It was impossible to sleep in more than short bursts what with the noise of the wheels on the track, the constant battering we got as we bumped against the sides and each other, and the cramps in your joints. All I did was catnap, afraid to go into a deeper sleep, I think, in case I didn’t wake up. The feeling of suffocation was immense, what with being locked inside this hellish crate, pressed up against other men’s stinking bodies, you could imagine yourself just drifting into unconsciousness and never waking up again. I managed to survive the eternity of that train journey towards my long sentence of imprisonment, watching the track under my feet, through the cracks in the floor as the miles sped by.
It seemed never-ending. Sometimes we slowed down for a passing train and those at the side tried to peep through the gaps to see where we were. Then we moved off slowly again and speeded up and then off again. Mile after mile after mile, speeding on and on, as we went further into Germany, across Poland out towards the East. How much longer? How much further? On we rattled and banged about in these brutish conditions, getting weaker and weaker and more disheartened.
On the third morning, the train came to a juddering halt. Was this it? Had we arrived? There was a long silence and nobody dared speak. What was going on outside? What was going to happen next?
Then all hell broke loose. A tremendous noise of banging and clattering, men shouting, boots thumping, and doors smashing back. We were fourth or fifth down and our door was unbolted, pushed back and sunlight streamed in. We shaded our eyes and you could see what a sorry state we were all in. Nobody wanted to catch anybody else’s eye because what you saw was just a reflection of yourself, reminding you how low you had fallen. Ashamed of what was happening to us.
Dirty and dishevelled, hunched in pain from the confinement and illness, some managed to stagger out of the door and get down onto the track. Others just fell out, broken men, and didn’t get up again. I had difficulty getting out, practically crawling along the truck floor after the others to get to the door. My knees and legs nearly buckled under me as I touched the ground with my feet.
Free at last! Fresh air and space to move about. Then you saw where you had ended up after all that travelling – another dirty railway station siding in some scrubby countryside in the middle of a country you’d never heard of, the only signs you could make out could have been in Arabic for all you knew. Where in God’s name were we?
East Prussia, heading for Stalag 20A at Thorn (now Torun, Poland), which was the administrative centre for processing prisoners into the system. According to my International Red Cross records, I arrived there on 10 June and was registered and issued with my metal identity dog tag on which my POW no: 10511 was stamped. I signed my admission card on 26 June 1940 but I have no recollection of staying there. At some stage I was sent on to Stalag 20B at Marienburg (now Malork, Poland) near the Baltic coast which was where I was registered and then sent out to labour camps where I stayed until 23 January 1945.
It was impossible to know exactly where you were most of the time. Always hungry and tired, always afraid and in unfamiliar surroundings, it’s not surprising that we didn’t know what was going on. You joined a queue here, waited in a line there. You only thought about how to get through the day and survive the night. You lived in the present moment. I met so many different men, fellow prisoners, coming and going that I lost any sense of time or place.
How many prisoners of war were there? Where were they all staying? We were moved around all the time, from camp to camp, and very few men found themselves with people from their own regiments, always being divided and separated, divided again, and sent to various camps and forts, miles from the main Stalag. I don’t know if it was a deliberate act and a way of controlling us or just due to the sheer volume of men. All I know is that we were always marching somewhere and always for long distances.
We arrived at an enormous field camp where thousands of men were spread over the area. There were many different nationalities but they all looked in the same poor condition – dirty and half-starved. They were standing, sitting and lying down wherever there was space. There were some small tents pitched on the site and some large marquees which served as kitchen and canteen and quarters for the officers. We queued to have our papers checked and stamped and told to join a line to get our first bit of food. Queuing is what prisoners did most of their waking time.
We were told to stay there and get our soup because if we moved we would lose our place and wouldn’t get anything. We had to wait patiently for our turn, hoping that the food wouldn’t run out before we got there. The food turned out to be soup which was at least hot and wet and helped take the edge off our raging hunger. I think it was then that my stomach started to learn not to expect much, certainly not ever to be full again; to be satisfied with whatever it was given to keep starvation at bay. Mostly soup as it turned out.
I can’t be sure how long we stayed there, a couple of nights, maybe, sleeping on the ground, getting a wash with a tin mug full of water we were allowed from a standpipe; and getting more soup. One time when I came out of the kitchen tent, an armed guard indicated with his rifle that he wanted us to move elsewhere, directing us towards another queue. Another guard pointed at his head and mimed a pair of scissors with two fingers, shouting at us, ‘Haare schneiden,’ – hair cut. Now I didn’t fancy having my hair cut, or to be more precise, head shaved (I had seen what the other men looked like) so I decided to take a little stroll around instead and see what was going on.
I noticed a group of men gathered across the other side of the field and could see a horse and cart. Now I’m a nosy so-and-so and like to know what’s going on and I decided to go over. I thought it was better to be doing something than just standing around waiting for goodness knows what to happen next. I walked past the end of the barber’s tent and out across the open field. The grass was uneven and worn in patches and I had to watch my step, so I was busy looking at my feet.
