German POWs Came to Iowa as Enemies—But One U.S. Farmers Kindness Left They Speechless

The train from Camp Shanks pulled into Alleona station on the morning of April 12th, 1944. And the first thing Edward Ky noticed was the silence. Not the silence of a country at war. Not the silence of ruins, the silence of open space, a silence so vast it seemed to swallow the sound of the locomotive as it hissed to a stop.

Kibb pressed his forehead against wire mesh, the wire mesh covering the window, and looked out at a horizon that stretched further than any horizon he had seen in his 34 years of life. Flat black earth, empty sky, a small wooden platform, two American soldiers standing with rifles, breathing steam into the cold spring air. Behind him, 300 other prisoners shifted in their seats.

Most of them had been captured in Tunisia in May of 1943 when General Van Arnim surrendered what remained of the Africa corpse. They had spent 11 months moving through a chain of camps, Casablanca, a Liberty ship across the Atlantic, Nor Virginia, Camp Shanks in New York. Then 4 days on a train watching a country most of them had only seen in news reels roll past their window.

Cab had not spoken during the entire journey. Before the war in Munich, he had trained uh as an architect and commercial artist. He was 34 years old, unmarried, thin with the careful hands of a man who worked with drawings and design. He had studied fine art and architecture. He had a small studio in Munich where he sketched buildings, ornaments, and religious scenes for for church commissions.

In 1940, the Vermacht had conscripted him. In 1943, the British had captured him in Tunisia with a sketchbook in his pack. He had watched what was left of his hometown burn from photographs. the Red Cross allowed him to see. He did not know if his mother was alive. The prisoners were ordered to disembark. They stepped down onto the platform and Ky saw the faces of the town’s people watching them from behind a wooden fence.

Women, mostly old men, children who had never seen a German outside of a movie poster warning them what the enemy looked like. Their faces were not what Kaib had expected. He had expected hatred. He had expected stones. What he saw instead was something harder to read. A kind of watchful silence, as if the town of Alona was waiting to see what kind of animal had been delivered to their door.

An American voice called out an order. The prisoners lined up in rows of four. That was when Ky heard it. Behind him, in the crowd of town’s people, an old man in a wool coat leaned toward a younger woman and said something in a low voice. The words drifted across the cold air and landed in Kaib’s ear like a stone dropped into still water.

They are only boys. Not one of them is older than my son. Cob turned his head slowly. He looked at the old man. The old man met his eyes. The dialect was unmistakable. It was the German of Schlis Holstein. The German his grandmother had spoken when he was a child in Bavaria. The words she used when she rocked him to sleep.

Here in a train station in the middle of the American prairie on the wrong side of a chainlink fence, a stranger was speaking the language of his dead grandmother. Kaib did not smile. He did not nod. He turned back to face forward because the guards were watching and because he did not know yet what this meant.

The trucks arrived. The prisoners climbed in. Camp Alona was 2 miles west of town. The camp itself was newer than Kib had imagined. 186 buildings arranged in neat rows on land that had been a cornfield the year before. Double rows of 10-ft chain link fence topped with barbed wire. Four wooden guard towers, one at each corner, each with a mounted 30 caliber machine gun.

The wooden barracks smelled of fresh pine. The gravel roads had not yet been rained on enough to settle. Everything felt hurried, provisional, as if the war might end before the paint dried. The commandant assembled the prisoners in the main yard. His name was Lieutenant Colonel Arthur T. Lobdell. He was a career officer in his early 50s with iron gray hair and the posture of a man who had spent decades standing at attention. He was not a combat officer.

He had spent most of his military career in administrations and logistics and the war department had chosen him for this posting cuz Camp Alona did not need a soldier. It needed a manager. Lobell spoke through an interpreter. His voice carried across the yard with no wasted emotion.

The United States, he said, was a signatory to the Geneva Convention of 1929. The prisoners would be treated according to that convention. They would receive the same rations as uh American enlisted soldiers. They would be ha housed in heated barracks. They would receive medical care. They would be allowed to send and receive mail through the International Red Cross.

Would be paid 80 cents per day for their labor, paid in canteen script, redeemable at the camp store for cigarettes, soap, coffee, and other goods. In return, Lobell said the prisoners would work. Iowa had sent 260,000 of its sons to the war. The farms had lost their labor. The caneries had lost their labor. The corn had to come in.

