Hard physical labour is exhausting and soul-destroying but somehow you survive; it toughens you up. You didn’t complain, you just got on with it. So I suppose I was lucky that I didn’t go under. A 5ft 7¼”, 130 lbs (according to my army records) greengrocer’s assistant from Barking, not big and burly or tough, I had never lifted anything heavier than a sack of potatoes. But here I was still in one piece, having no choice but to carry on, to face whatever my captors had in store for me. To keep on going, for myself and for those left behind at home.
I suppose I was lucky not to be sent to another quarry to break up more bloody boulders or to be sent down the mines to be killed by an explosion or tunnel collapse. Our fate was completely in the hands of our enemies. The longer we were imprisoned and got further into the war, we learned more about the cruelty of the Germans and, of course, I was to witness myself some of the atrocities inflicted on other human beings.
I remained at the next camp I was sent to for the rest of the war, along with the four friends I made. Fortunately I’ve always got on with people and there’s something about me that they like. So when I met Laurie, Sid, Hebby and Jimmy we all got on straightaway. We gradually formed a friendship which lasted long after the war.
If you have one good friend you are lucky but to have four is a miracle. How truly blessed to be surrounded by people who care about you, look out for you and stick by you. You get strength from being with people like that. I felt the same, of course. You give as much as you take with true friends. Up until then I had only had one real friend, Tommy Harrington, but that didn’t last. He went off to another camp. I remember that he carried a picture of his sweetheart which he was always showing us. She was a real cracker, looked like a film star. I don’t think he had any family to speak of so I gave him my sister’s address before he left and when I next wrote to Winnie I asked her to keep in touch with him. Winnie wrote regularly and sent him cigarettes. I’ve got some copies of the letters he sent to my sister.
The strangest thing is that I met him again briefly on The Long March in 1945. Fantastic coincidence, out on the road, among the thousands of people there were on the move across Germany.
You get strength from having friends and together in a group you are better than being on your own. I would have gone mad I think without my pals. Five of us together felt like a family again; reminded me of my brothers and what I was missing. We stayed together for the next 4½ years and I know we helped each other to survive throughout those war years.
One morning at roll call, the Unteroffizier – under officer, announced that we were leaving and moving to another camp. We were told to pack and be ready outside as soon as possible. I was pleased not be going out to break up more bloody boulders for twelve hours and glad to see the back of the cowshed. On the other hand, we didn’t know where we were going next or what the Germans had lined up for us. We got onto the carts accompanied by some of the guards and set off in the direction of Freystadt. Just outside the town we stopped at a place which looked like an abandoned school, got off and were split into two groups. I went off with one lot of seven, marching a few more kilometres to another spot where I joined another larger group waiting with some guards.
There were now forty-five of us and we all marched off out into the countryside to a farm in the middle of this remote area. Our new camp was housed in a former farmhouse which had presumably been owned by a local German family. It was now run by the German authorities and we were the new labour force, to be put to work on the land to produce food for the Fatherland. They had built an extension onto the main building for the Unteroffizieren and about thirty guards who changed regularly. The whole place was surrounded by two lots of chicken wire fencing with a gap between and rolls of barbed wire along the top. There were two sets of gates, which were locked at night.
Our accommodation was in a large farmhouse which had about seven rooms although we were only allowed to use a few. We slept in dormitories on the ground floor, with ten to a room in double bunk beds. We had the use of a room at the back which had a wood burning stove for cooking and a copper for heating water for washing and laundry. What luxury! And toilets, or latrines I should say, which were in a wooden outhouse. A trench had been dug in the earth floor and you stood or squatted over it to do your business and when you finished you shovelled over some lime from a bucket kept at the side. We could only use them during daylight hours.
Map showing Langenau and Freystadt in Kreis Rosenberg region, East Prussia. From Bildarchiv-Ostpreussen.de.
