“Can We Have Leftovers?” German POW Women Asked, Americans Gave Them Coca Cola and Hamburgers

Leftovers (Texas, 1945)

Chapter 1 — The Door Opens

The mess hall door swung open, and twelve German women stopped at the threshold as if they had hit an invisible wall.

Inside, long tables were piled with food—food that did not belong to wartime Europe, food that belonged to a world that had not been burned down. White bread stacked in thick slices. Real butter, pale and soft in metal pans. Trays of hamburgers still warm from the grill, their smell rolling out into the hallway like a force.

.

.

.

For a moment none of the women moved. They stared with the stunned attention of people who had learned that hope was dangerous.

One of them, barely twenty, named Greta Zimmermann, turned toward the American sergeant who had escorted them. Her English was broken, shaped by school lessons and fear.

“Can we have leftovers?” she asked.

The sergeant blinked, as if he had misheard. Then he laughed—surprised, not mocking.

“Leftovers?” he said. “Ma’am, this is all for you.”

Greta’s face did not change. She looked past him at the steam rising from the trays, waiting for the trick to reveal itself. None of them believed him.

They had been told Americans were wasteful enemies. Cruel. Undisciplined. They had been prepared for deprivation.

Instead, they had been brought to a room where abundance waited without a price tag.

Chapter 2 — America Through a Train Window

The women had arrived in Texas after days of movement that blurred into one long, uncomfortable transit: ships, holding stations, trains, trucks. Three days on a train alone across an ocean of land.

Through the small windows of the prisoner cars they watched America unfold—fields stretching so far they looked like they might never end, towns untouched by bombs, children waving from farmhouse porches as if war were only a rumor carried by newspapers.

Greta had pressed her forehead against the glass and felt the vibration of steel rails. In Germany, every city she knew had been cracked open—roofless buildings, blackened walls, streets that smelled of smoke and dust. Here, church steeples rose intact against a blue sky. Houses stood straight. Roads were filled with ordinary traffic.

The sight unsettled her more than ruins had. Ruins made sense. This did not.

When they stepped onto the platform at Fort Sam Houston, the heat struck them first—Texas heat, thick and still, wrapping around their wool uniforms like a second skin. Dust hung in the late afternoon light.

An American officer, young—twenty-five maybe—gestured them toward waiting trucks. His face carried neither hatred nor pity, only professional distance.

“Welcome to Texas,” he said in careful German. “You’ll be processed. Assigned quarters, then fed.”

The word fed hung in the air—simple, and almost unbelievable.

Greta glanced at Ilsa Weber, older, a nurse from Hamburg who had worked in a field hospital until Germany collapsed. Ilsa’s cheekbones were sharp beneath pale skin. The ocean crossing had taken weight from all of them. The Red Cross had provided basic rations, enough to keep them alive, not enough to make them feel human.

As the truck rolled through gates topped with wire, past guard towers where soldiers watched with rifles resting easily in their arms, Greta waited for shouting. For blows. For humiliation.

None came.

The compound was enclosed, but it looked clean. Organized. Almost ordinary.

Ilsa leaned closer and whispered in German, “This is where we’ll die. They’re just being civilized about it.”

Greta wanted to agree. It would have been easier. But something about the guards’ faces did not match that story. They looked tired. Alert. Human. Not cruel.

That difference, small as it was, began to loosen the first threads of what Greta had been taught.

Chapter 3 — The Hamburger and the Bottle

The first evening, the women were led to the mess hall—the same door, the same threshold, the same moment that would stay with Greta for the rest of her life.

Inside, ceiling fans turned slowly. The smell hit them before they crossed fully into the room: meat cooking, fresh bread, and something sweet and unfamiliar.

Long tables ran the length of the hall. At the far end, American soldiers in white aprons stood behind serving stations, lifting lids off steaming trays.

“Form a line,” an officer said in German. His accent was precise, learned from classes rather than life.

They shuffled forward, uncertain. The cooks watched them approach with expressions Greta could not read.

One cook, older, with thick forearms and a stained apron, smiled when Greta reached the counter. It was a real smile, the kind that creased the corners of the eyes.

“Hungry?” he asked in English.

Greta nodded, not trusting her voice.

He loaded her tray without hesitation. A hamburger thick and shining with juice. Green beans cooked with bacon. Mashed potatoes with butter melting into yellow pools. White bread with more butter.