The soybeans had to come in. The peas in southern Minnesota had to come in. If the harvest failed, American soldiers overseas would go hungry. So would American civilians. So would the prisoners themselves. Any any prisoner who refused to work would be placed in solitary confinement on bread and water. Any prisoner who attempted escape would be shot. Lobdell paused.

Then he added something that was not required by regulation and that the interpreter hesitated before translating. He said, “I have been told by men in this town that you are monsters. I have been told that you will burn our barns and poison our wells. I do not know yet whether that is true. What I know is that this camp will be run according to the laws of civilized nations.

You will be treated as men. Whether you behave as men is your decision. Then he dismissed them to their barracks. Kaib was assigned to barracks 17. 50 men to a building, two rows of bunks, coal stoves at each end, windows that opened. His workshop on Turkenstraasa was gone. The building had been hit in 1944. He could no longer picture the door.

That night, the prisoners talked in low voices. Some had been in American hands for almost a year. They had been at Camp Clark in Missouri, at Camp Concordia in Kansas. They had heard rumors about Alona for weeks. The rumors were mostly true. The food was better than the vermach rations they remembered.

The guards were older men, most of them wounded veterans reassigned to stateside duty. There were roughly 40,000 American soldiers guarding some 370,000 German prisoners across this country. and most of the guards did not want to be there anymore than the prisoners did. The war outside the camp continued. In April of 1944, the invasion of France had not yet happened.

The Eastern front was grinding westward. Rome had not fallen. Berlin was being bombed almost every night. None of the prisoners knew when they would go home. None of them knew what they would find when they did. Kib listened and said nothing. He was thinking about the old man on the platform. The next morning before dawn, the prisoners were marched to the mess hall for breakfast. There were eggs.

There was bacon. There was coffee that was actually coffee, not the the bitter chikory substitute the vermuk had served in North Africa. A prisoner two seats down from Maid began to cry silently as he ate. He did not stop eating. He simply cried while he chewed. No one at the table spoke. Everyone understood.

At 6:00, the farm trucks arrived at the main gate. The system was not yet in full operation. Full labor deployment would not begin until May, but the camp administration was running pilot crews on nearby farms to work out the logistics of transportation, guard ratios, and payment. Kibb was assigned to one of the first crews, six prisoners in the back of a flatbed truck driven to a farm 10 mi north of Alona, owned by a widow named Mrs. Voss. Mrs.

Voss was in her 60s. Her husband had died of pneumonia in 1941. Her only son was somewhere in the Pacific on a ship whose name she was not allowed to know. She watched the six Germans climb down from the truck and she did not say a word. The guard for their crew was a corporal named Wendell Miller.

He was 35 years old. He had lost most of of the use of his right leg to a mortar fragment at at Casserine Pass in February of 1943, and he had been reassigned to prisoner guard duty when he returned stateside. He spoke passable German, which he had learned from his mother’s family in Wisconsin. He carried a rifle, but rarely unslung it.

Miller told the prisoners what the widow needed. Fence posts had rotted along the north pasture. 300 yards of new posts needed to be sunk before the cattle could be moved out for spring grazing. It was heavy work. The ground was still half frozen. Sledgehammers, augers, and post hole diggers were leaning against the barn wall. Ky picked up an augur.

He had never used one in his life. The prisoner beside him, a man named Joseph Klene, showed him how. Klene had been a farmer in Bavaria before the war. He was 30. He had a broad, calm face and hands that were already thick with old calluses from 10 months of work at other camps. He demonstrated the motion, the weight shift, the angle of the blade.

Ky copied him. his draftsman’s hands trained to move a pencil in millimeters, adjusted to the crude physics of a farm tool. By noon, his palms were bleeding, Mrs. Voss came out to the the pasture at 12:00 with a basket, sandwiches, apples, a metal thermos of hot coffee. She set the basket on a flat stone at the edge of the field.

She did not look at the prisoners. She walked back to the house. The prisoners ate in silence. The sandwiches were thick with ham and butter. Klene bit into his and closed his eyes. He said quietly in German that he had not eaten butter in 2 years. Kyibbe ate slowly. He was thinking about the old man on the platform and about Colonel Lobdell’s words and about the fact that a woman whose son was at war in the Pacific had just brought him butter.