We were mainly employed on farm work, providing agricultural labour for anything and everything that needed doing to get food to the German nation. We went out on work detachments locally and further afield, depending on what the work was. Day in, day out, month in, month out, the seasons came and went and the years passed in this vast, desolate wilderness of East Prussia. Fields were ploughed and sown; crops planted and harvested. Fences were mended and roads cleared. Coal unloaded and timber cut down. We turned our hands to whatever was needed. No matter the weather, we were out working away with our bare hands and a few basic farm tools. Muscle power and stamina were what was needed; not brains.
I was happy being out in the fresh air. Perhaps, ‘happy’ is too strong a word. Rather say ‘pleased’ because you couldn’t really be happy imprisoned where we were in those conditions. It was wonderful receiving a letter from home, a parcel of clothes, extra rations and cigarettes in a Red Cross parcel. It was a miracle and cheered us up but I never felt happy. I was grateful that I wasn’t down a coal mine or lying sick or injured somewhere. But not happy.
In spite of the hard physical work, I thought I was freer and healthier than if I had been stuck indoors at some of the other places. Doing nothing but look at four walls of a hut with the occasional bit of exercise round the yard to break up the monotony. Keeping busy during the day helped to distract my mind from thinking about what was going on around me and what the future might bring; but at night dark thoughts haunted me.
We went out on work detachments except for two chaps who volunteered to stay behind to cook and clean. They did that all the time I was there. They had to look after the kitchen and the supplies, which usually came from the village and improvise if there were shortages. Their job included bringing lunch, usually soup, out to us, carrying it in a milk churn on a cart if we weren’t working too far away. They had to have supper ready for us when we got back. What we ate depended on what was available.
Monday might be split pea, Tuesday, barley, Wednesday, potato and so on until you came back to the beginning again. Our daily routine was simple. We got up at 6am, had a mug of ersatz coffee (you got used the awful bitter taste of roasted barley) and wash, if it wasn’t winter and the tap was frozen. We went out to the farm yard where we assembled in front of the officer who counted us and then divided us up into five teams.
Work schedules were given out – so and so to go there and so and so there, and we walked with our guards out to our various jobs on the farm. Some work lasted weeks, some just days, depending on the season and what was needed. We came back at 6 or 7 in the evening, washed, ate supper, which might be soup or bread and butter and perhaps some sausage and then went to bed. That was the routine pretty much from then onwards.
I was lucky working with the same fellows most of the time. That’s when I got to know my four new pals. I think we must have made a good team not to be split up. Sometimes when you first meet somebody, you feel at ease with them and there is an instant bond. It was like that for me and my pals. We shared the same room and our bunks were close together and then we found ourselves out working together. We talked about the usual things men talk about – home, families and jobs. Even though we had different backgrounds and personalities, it didn’t matter when we had so much in common: being far from home and loved ones and hating the Germans.
Laurie, Laurence Neville, who came from Prestiegne in Radnorshire, was in the Royal Artillery and had been taken prisoner somewhere n
ear Saint-Valery-en-Caux. He was a butcher and his knowledge of animals and ways of killing them was to come in handy. We got on well and liked to share a joke or two. Heb or Hebby, Albert Hebner, who came from Perth, had his head screwed on tight and was always willing to help you out if you were in a bit of bother. There was Sid, Sidney Bentham, who came from St Albans. I wasn’t as close to him as the others. He seemed a bit different, a bit aloof. I think he was from a better class family, possibly even been to public school but we got on all right and he stuck by us.
Then there was Jimmy, James Sellar, who really was the Boss. We none of us could have done without him. He was a great chap. Great, not just because he was tall and well-built, a real asset when you are doing hard physical work together, but his strength of character, common sense and kindness helped see us through the war. He really watched out for us; I’m sure we wouldn’t have survived without him.