Suddenly I felt somebody grab my shoulder from behind. I jerked to a stop and spun round to come face to face with a German officer. ‘Du,’ – you, ‘arbeiten’ – work. He pushed me forwards and I stumbled on towards the other men who were about to get in the back of this vehicle. It was a battered old farm cart drawn by a tired-looking horse, with an equally tired-looking civilian driver holding the reins. The officer counted us on. ‘Vierzehn, ja’ – fourteen, yes. ‘Das ist gut’ – that’s good. There were two armed guards with us, one up front and the other at the back with us squeezed in together. And off we went, bumping along over the uneven ground until we reached an exit out of the wire-fenced compound where a guard waved us through and out.
You can’t plan these things, can you? You don’t know what fate has in store. Didn’t have any choice, anyway – that’s the way it goes. Curiosity got the better of me. I was going to say I was lucky to join these thirteen other men but you might say it was out of the frying pan into the fire. I have thought about this a lot lately, and still wonder what would have happened if I had stayed and had my hair shaved off. Where would I have gone? Whilst it was no picnic what happened next, I do think I was saved from something far worse.
* * *
The countryside we drove through didn’t look that different from Northern France except for the sheer scale of it: immense stretches of open empty land with town and hamlets much further apart. There were fields lying fallow, others planted with row upon row of crops as far as the eye could see, broken up by the occasional wooded area of conifers and derelict farm buildings. We were driving in a region known as Kreis Rosenberg and we passed near a town called Freystadt.
We finally arrived at a rundown farmhouse. A rough-looking man came out and talked to the driver who hitched the reins to a post and got down, followed by the two guards. In a mixture of German and Polish from the sound of it, the guards exchanged words with the farmer who then came over to take a look at us. He returned to the guards and as he talked started pointing to various buildings around. We got
down from the cart and, with a rifle nudging us in the back, walked towards the farmhouse.
I thought for a moment that we were going inside to meet the farmer’s wife and have a drink, perhaps. Instead the farmer took us round the back to a large wooden building and pointed to the door at one end. The guard shouted, ‘Hinein,’ – go inside. Oh God what on earth was going on? ‘Hier schlafen,’ – sleep here, said the farmer. It was a cowshed. Welcome to our new home. From cattle truck to cattle shed.
It was dark and very smelly inside. Much worse than the stables behind Grandma’s house which I used to clean out for my brothers, Alf and Reg. The shed was divided in two by a wall which came to about six inches from the roof. There was a herd of twenty-five to thirty cows one end and fourteen men at the other. Wooden boards had been put down on the floor, which was better than the cobbles the animals had next door. You could hear their hooves all the time as they moved about. The straw in their stalls didn’t seem to dampen the sound much. There were seven bunk beds crammed in, barely room to move between them. There were a few thick glass bricks high up but hardly any light came through the dirt and grime on them.
We found out later how dark it really was and stifling too, when the double doors were shut and the bar put across outside to lock us in at night. Middle of summer, of course, and no ventilation and the cows next door giving off a terrific heat as well as. So one night, when everybody was asleep, we knocked out a couple of the glass bricks to get in some fresh air. Boy, did you need fresh air with that lot next door.
I managed to get a top bunk which was lucky as I knew about rats on farms and didn’t want to give any of those big buggers a chance to nibble my toes as my feet hung over the end of my bed. Fortunately the rats stayed away preferring the livestock next door. If you opened the doors to the cowshed and clapped your hands, dozens of rats, some the size of a cat, mothers and little babies, shot out from under the straw from every corner. The disadvantage of being on the top was that you were nearer the roof and could see the mice running along the gap at the top of the wall. Mice didn’t bother me.
Although the stench from the cows was horrible, we were grateful later on in winter for the heat generated by the animals next door. To be honest you were so exhausted all the time that nothing much disturbed you once your head hit the straw mattress. There was a wood burning stove which was out of action most of the time we were there, so it was no use for heating the shed. We didn’t have any fuel anyway except what we could find and bring back in dry weather.
We managed, very occasionally, to have a hot (well, warm) bath, taking water from the outside tap in a bucket and heating it up on the stove if we’d managed to get it going. The farmer’s wife had left us an old tin bath which was hanging on a nail outside. It was a real palaver but worth it, even for a scoop or two of dirty, grey lukewarm water over you. I used to share the water with Tommy Harrington, one of the fellows I made friends with, and we scrubbed each other’s backs. Goodness, what dirt that came off us! It wasn’t surprising that we got filthy dirty, considering where we were sent to work. I suppose the sound of blasting in the distance should have given us a clue as to what was going on nearby and why we’d been sent there.
As soon as we had seen our quarters, we were led out of the farm and marched about 5km away. The next shock after our sleeping quarters was that we were not going to work on the farm as we thought but going to a stone quarry. We were sent to work immediately. No training was needed, no special equipment just a hammer and a pair of strong hands for breaking up the rocks.