He did not yet know that a debate was already burning through the town of Alona. On April 15th, the three days after the prisoners arrived, the Casath County advocate published a letter to the editor signed by 37 residents. The letter demanded that Camp Alona be relocated. It warned that armed Germans in the middle of Iowa farmland was an invitation to disaster.

It reminded readers that Kasuth County had sons in Europe. Sons who had died at Anzio and Salernno. Sons who were about to die on beaches whose names no one yet knew. The letter asked what kind of country asked its women to feed the men who killed their children. The letter did not persuade the War Department, but it persuaded the Chamber of Commerce to demand a public meeting.

On the evening of April 22nd, Colonel Lobdit drove into Alana in his staff car and stood in front of 200 towns people in the auditorium of Alana High School. He was not a good public speaker. His voice was flat. His posture was rigid. But he said what he had come to say. He said the prisoners in his camp were for the most part ordinary men who had been drafted into an army that most of them had not wanted to join.

He said the Geneva Convention was not a favor to the Germans. It was a protection for American prisoners of war held in Germany. every meal his prisoners ate, every letter they mailed, every hour they worked at fair wages was a message to Berlin that the same treatment was expected in return. He said if the town wanted to see what Nazism looked like up close, he would arrange a supervised tour of the camp.

Not a spectacle, a visit, so the citizens of Alona could see with their own eyes the men they were being asked to fear. The room was silent for a long moment. Then a woman in the third row stood up. She was in her 40s. Her name was Mrs. Halvorson. Her husband had been at Pearl Harbor. He had survived. Her brother had not survived Guadal Canal.

She said in a voice that shook only slightly that she would take the tour. 6 days later, 30 citizens of Alona were driven out to the camp. Lobdell walked them through the main yard. He showed them the barracks. He showed them the mess messaul workshop where a small group of prisoners had begun making wooden toys in their offduty hours to be given to local children at Christmas.

Lobdell had not planned that display. The prisoners had done it on their own. The tour lasted 90 minutes. When it ended, the town’s people rode home in a quiet convoy of trucks. The Kauith County advocate did not publish another letter demanding the camp’s closure. Edward Caib knew none of this.

He was in the north pasture of Mrs. Vos’s farm sinking his 41st fence post of the day, feeling his hands bleed into the wood. That evening, back at the camp, he sat on his bunk and opened the small canvas bag he had carried since Tunisia. Inside was his sketchbook. He had not opened it in 11 months. He he turned to a blank page and with a stub of pencil drew what he had seen that day.

Not the fence, not the pasture, not the widow. He drew the horizon, the line of Iowa land against the enormous Iowa sky. And below the drawing he wrote in small German script three words here begin at something begins here. He did not know yet what it was. He did not know that within 18 months he would design and lead the construction of a nativity scene 65 figures wide and 12 ft tall.

That he would spend $8,000 of the p prisoners pulled canteen wages on plaster and paint. that he would carve a Madonna in a country whose language he did not speak, in a camp built to hold him prisoner, in the middle of a war he had helped to lose. He did not know that the nativity scene he had not yet imagined would still be lit. every December in the town of Alona, more than 80 years later, long after he was dead, long after everyone who had known him was dead, long after the war itself had faded into black and white photographs in books children no longer read. He

only knew that the horizon in Iowa was very wide and that somewhere behind him in the crowd on a train platform, an old man had spoken his grandmother’s language. And that something he did not yet know what had begun. By the middle of May 1944, the trucks were rolling out of Camp Alona every morning before the sun came up. Six prisoners to a truck.

One guard, a driver from the local farm co-op. They fanned out across four counties, dropped their crews at farm gates and returned at dusk to collect them. By June, the system was serving 140 farms. By August, more than 200. The prisoners planted, hoed, cultivated, and harvested. They cleaned barns.

They sank fence posts. They repaired tractors that had been sitting broken for 2 years because the parts were rationed and the young mechanics were dead in Italy. Edward Kib worked on a rotation of six farms that spring and summer. His hands, once trained to draw the face of a saint in careful pencil lines, learned instead the weight of a scythe. He grew leaner.

His back grew stronger. He kept his sketchbook in the inside pocket of his prison jacket. And at night, by the light of the coal stove, he drew what he had seen. A rusted plow, a red barn against a green sky, the face of a farmer he did not know the name of. He drew because it was the only way he knew to hold on to who he had been before the war took him.