He was in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders and, like Laurie, had been captured at Saint-Valery-en-Caux. When the weather improved he would put on his tartan trousers and black Glengarry cap with red check band. I can picture him now on The Long March, two black ribbons swinging from his cap, as he marched proudly along. He was a gamekeeper on a large estate near Dalwhinnie in the Scottish Highlands and a natural man of action. Which was just as well, because I could hardly understand a word he said in his thick Scottish accent. His resourcefulness and skills proved invaluable throughout our stay and during our long journey to our final liberation.
When people talk about prisoner of war camps now, they have a picture in their mind of Colditz and The Great Escape but I was never an inmate in a place like that, locked up with thousands of other men behind electrified fences, with tall watch towers and patrolling guards. We had no concert parties or officers planning escape routes and digging tunnels. We were an Arbeitskommando – a labour battalion, mostly prisoners of war from the lower ranks. It was one of the independent work forces under the command of the main Stalag.
We lived and worked in the local community providing labour for farms, factories, quarries and mines. We were in the middle of nowhere, far from towns or cities, thousands of miles from home, locked in at night, starved of food, worn out by work. We were better off, however, than many of the thousands left behind elsewhere. We were free in our own way in The Great Outdoors. We didn’t always have guards breathing down our necks. Work toughened us up. How do you think I survived those terrible winter months of starvation and marching over 1600km?
People ask me whether I tried to escape. You didn’t think of escaping, even if your guard had gone off somewhere to have a smoke and left you standing in the middle of a frozen field with just a spade. Where would you go? You had no money, didn’t speak the language, locals weren’t particularly friendly, or didn’t dare to be, more like. They feared the German officers and guards as much as we did. If you managed to escape and you were caught what would happen to you? I didn’t want to think about that as it frightened me more than staying put. Keep your head down, get on with the work, and make the best of it.
Farm work kept us busy. The main crops were wheat, potatoes, cabbages, sugar beet and mangel-wurzels. There was always plenty to do: digging, ploughing, sowing, planting, harvesting; clearing up, cleaning out, cutting down, carrying away. We sifted, sorted, picked and packed. Whatever we were told to do, seven days a week during the summer and six days a week in winter.
Funny how things turn out, finding myself forced to work on a German farm, spending my days handling vegetables, when I’d spent the last ten years lugging them about at market and selling them in the family shop. I didn’t like eating my greens back then, but here the only greens I got were stringy bits of cabbage or beet tops in my soup. We were always hungry and on the lookout for something else to eat. What with the hard physical labour we did twelve hours a day, and the poor diet, we were never full and never satisfied.
We didn’t start getting Red Cross parcels for quite a while so we kept our eyes skinned for ways of supplementing our diet. Anything. You wouldn’t have thought mangel-wurzels which were grown as cattle fodder would be something we craved. But we did.
Mangel-wurzels. Huge, ugly blighters. They didn’t taste very nice but they were food and if we were out working and digging them up, we would pocket a few as we went along. We sneaked them into the front of our tunic tops but we couldn’t carry many as they bulged and that gave the game away. We took them back, sliced them up, put them on a stick and toasted them in the fire of the wood stove. That is if we were able to get the wretched thing going.
Once the load of logs had gone, which the local farmer supplied to our cooks, we had to do without unless we got some wood ourselves. Hell of a job keeping a fire going if the bits of the twigs and branches we brought back were not dry. The guards weren’t bothered what we did; they expected us to find our own fuel if we could. Always on the lookout, not just for food but for anything which might be useful to us. Later on the five of us were on a two months’ work detachment in a local forest. Plenty of wood there.
Of course, potatoes were always a favourite. We couldn’t get away from them anyway as they were a staple crop. Planting, growing, digging them up and storing them took up a lot of our time. And if we sneaked some back, so much the better although a handful each wasn’t much, particularly if you were going to share it with others. So going out on night-time raids for potatoes and other food was another way to supplement our diet. I suppose it was also a bit of an adventure and one-up on our German guards if we were successful.
