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Dean Ness and his late wife Maria. (Photo courtesy Dean Ness) |
By Dominik Lobkowicz
As a prisoner of war under the Germans, U.S. Army veteran Dean Ness, now of Damariscotta, was taken across Europe by boxcar to Poland, where a German doctor with ties to the United States saved his ailing leg.
(This article is the second of a two-part series on Ness, outlining some of his experiences serving in the United States Army and afterward. The first article was published in the Nov. 13 edition of The Lincoln County News.)
After jumping into Holland, Ness was captured and remained a “guest” of the Germans for about 4½ months. He was taken by train from Holland through Germany to Poland, and he was held at Stalag Luft III, a prisoner of war camp.
“I’d been in a boxcar, 40 and 8 [a boxcar designed to hold 40 men or eight horses], no medical treatment at all, and nothing to eat,” Ness said.
“A German doctor saved my leg, his name was Dr. Schoenwether,” Ness said.
Schoenwether went to medical school at Marquette University, in Milwaukee, while his father was working illegally as a brewmeister for the mob during Prohibition. It was during a visit home in 1939 that the Germans drafted him, Ness said.
“They didn’t have penicillin, they didn’t have sulfa drugs [a type of antibiotic], they didn’t have anything except for maybe a little iodine, and he came in one day … and he filled that leg full of maggots. They ate all the dead stuff,” Ness said.
The stalag was eventually liberated by Russian forces in 1945.
Ness remembered the liberation as his first introduction to vodka, when a Russian poured some into Ness’ canteen cup at the gate of the stalag.
“I took a pull on it and went down on both knees. I weighed about 120 pounds. I hadn’t had too much to eat, turnip top soup and sawdust bread,” Ness said. “I thought [he] had poisoned me.”
By the time the war was over, Ness had been promoted from private all the way to master sergeant.
“That’s the worst thing that ever happened to me was rank. I was the happiest yardbird in the world, I was the best private you ever saw, but the minute they gave me stripes I had the responsibility of other people and I didn’t like it,” he said.
Postwar
After his liberation and return to Germany, Ness was assigned to an honor guard unit in Berlin and was later sent to Biarritz, France, to study with American professors who had taken leaves of absence to teach in Europe.
“I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel with German POWs as waiters and Frenchmen as bellboys,” he said.
Studying to become a psychologist, Ness had the opportunity to travel to Switzerland for a time to study with renowned psychologist Carl Jung.
Ness made the trip with Dr. Carpenter, his psychology professor from Biarritz who was involved with the pysch program at Penn State.
“Brilliant man,” Ness said of Jung. “I didn’t speak enough French or enough German, and he didn’t speak enough English, so I can’t really give you an honest opinion of him.”
Most of Ness’ time with Jung was spent in cafés, though some was in the classroom. Primarily it was just the three men – Jung lectured on the philosophy of human behavior and Carpenter translated, Ness said.
“I wasn’t bright enough to take full advantage of what was going on. I was too young,” Ness said. “At the time this came about, I wasn’t aware of how important Carl Jung was.”
When he returned to the United States, Ness enrolled at the University of Minnesota and later transferred to the University of South Dakota, but in “coming down” from four years of war, he found he couldn’t sleep at night and couldn’t stay awake during the day.
After he had a violent run-in with the police and a brief – about four days – voluntary stay at a veterans’ hospital, Ness took to the road in 1950, wandering for about a year.
“I never felt so good in my life. The smell of clover and pine in the Black Hills of South Dakota,” Ness said.
“I lived under a bridge with all the tramps. Had ham sandwiches out of the back doors, mowed lawns, shoveled sidewalks,” Ness said. He ate rabbit stew, rode the boxcars and coal tenders, and raided gardens.
“I acquired a great deal of knowledge from the tramps. They were amazing people. It was strictly common horse-sense,” he said.
When a friend finally caught up to Ness, who was washing dishes in a greasy spoon in Iowa, he talked Ness into attending the University of Chicago and finishing his degree.
Ness finally earned his degree in psychology in 1955 or 1956, which he said was “a big mistake.”
“I don’t put any stock in it, now that I’ve gotten older,” he said.
For the next 10 years Ness wandered again, working for his parents at their cocktail lounge and restaurant in his hometown of Aberdeen, S.D., working for a manufacturer in Minneapolis, and living on a sailboat in Newport Beach, Calif.