The 80 cents a day accumulated in the canteen ledger. The prisoners bought cigarettes, chocolate, soap, writing paper, thread to mend their uniforms. Oh, some saved every scent. Kai saved every cent. He did not yet know what he was saving for. The pea harvest of southern Minnesota that summer was one of the largest in the state’s recorded history.

The caneries could not process it fast enough. Every able-bodied worker in three counties had been drafted or was already deployed. The War Food Administration made an emergency request and Camp Alona sent 180 prisoners north on flatbed trucks. They worked 11 days without rest. They they saved an estimated 65% of the crop.

In one Minnesota canery, a foreman who had lost his younger brother at Casserine Pass stood watching the German prisoners empty crates onto the sorting belt. And he turned to the plant manager and said only in a low voice, “God help me. We needed them.” The total value of prisoner labor across Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas over the course of the program was estimated at more than $3 million.

In the currency of the war years, that was not a number. That was a harvest that fed a country at war. But not everything inside the uh wire was silent surrender. There were men in Camp Alona who did not accept what was happening. They were not the majority. They never were. But they were organized and they were dangerous and they wore the same gray uniforms as everyone else.

Most of them had been Vafan SS. A few had been Luftvafa officers from down bombers. They had been captured later than the Africa corpse men. And they still believed. They believed the rush would win. Then they believed that any German prisoner who worked cheerfully for the Americans, who accepted their coffee, who learned three words of English, was a traitor to the Vul.

They ran a shadow court inside the barracks. It had no formal name. The prisoners called it quietly the Honor Tribunal. It met at night in the shower rooms and in the coal storage sheds wherever the American guards could not hear. It summoned men. It accused them. It sentenced them. Some sentences were public humiliation.

Some were beatings. In one caseless at another in Arizona at Papago Park in March of 1944, a German prisoner named Verer Drexler was tried by such a tribunal within 7 hours of of arriving at the camp and hanged in a shower stall before dawn. Seven prisoners were later convicted by an American military court and executed at Fort Levvenworth.

It was the largest mass execution in United States military history. Colonel Lobdell knew what could happen. He read every report. He and his intelligence officer, a captain named Walter Rap, who spoke fluent German, began quietly separating the hardline men into a segregated compound within the camp. They read the mail.

They listened to the informants. They moved the most dangerous men out to Camp Alva in Oklahoma, which had been designated as the holding facility for committed Nazis. Kaib was not on any list. He kept his head down. He worked. He drew. He said little in the barracks, even when spoken to, but he watched.

He noticed the small ways in which men signaled to each other that the war was not over inside the wire, no matter what the maps in the newspaper said. Then came the winter of 1944. In December, the German army launched its last great offensive in the Arden forest of Belgium. American newspapers called it the Battle of the Bulge.

19 thou th,000 and American soldiers were killed. 47,000 were wounded. 23,000 were captured. In Kasath County, Iowa, three telegrams arrived at three farmhouses in the space of a single week. Three sons, three flags folded into triangles, three mothers who would not come outside for the milk delivery.

The p prisoners at Camp Alona felt it before they were told. Something changed in the way the guards looked at them. Something changed in the way the farmers spoke to them when they spoke to them at all. Mrs. Voss stopped bringing the noon basket for 2 weeks. When she resumed, the sandwiches were smaller. She still did not meet their eyes. Kibb understood.

he would have understood in any language. And then in the spring of 1945 came the news reels. On May 7th, Germany surrendered. In the summer of 1945, Colonel Lobdell assembled every prisoner in the camp Messaul and screening them a documentary film that had been assembled by the United States Army Signal Corps.

The film had no music. It had no narration in German. It did not need any. It showed bhanvald. It showed beraggan belen. It showed dao. It showed the bulldozers pushing the dead into pits. It showed the ovens. It showed the soldiers walking through the camps with handkerchiefs pressed to their faces. It showed the children.

It showed what what had been done in the name of the country. These men had worn a uniform for the film lasted 42 minutes. When the lights came up, no one moved. Some prisoners were weeping. Some sat with their heads in their hands. Some, the hardliners in the back rows, looked straight ahead with faces set like stone and said in low voices that it was American propaganda, that it was staged, that it could not be true.

The men around them did not answer. Joseph Klene, the Bavarian farmer, walked back to barracks 17 that night and lay on his bunk with his boots still on and did not move until the following morning. Kyibb sat on the edge of his own bunk with his sketchbook open on his knees, pencil in his hand, and drew nothing at all.