We found a way of getting out of the camp at night. It all had to be planned carefully. The beauty of it was that we knew if there was anybody about because we could hear the guards’ big boots outside or making the floor boards creak if they were nosing around inside. They rarely were; they preferred staying snug inside their quarters. We waited until midnight or one o’clock in the morning when it was all quiet. We were always locked in at night which is why the guards thought we were all safely tucked up in bed. Our house had a set of double doors and the front ones had bolts, which weren’t always put across. The inner ones were just locked with a key. If we were lucky we only had one door to deal with and somebody would pick the lock and let out whoever was going out that night.
We decided that it was best if we went out in pairs for safety reasons although, come to think of it now, Jimmy did go off on his own midnight raids. So we sneaked out round the back of our building and through part of the wire fencing we had cut, enough for a man to get through. We folded it back, squeezed through and then folded it back again so nobody could see where the hole was. Favourite places we went to were the storage clamps to get potatoes, which were easy to find because we had built them.
There were four or five clamps in different parts of a field not too far away. What we did to build them was to dig down about 6" and clear an area about 8" x 12" then spread a layer of straw down followed by a layer of potatoes, then more straw and so on. We kept building it up into a big mound and then finally covered it all with earth. The potatoes could be stored for a long time like that. When they were ready to move we dismantled the clamp, digging out the potatoes with special forks with wide prongs, so we didn’t spike any and spoil them. We put the potatoes in large baskets which we had brought with us from the farm, carried them to the edge of the field and tipped them into the farm carts. Next day a crowd of us would be sent down to Freystadt railway station where we shovelled them into railway trucks. They then went to factories to make Kartoffelsalat – potato salad or Kartoffelmehl – potato flour for making dumplings.
We always made the clamps right again so you couldn’t see that they had been disturbed. One night Sid and I decided to go out. I remembered this because I was the one who got caught. I had just gone through the hole in the wire and Sid was passing me one of the baskets when we heard the sound of the officer’s door opening. Sid grabbed back the basket and together with the other one already in his hand made a run fo
r it back to the house. Unfortunately it was a moonlit night so the guard who had gone outside found me standing a few feet from the fence. He was this little fellow who always carried a revolver and we used to joke that it was bigger than he was. He was obviously proud to be boss tonight. I had a bit of German so I could understand what he said.
‘Was macsht du hier?’ – what are you doing here?
I replied ‘Spazierengehen,’ – walking.
He shook his head and said, ‘Verboten’ – forbidden. ‘Nachts nicht’ – not at night. He paused and thought for a bit. ‘Kein Fußball’ – no football. ‘Für zwei Wochen’ – two weeks.
That was a pity. What happened was that some of the guards turned a blind eye to us playing a bit of football in the yard, usually in exchange for a packet of twenty Players from our Red Cross parcels when they eventually arrived. It was good to let off steam like this and also good for morale. So we had to do without football for a while and decided to give the midnight excursions a miss for a bit.
I think it was Jimmy found them and told us about some more potatoes. He came across a huge iron drum in a field where local farm workers had been baking potatoes. When he looked inside among the ashes at the bottom he found some left, charred skins, dirt and all. What were they doing there? Some German and Polish farmers used to give the horses some of the waste potatoes if they were short of normal feed. Times were hard for everybody. I hadn’t heard of that in this country and I handled horses at home. When we got the chance, and there were no guards checking up, some of us would sneak out with a bucket or bowl, (we could use our caps and pockets too) and fill them up and bring them back. We didn’t mind a bit of dirt on our baked potatoes.
None of us liked working for the Germans and helping them in their war effort. Instead of growing crops for the enemy we should have been fighting them and trying to defend our country. Your duty as a prisoner of war is to stop the enemy from getting on with their work as much as you can. So we tried to keep up a spirit of resistance by continuing with small acts of sabotage. While we were picking potatoes for example, and the guard wasn’t watching, for every one we picked we trod one into the ground. Seems silly and insignificant now but it meant something to us at the time. Less a victim, more in control.
Survivor of the Long March Page 8
