sergeant Hutchkins. He was a patient man who taught her the vocabulary of an American life: flour, yeast, oven, roast. He treated the kitchen as a sanctuary. One afternoon, he noticed Lee staring at a pile of fresh vegetables, her eyes distant.

“You’re thinking about home,” he said, not looking up from the onions he was chopping.

“I am thinking that I was lied to,” Lee said, her voice tight. “I am thinking that I spent years hating a people I didn’t know, believing they were monsters, while they were eating this… while we were eating stones.”

Hutchkins stopped. He set the knife down. “The world is a hard place, Lee. Don’t waste your time apologizing for being a child of your government. Just try to grow up.”

It was a cold comfort, but it was honest.

Their emotional crisis reached a head with the arrival of Corporal Vernon Whitlock, a guard whose quiet compassion began to bridge the gap between prisoner and captor. When a young prisoner named Laura suffered a severe, dangerous reaction to the sudden increase in calories—her body rejecting the richness of the food—it was Whitlock who brought her broth and crackers, sitting by her bedside to ensure she kept them down.

Lee watched from the doorway, her breath hitching. Why? she thought. Why would they save someone who fought to destroy them?

The ideology of the Reich began to crumble, not because of a lecture or a pamphlet, but because of the way a guard held a bowl of soup.

Then came May 15th, 1945. The war in Europe was over, though the surrender had only just begun to sink in.

The kitchen was buzzing with a strange, celebratory energy. Sergeant Hutchkins had decided to introduce the women to a classic of American ingenuity: the club sandwich.

He lined up the ingredients with the precision of a craftsman: toasted white bread, crisp strips of bacon, turkey slices, fresh lettuce, and slices of tomato, all layered with a smear of mayonnaise. He topped each one with a third slice of bread and drove a toothpick through the heart of it to hold it steady.

He walked into the mess hall with a platter of them. They looked like small, delicious skyscrapers.

“Try these,” he said, setting the platter down. “Club sandwiches. A little bit of everything.”

Lee took one. She turned it over in her hands, fascinated by the architecture. It was three stories of food. The bacon was a revelation of salt and crunch; the turkey was mild and plentiful; the mayonnaise felt like a luxury that should have been illegal.

She looked at her fellow prisoners. They were staring at their sandwiches, some dismantling them to see if it was a trick.

“Three stories,” Lee whispered, a small, hysterical laugh escaping her. “It is three stories of food.”

“It’s good, isn’t it?” Corporal Whitlock asked, leaning against the doorway.

Lee took a bite, the crunch of the toast echoing in her ears. She felt the tears starting again, but this time, they weren’t tears of grief. They were tears of a deep, shattering clarity.

“It is,” she said, her voice shaking. “And it makes me feel like a fool.”

“Why?”

“Because we were told you were starving,” she said, gesturing to the overflowing platter. “We were told you were a dying race. And here you are, building towers of food for your prisoners.”

The mess hall went quiet. The truth hung in the air, heavier than any weapon. The Nazi narrative of American deprivation had been a cornerstone of their indoctrination—a way to convince them that the Reich’s sacrifice was a necessity for survival. But the sandwich was undeniable. It was a physical manifestation of a truth they could no longer ignore.

As the spring turned toward summer, the camp became a place of profound, painful transition. Letters began to arrive, and they were not the letters of triumph. They were the letters of the survivors—reports of bombed-out cities, of mothers standing in lines for bread that didn’t exist, of brothers lost in the final, desperate battles.

The contrast became unbearable. They were living in the lap of American abundance, while their families were scavenging in the ruins of a collapsed empire.

The guilt was a physical weight. Lee found herself working harder in the kitchen, as if she could scrub away her history with soap and water. She and the other women began to adopt the American customs not out of forced assimilation, but out of a desperate need to find a new framework for their lives.

They started to share their own stories, too. They spoke of the fear they had felt, the way they had been funneled into the war machine, the way they had been taught to view the world as a binary of conquerors and victims. They told the Americans about the propaganda, the way the voices on the radio had sounded, the way the fear had been fed to them like a slow-acting poison.

And the Americans listened. They didn’t always agree, and they didn’t always understand, but they listened.

In July, the repatriation orders finally arrived. The camp began to empty. For those who were to return to Germany, the prospect was a nightmare. They were returning to a country that was not the one they had left.

On their last night, the kitchen was silent. Sergeant Hutchkins stood by the stove, the same stove where he had cooked the beef stew and the club sandwiches.

Lee walked up to him. She was no longer the hollowed-out girl who had arrived in November. She was stronger, her eyes clearer, her posture carrying a new, quiet dignity.

“You have been a hard teacher, Sergeant,” she said, attempting a smile.

Hutchkins wiped his hands on his apron and looked at her. “I wasn’t teaching you about sandwiches, Lee. I was just trying to keep you alive.”

“You did more than that,” she replied. “You showed us that the world isn’t a place of monsters. You showed us that it’s a place of people.”

She looked around the mess hall one last time. She thought of the three-story sandwich, the symbol of an abundance that had cost her her belief system. She realized that the hunger she had felt at the beginning was not just for calories. It was for the truth.

As she walked out of the gate the next morning, she didn’t look back at the barbed wire. She looked at the horizon. She was going back to a broken country, a land of ruins and uncertainty. But she was carrying something with her that the propaganda hadn’t been able to destroy.

She was carrying the memory of the taste of a club sandwich—a taste that had reminded her that she was human, that the world was wide, and that even in the middle of the most devastating war in history, there was room for a small, simple act of kindness to change the trajectory of a life.

The war had ended, the ideology had collapsed, and the walls had fallen. Lee Shriber walked toward the future not as a soldier of the Reich, but as a woman who knew the taste of the truth. It was salty, it was sweet, and for the first time in her life, it was entirely her own.