The next day he did not go to the farms. The next day he walked to the workshop shed on the north side of the compound and he sat down on a wooden crate and he began to draw a Madonna. He would tell people decades later that the nativity was not a project he had chosen. He would say that it was a project that had chosen him.

That in the days after the film he could not sleep, could not eat, could not work in the fields. and that the only thing that could hold his hand still was to hold a piece of plaster in them. He asked Colonel Lobdell for permission. He asked the prisoners for money from the canteen fund. They gave him $8,000. It was almost every cent they had earned.

He asked five other men to help him. They agreed. They were not sculptors. They were bakers and mechanics and clerks. But Ky taught them in the shed in the evenings after the farm work was done. He built armatures of scrap wire. He mixed plaster from bags shipped in from De Moine. He designed faces from memory and from imaginations.

Faces of shepherds and kings and angels. Faces of a mother and a child. Faces that did not look German or American or anything at all except human. They worked from June to December. 65 figures, half-life size, a scene 12 ft across, a stable, a star, a Madonna with a face that a Bavarian designer had shaped in an American prison camp 6 months after seeing what his country had done at Ducko.

The town’s people of Alona did not know it was being built. Kibbe insisted on three conditions before the first figure was even finished. The nativity when it was done must be given to the town. It must remain in Alona forever. It must be free to view and it must be displayed only at Christmas.

Colonel Lobell agreed to all three. On the evening of December 24th, 1945, the doors of the workshop shed opened and the citizens of Alona were invited to see what their prisoners had made. They came on foot through the snow. Christmas Eve 1945. The temperature outside the wire was 14° below zero. The wind moved across the flat Iowa land the way it had moved across it for 10,000 winters.

Before there was was a town called Alone um before there was a country called Germany. Before there was a war, the town’s people walked from their parked cars to the workshop, shed in coats, buttoned to the throat, their breath hanging white in the air. Some carried children on their shoulders. Uh, some walked alone.

Colonel Lobell stood by the doors in his dress uniform. He did not speak. He simply opened the shed and stepped aside. Inside, the light was warm. Kibb and his five assistants had rigged electric lamps behind the figures, so that the plaster seemed to glow from within. 65 faces, half-life size, a stable of rough boards salvaged from a torn down barn near Whitmore, straw on the floor, shepherds with weathered hands, three kings in painted robes, angels with folded wings, and at the center a mother bent over a child in a manger. her face carved by a man who

six months earlier had watched a film of what his country had done to other mothers and other children. The town’s people moved through the shed in silence. Kaib stood in the corner in his prisoner’s jacket and watched them. He did not speak English. He did not need to. He watched a farmer take off his hat.

He watched a boy of nine reach up and touch the hem of a shepherd’s robe with one gloved finger. He watched a woman in a black wool coat stop in front of the Madonna and close her eyes and stand there without moving for almost a full minute. Then the woman opened her eyes and walked directly toward him. Her name was Ms. Halverson.

She was the woman who had stood up in the high school auditorium 18 months earlier and volunteered to take the tour. She had lost her brother at Guadal Canal. She had in the past year also lost her nephew at the Battle of the Bulge. Her sister had not spoken since the telegram arrived. Mrs. Halvorson stopped in front of Kaib.

Corporal Miller stood beside her, ready to translate. She looked at Kib for a long moment. She was not smiling. She was not weeping. Her her face held something that was neither forgiveness nor accusation. It was something older than both. She said through Miller that her nephew had died in a snow field in Belgium a year ago this month.

That her sister had not put up a Christmas tree since. that she herself had not been able to walk into a church all year. She said, “You did not give my nephew back. Nothing gives him back.” She paused. She looked at the Madonna behind him. She said, “But you gave me back Christmas Eve.

” She turned and walked out of the shed without waiting for a reply. Kaib stood where he was. He did not move for a long time. Corporal Miller stood beside him and said nothing because there was nothing to say. Outside the snow began to fall harder. Inside the electric lamps hummed against the plaster faces. The re-reatriation orders came 4 weeks later.

The prisoners of Camp Alona were not most of them sent directly home. This was the part of the story that would be quietly left out of the newspaper accounts for decades. The United States under agreements made at Yala and Potdam transferred large numbers of German prisoners to Great Britain and France in the first months of 1946 to serve as reconstruction labor.