“I don’t know what I was doing. I was trying to figure out what it was all about. I was thinking about all the guys I knew who didn’t have a chance to do anything,” he said.
It was during the 1950s Ness had a short piece of prose published in The New Yorker magazine.
“I was sitting, about 2 o’clock in the morning, and I was banging away on a typewriter. I’m a hunt-and-peck artist. This appeared on the typewriter, and I have no knowledge of how I put together, composed it or anything,” Ness said. He sent it to a gal he knew in San Francisco and she sent it to The New Yorker, which published it.
Ness recited the piece from memory: “The evening mist swirled gently around a stately oak. Its branches dipped and bowed as if in subservience to the might of Mother Nature. And high on its branches overhead, a squirrel chattered angrily at an owl, as if to say it was violating its own private sanctuary, and off in the distance the crickets chirped merrily, adding their counterpoint to this symphony of nature. At the bottom of the tree, a man ignoring the beauty and the wonder of the world around him, very quietly strangled his mate.”
“I got $37.50,” he said.
Moving away from the tourists and crowds of Newport Beach, Ness founded a halfway house for youth in Santa Barbara in 1966, called the Harbinger House.
“There was so much talent there,” Ness said of the youths, but they had no direction or discipline. Working with them, Ness said he had “pretty good success” but he later realized it was the parents he should have been working with.
Ness eventually closed the Harbinger House after he grew tired of fighting the people in the city and their ignorance of the growing narcotics problem there.
Many of the kids in the Harbinger House were potheads, Ness said, and he recalled seeing a fitting memorial to the house when he drove past the location several years later.
“Right in where the basement was, the foundation, coming right out of the foundation was a pot plant about 3 1/2 feet tall. I died laughing,” he said.
After he closed the house, Ness hit the road again.
“I was completely self-contained. I had a backpack, I had a bottle of scotch, I had a Priva stove and all the things that I needed. I was hitchhiking. I had a sign that said ‘Whither goest thou,'” he said. “If I saw a mountain I’d climb it, and see what was on the other side, and I found who I was for a change.”
Ness’ travels took him to San Francisco, which is where he met his wife, Maria, in 1973 or 1974. The two married in Carmel, Calif. in 1975 and moved to Florida to live with Ness’ parents during their final years.
After Ness’ parents both passed away in the mid-1980s, he and Maria moved to Waldoboro. In the early 1990s Maria was diagnosed with lung cancer, but lived another four years before she passed.
“I miss the hell out of her,” Ness said.
Changes
Ness shared what he called a “transition” of himself through the war and over the years. He remembers dancing with a girl at Camp Blanding during basic training.
“We were dancing, probably to ‘Stardust’ or some beautiful tune, and she looked up and said, ‘You know who you remind me of?’ And I’m thinking Clark Gable, Tyrone Power – my ego was showing.”
“She said ‘Peter Lorre,'” Ness said. “He was homelier than a mud fence. Anyway, I said, ‘Peter Lorre?’ She said, ‘You’ve got such soft brown eyes,’ and I thought, ‘Isn’t that nice? Peter Lorre.'”
Years later, Ness was having dinner one night with his wife.
“She said ‘You know something honey?’ and I said ‘What’s that?’ She said, ‘You’ve got the coldest eyes of any man I’ve ever known,'” Ness said. “She said, ‘When you’re mad, and you’re angry … you scare me.'”
“I thought to myself, ‘Isn’t that something? What a transition. From Peter Lorre with soft brown eyes to eyes that frighten my wife.”
Ness is a decorated veteran, having earned the Bronze Star, the Soldier’s Medal, and the Purple Heart, among others, but he doesn’t put a lot of stock in them.
“My feeling is, you can’t eat ’em,” Ness said.
“In my book there are no heroes. There are survivors. The heroes have white crosses on their heads. Those are heroes. The rest of us did our job and survived. Period,” Ness said. “You fight for the guy standing next to you, not mother’s apple pie or the flag. That’s all [bull]. You’re fighting for the guy standing next to you. If you let him down, you’re letting the whole outfit down.”
Ness said soldiers learn to live with fear in war, but that doesn’t make them any less afraid.
“After Sicily, I considered myself already dead. The rest was merry grace. It didn’t make any difference to me after a while. If I survived, fine. It was a grace, but I considered myself already gone,” Ness said. “It was the only way I could survive.”
“War is hell,” said Ness. “There’s no excuse for it.”