Once the blasters had done their job with the dynamite on the rock face, we were called in to break up the boulders into pieces and load the stones into railway trucks, which then went off to be used in construction work and repairing roads and railways. We worked in pairs smashing the rocks up with 7lb sledgehammers and then when we had a load, we scooped them up into these large, heavy, wooden boxes. They had handles at each end so we had to carry them together down a slope to the railway trucks which were waiting on the tracks below.
Each truck was numbered with a white card which had 10T, 15T, 20T or whatever tonnage it was, printed on it, and we had to tip the stones out in to the trucks. We kept on doing this for hours on end, every muscle hurting, our hands cracked and bleeding – no shovels or gloves for this work. Was this what I was going to be doing for the rest of the war, however long that might be? Twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Was this better than being shot in the head? Over and done with quickly. No more fear, pain, suffering or humiliation like this.
Every day was much the same: up at 6am exhausted, wash under the tap, coffee, walk to quarry, work, lunch, more work until 6 or 7pm, walk back, supper, go to bed exhausted. The guards changed about four times during the day and we had about half an hour’s break for lunch. We were lucky if we got a piece of bread as normally it was just a serving of soup brought up by cart in a milk churn from the farm. It was always rubbish anyway.
In the evening we got our bread, which was supplied by the Germans, and a bit of margarine or sometimes, instead, a piece of leberwurst, liver sausage. We got a little bit more of that because I think it was cheap as the locals liked this sort of sausage. Every little bit extra helped to fill us up but, of course, it was never enough. We knew what the rations should have been: 500gms of bread and piece of margarine about the size of a match box, but we never had that.
We only got to hear about other POWs and how they were being treated later on when we moved about more and mixed with chaps from other camps further away. At least we weren’t down the mines which were really dangerous places to be. Filthy air, gas explosions and tunnel collapses. We were stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with no news coming our way and we had no idea what was happening in the war. All we knew was our own little world; a world of slavery to our German masters. We were doing their dirty work and helping them instead of helping our own men and our own country. That was a dreadful feeling. We couldn’t take pride in anything we were doing. We were the lowest of the low.
We talked a lot about this among ourselves and someone came up with the idea of a bit of sabotage. To do something to make us feel less like victims. Something which would hinder the work but not get us into trouble. Nothing worth getting shot for. Most of the time we only had a couple of guards hanging around while we were working and they weren’t watching us all the time. They got bored and went off for a smoke or eat the bread and cheese they had brought with them. They were meant to supervise what we did and check the loading of the trucks but they didn’t.
We did the same work every day, breaking up endless rocks and shifting them to the trucks, so we couldn’t do anything obvious like stopping work or slowing down even. There were targets to meet for the work: so many trucks filled per day and then taken off down the line to be replaced by another lot to fill. Our great plan for a bit of sabotage was to ignore the weight limits on the trucks and start loading them with more or less the same amount of stones up to the top. While the guards weren’t looking we continued filling the trucks with as many stones as we could beyond the markers on the side, ignoring the weight restrictions. That felt good. It gave you back a bit of control and a feeling of power. The trucks would then go off down the line. We watched them disappearing, wondering what would happen next, if anything.
A few weeks’ later the Bahnpolizei – Railway Police, turned up at our farm to check us out. It was another sunny day, hot already in the early morning and we were all in the yard at the back, some washing under the tap, others hanging around waiting their turn or sitting on a wall drinking the black ersatz coffee brought out to us by the farmer – his attempt at providing us with breakfast. I always wondered if he was paid for putting us up or whether he had been told to do it. You didn’t refuse orders like that. I think whole families were threatened with deportation if they didn’t obey the German authorities. We hadn’t heard a vehicle arrive but two men suddenly appeared, marching purposefully towards us in their
crisp uniform, shiny boots and eagle and swastika insignia on their braided caps. This looked serious.
They lined us up and took a roll call. One policeman spoke quite good English and he announced that one of their trains carrying stones from the quarry had derailed. One of the axles had buckled under the weight of some overloaded trucks. He said, ‘Incorrect weight’ and that the overloading of these was ‘a deliberate act of sabotage,’ and there would be serious consequences for all of us. What was he going to do? Arrest us all and put us in prison? Stop us breaking up rocks? Wasn’t this punishment enough? He said that this was to stop immediately. He couldn’t prove anything, luckily.
Maybe we were too valuable as workers to get rid of us or waste good manpower by locking us up. I like to think that we did our bit to delay some of the construction work. We heard no more about it and it looked as though we had got away with it but we had understood the message.
6
Potatoes
We carried on working there until Christmas in rain and shine, wind and snow. If it was sunny we worked without protection and suffered dehydration. If it rained we got wet and our clothes never dried out properly and we caught colds. If it snowed we had to dig our way out first before we even got there and nearly collapsed from exhaustion. Some men fell ill or got injured and were sent back to the camp to be replaced by more prisoners. I didn’t know the meaning of hard work until I went to that quarry.
Survivor of the Long March Page 7