At the end of the line, a young soldier handed her a cold bottle in dark glass, beaded with condensation.

“Coca-Cola,” he said slowly. “You’ll like it.”

Greta carried the tray to a table, moving as if one wrong step might break the spell. Around her the women sat in silence, staring at their plates. Ilsa’s tears ran down her face without sound.

“It’s a trick,” someone whispered in German. “They’ll take it away.”

But no one took it away.

The guards stood by the doors, talking among themselves. The cooks cleaned their stations. Life continued as if feeding hungry women were not a moral event, but a simple duty.

Greta lifted the hamburger. The bun was soft beneath her fingers. She bit down and the taste burst across her tongue—salt, fat, the char of the grill.

Her body responded before her mind caught up. Trembling, she ate slowly, forcing herself not to devour it, knowing hunger can turn even good food into sickness if you rush.

A woman named Anna drank the Coca-Cola and gasped, eyes wide.

“What is this?”

Ilsa answered thickly, still crying. “Sugar,” she said. “Just sugar and bubbles.”

They ate in silence, the only sounds forks scraping metal trays and the hiss of carbonation.

When Greta finished, she stared at her empty plate as if it were proof of something she did not yet know how to name.

Then she stood.

Chapter 4 — “Can We Have Leftovers?”

Greta walked back to the serving station on legs that felt too weak for courage. Her heart hammered. She was not sure what she was afraid of—being punished for asking, or being laughed at, or being reminded that she was still an enemy in an enemy’s uniform.

The older cook straightened as she approached.

“Can we have leftovers?” Greta asked in broken English. The words came out smaller than she meant them to.

At first he frowned, not understanding.

Then his face cleared. He laughed—startled, almost sad.

“Leftovers?” he repeated. He glanced at the trays, still half full, and shook his head as if the question hurt him.

“Ma’am,” he said, and his voice softened, “this is all for you. You can eat as much as you want. That’s how it works here.”

Behind Greta, the other women had stopped eating. They watched her, listened, held their breath.

The cook gestured with his ladle. “Go on. Get whatever you want.”

No one moved.

Abundance can feel like a trap to people trained by hunger. Their lives had been measured in ration cards and shrinking portions, in substituting turnips for meat, in pretending to be full so someone else could eat.

Greta’s mind kept searching for the cost.

But the cook simply waited, patient, as if he had all the time in the world.

Finally Anna stood, walked forward, and held out her tray.

The cook filled it again as if that were the most normal act on earth.

One by one, the others followed.

That night in the barracks, Greta lay awake listening to the fans and the distant sounds of the camp settling into sleep. She felt something shift inside her—not a collapse, not a sudden conversion, but a quiet rearranging.

The propaganda had been clear: Americans were decadent, wasteful, soft. Their softness would be their weakness.

But what she had seen in that mess hall was not weakness.

It was power—power so certain of itself that it could afford mercy. Power that did not need to prove its strength by making hungry women suffer.

That realization frightened her more than cruelty would have. Cruelty would have confirmed what she expected. This did not.

Chapter 5 — Laundry Steam and a Hard Kind of Peace

The camp settled into routine.

Wake at dawn. Roll call. Work assignments—laundry, kitchen duty, maintenance, clerical tasks. The Americans kept them busy but did not brutalize them. There were rules and structure, but no beatings, no starvation. The discipline felt like a system, not a personal hatred.

Greta was assigned to the laundry, a long building thick with steam and the sharp smell of soap. She worked alongside American women—local civilians hired by the military, housewives and mothers earning extra money.

At first there were no conversations. The American women watched the German prisoners with wary eyes. The Germans kept their heads down.

Then one morning, an American woman named Betty dropped a basket of wet sheets. They spilled across the concrete floor, and she cursed with a sharp word that needed no translation.

Greta moved automatically, kneeling to help gather the sheets. Betty hesitated, then knelt too. For a moment, they worked in synchronized rhythm, hands moving, bodies sharing the simple labor of cleaning up a mistake.

“Thank you,” Betty said when they finished.

Greta answered, “Bitte,” then corrected herself quickly. “You’re welcome.”

Betty’s eyes widened. “You speak English?”

“A little,” Greta said. “From school.”

Betty nodded slowly, then said something that made the air feel heavier.

“My son’s over there,” she said. “Germany. With the occupation forces.”