They rebuilt roads, they cleared rubble, they worked in mines. Some of them worked in those countries for another two years before they were finally released to return to a Germany that had been divided into four occupation zones and was starving through the winter of 1946 and 1947. Ky was among them. He was shipped from New York to Liverpool in February of 1946 and from Liverpool 2 to a labor camp in the north of England where he worked clearing bomb sites in Manchester until August of 1947.

He was 37 years old when he finally walked back into what remained of Munich. His studio on Turkstrasa was gone. The building had been hit in 1944. His mother had died of pneumonia in the winter of 1945, 3 months before he had begun carving the Madonna. He did not learn of her death until he arrived at the address where she had been living with his aunt and saw this small framed photograph on the shelf. He rebuilt slowly.

He found work as an architectural draftsman and designer for church restoration projects across Bavaria. He never married. He kept the sketchbook he had carried through Tunisia and Iowa on a shelf above his desk for the rest of his life. He did not often speak of the war. When Americans wrote to him in the 1960s asking about Camp Alona for local histories they were compiling, he answered their letters carefully and briefly.

He signed each letter with his full name and the words with respect. He died in Munich in the winter of 1979. He was 69 years old. Among his papers, his niece found a single photograph. It was of the workshop shed at at Camp Alona taken from the outside on the evening of December 24th, 1945. Snow on the ground, light spilling from the open doors written on the back in small careful German script were four words. Dortabish galaped. There I lived.

The nativity remained in Alona. It was housed for many years in a small building on the county fairgrounds. Every December, without fail, the town brought it out. Every December, this town’s people came. Children who had been carried on their father’s shoulders in 1945, brought their own children and then their grandchildren.

>> The rules Kibbe had insisted upon were kept. It was always free. It never left the town. It was displayed only at Christmas. In 2004, a museum was opened in in Alona to preserve the history of the camp. The wooden barracks were long gone. The land had returned to soybeans and corn, but the museum held the letters, the photographs, the ledgers of 80 cents a day entered in careful pencil handwriting.

prisoner by prisoner, hour by hour. It held the names. Colonel Arthur Lobell died in 1957. Corporal Wendell Miller died in 1981. Mrs. Vase, the widow whose fence posts had bled Edward Kib’s hands in April of 1944, lived until 1969. Her son came home from the Pacific in the fall of 1945 and took over the farm. He never spoke publicly about the German prisoners who had worked his mother’s land, but he kept in a drawer in the farmhouse kitchen a small wooden toy horse that one of them had carved and left on the doorstep the morning before

they were sent away. The historians who study this period argue with some evidence that the the treatment of German prisoners in the United States during the Second World War had consequences that outlasted the war by 50 years. that the young men who returned to Germany, having eaten American food and slept in heated American barracks and been paid fair American wages, carried that memory into the political rebuilding of West Germany.

that the Marshall plan worked in part because the ground had already been prepared one farm at a time, one basket of sandwiches at a time, one carved Madonna at a time in places like Alona, Iowa. That is the argument of historians. The argument of the men who were there was simpler. They said, “We worked. We were fed. We came home. The nativity is still lit every December.

In 2026, it will be 81 years since Idoard Kib finished carving the last shepherd. The building has changed. The town has changed. The children who first saw it are almost all gone now. But on Christmas Eve, when the doors are opened and the electric lamps are switched on behind the plaster faces, something happens in the room that has been happening in that room in one form or another since 1945.

An old man once said in the language of Schleswig Holstein on a train platform in the middle of the American prairie that the prisoners stepping down from the train were only boys. Not one of them was older than his son. He was right. They were boys on both sides of the wire. boys who had been sent to kill each other by governments that were older and colder and further away than any of them would ever fully understand.

Some of those boys came home, some did not. Some carried what they had seen for the rest of their lives, and some spoke of it, and some never spoke of it at all. But in a small town in Iowa on Christmas Eve, the light still comes on and the faces the prisoners carved in the winter after the news reels still look out from the straw.

And that is the part of the story worth remembering. Not the war, uh, not the wire, the light. The camp Alona Pobio Museum in Alona, Iowa opened its doors in 2004. The nativity scene designed by former prisoner Edward Kibb uh and built by his fellow prisoners in the winter of 1945 is displayed free of charge every December exactly as they asked.

If you go, you will see it. The light still comes