In keeping with the Buffalo Story Telling Festival, I am presenting a true story from my childhood. You see I grew up on a farm just south of McCook in a community of ethnic German people. Our neighbors had family names of Uhrich, Troop, Huff, Kisker, and Lauer to name a few.

Most had parents or grandparents who had emigrated from Russia. A few of the originals were still alive at that time, men who could speak Russian, as well as their native German and wonderfully accented English. The men spoke Russian as the language of business but the ladies never learned it and the same was sometimes true of their learning English.

My story is set as World War II was still raging in Europe and in the Pacific. The Pacific theatre was a bit distant but Europe was of most interest because we had German Prisoners of War working on the farm. Those young men had been taken prisoner in the African Campaign and some had been part of Rommel's elite Africa Corps.

Later we had prisoners that had been taken in Italy. All were from the German Army and were quartered in the POW camp located on the north edge of Indianola.

I've learned recently that half the prisoners held at the Indianola Camp were hard core Nazi's, trouble makers that were never let out to work in the farm fields.

None of those details were important to me at the time. I was just a 6-year-old kid who went everywhere with my younger brother, Tom.

Restrictions ab-out keeping away from the POW's, we had none. Tom and I mingled with as many as 70 young men working out in our sugar beet fields "hoeing and blocking" the young beet plants.

Probably many of those POWs had children of their own thousands of miles away in a war-torn country. Probably they just needed a "kid fix," so lavished attention on us two overall-clad barefoot tow-headed boys. They brought us candy purchased in their own PX with the meager earnings from working in the fields.

One POW was some kind of magician who could do wondrous things like blow cigarette smoke out of his ears and hide coins in his hands and make them magically reappear in my brother's ear.

They always seemed happy to stop hoeing to entertain us in one simple way or another. Overall my dad didn't think that they applied themselves very assiduously and often commented that work accomplished by 70 POWs was about equal to six Mexicans, the labor force that later replaced the POWs when the war was over.

My folks cooperated with about six of the neighbors to pool their resources to pick up the POWs from their camp each morning then return them in the late afternoon before the supper hour.

By sending the POWs out in large groups the Army could make more efficient use of their American GIs who had the task of guarding the Germans and preventing them from escaping. One GI guard for 70 Germans was much more efficient that one guard for 10 Germans working at each of seven different farms. Tom and I found the guards much less friendly than the POWs perhaps because each carried an M-1 Carbine Rifle which was, of course, of great interest to this kid.

One evening as the POWs assembled for roll call in preparation to be transported back to camp I remember one being greatly upset. The winding stem of his wrist watch had broken.

He thought he knew the location where the missing piece had fallen, which was about 10 feet east of the second power pole just west of District 8 School. Everybody present looked for the part but weren't able to find it before the group had to leave.

Later that evening my dad brought out a couple of window screens from the house and we skimmed off surface dirt where the piece was lost and sifted it through the screens but alas, no gold winding stem.

The next morning, my father persuaded the POW with the broken watch to give it to my mother, who would take it into Sutton's Jewelry to get it fixed. The man was reluctant, but finally gave the watch over.

Imagine being a prisoner in a foreign land and having to hand over your most prized possession to an unknown person on the promise that it would be fixed.

But he did. Mom took it to town and the jeweler replaced the broken winding mechanism, although the replacement was not gold, it nevertheless worked OK. The price I remember not, but I know mom paid it from egg money and the German was never charged. A happy POW and a farm couple that was blessed by doing a good deed. A great lesson for a 6-year old son.

I never thought much of the fact that most of the neighbors could converse with the prisoners in their native German. Some POWs in fact spoke English.

Whether "our" prisoners who worked around McCook were treated better from a common feeling of kinship I don't know. I just learned by example that you treated another human as a friend or brother no matter the circumstance. It has not been a bad way to live my life.