Greta didn’t know what to say. The distance between them was enormous—built from years of speeches and blood and graves.

But they were standing in the same steam, folding the same sheets.

“I hope he’s safe,” Greta said at last.

Betty looked at her a long moment. Then her mouth softened into a small, sad smile.

“Me too,” she said.

It was not forgiveness. It was not reconciliation in any grand sense. It was something quieter: two women acknowledging that war had threatened what mattered most to both of them, and that neither could repair that damage alone.

Chapter 6 — The Feast When the War Ended

In late summer, word came that Japan had surrendered. The war was finally, completely over.

American soldiers erupted in celebration—shouting, throwing caps, embracing, laughing with the relief of men who had been carrying fear for too long.

The German women watched from the barracks, uncertain how to react. The war being over meant they might go home. It also meant they would return to ruins.

That night the Americans held a feast in the mess hall. Streamers hung from the ceiling. A small band played swing music in the corner—soldiers with instruments, the notes bouncing off walls that had heard too much silence.

The cooks outdid themselves: hamburgers, hot dogs, potato salad, coleslaw, apple pie cooling on racks, Coca-Cola bottles lined in crates like treasure.

A young guard from Kansas—Eddie, they called him—appeared at the barracks door.

“Come on,” he said. “You’re invited.”

“We’re prisoners,” Greta answered.

“Tonight,” he said, “you’re guests. Come eat.”

They entered awkwardly, unsure where to put their hands, their eyes, their history. But the Americans made space. They pulled out chairs. They handed out plates piled high.

Someone took Ilsa’s hand and pulled her into a dance. Greta watched Ilsa spin and laugh for the first time since arrival. Her thin frame moved to music that belonged to no nation.

An American corporal approached Greta and held out his hand.

“Dance?”

“I don’t know how,” she admitted. “Not to this.”

“Neither do I,” he said, grinning. “We’ll figure it out.”

They stepped onto the floor clumsy and laughing, stepping on each other’s feet. Greta felt dizzy with the unreality of it—hamburger grease on her fingers, the warmth of another human hand, the sound of joy in a place that had once been only wire and caution.

Later, she sat with a bottle of Coca-Cola sweating in her hand and watched the celebration continue.

The chaplain—older, with gray threaded through his hair—sat beside her.

“Doesn’t make sense, does it?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Good things and terrible things exist at the same time,” he told her. “That’s the hardest lesson.”

Greta stared at the room—American soldiers laughing, German women eating, music pushing back against the past for a few hours.

“How do you live with that?” she asked.

The chaplain’s answer was quiet and steady.

“You choose which one to feed,” he said. “Every day you wake up and choose.”

Chapter 7 — What She Carried Home

In the fall, repatriation began. Paperwork, lists, dates. Some women had homes to return to. Some did not. All had uncertainty.

On Greta’s last night, the Americans held a farewell meal. Not celebration this time, but something closer to respect. The mess hall windows fogged with steam. The familiar foods were there—hamburgers, pie, Coca-Cola cold enough to sting the hand.

Betty arrived in her Sunday best and gave Greta a small package wrapped in brown paper.

Inside was an American cookbook, recipes in English.

“So you can remember,” Betty said.

Greta held it carefully, as if it were fragile.

“I won’t forget,” she said.

They embraced, awkward and genuine—two women who had found a thin line of friendship in the machinery of history.

Before leaving, the chaplain pressed something into Greta’s palm: a small wooden cross, hand-carved, the grain still visible.

“Remember,” he said. “Doubt is the beginning of understanding.”

In January 1946, the trucks rolled out before dawn. Greta watched the camp recede in the mirror—the barracks, the mess hall door, the laundry building.

At the port, as the ship pulled away, the American coast shrank into a thin line.

“What do we do now?” Ilsa asked.

Greta touched the cookbook in her bag and felt the outline of the wooden cross in her pocket.

“We rebuild,” she said. “We tell the truth.”

She did not know if anyone would believe her. But she knew what she had seen: not softness, not decadence, not a trick—just a stubborn, ordinary American decency expressed in the simplest way.

A hungry enemy was fed.

A frightened young woman asked for leftovers.

And the answer—gentle, surprised, and sure—cracked a wall that bombs and bullets could never reach.

“This is all for you,” the cook had said.

And in that moment, the propaganda began to die.