They had finally arrived at their destination. Joseph Horace Greasley had arrived in German-occupied Poland, where he would spend the next five years of his life.
CHAPTER
FIVE
The early months of the war did not go well for the Allies. In August 1940 Hitler prepared an invasion of Great Britain, scheduled to take place on 15 September in an operation named Sealion. He was confident of an early victory. His troops and air force were ready and primed and the military hardware in place, and the Allied troops were seemingly in disarray. Only the force of Mother Nature’s weather prevented him from going ahead with the operation.
The RAF offered a glimmer of hope, proving more than a match for the German Luftwaffe in wide-ranging flights along the east coast. However, the Germans still managed to bomb London and continued shelling Dover with long-range artillery. Towards the middle of September Hitler, who had now ordered all Jews to start wearing yellow stars for identification, sent waves of aircraft to bomb British cities but most were driven off. The Luftwaffe failed to make significant inroads into British defences. The RAF was beginning to claim victory in the Battle of Britain.
Horace Greasley was unaware of any of this. He and his fellow prisoners had spent some weeks at a large holding camp at Lamsdorf and then about three hundred were transferred during darkness to another facility a few miles away. The prisoners were updated on the progress of the war, but only from a German perspective. Although Horace realised that the Germans would stretch the truth in the war of propaganda, his thoughts drifted back to his capture and how easily France and the other Allies had capitulated. He thought back to the German troops at Cambrai and their weaponry, and how well organised and motivated their whole war machine seemed to be. And he feared the worst. Horace was in a depression he had never experienced before.
It was early in the morning when Horace would awake on his bed of straw on concrete. Even though the summer sun still retained a little heat, the concrete below him had already begun to cool significantly in the few short weeks since they had arrived. Winter would be with them soon enough, a thought Horace dreaded.
He awoke each morning thinking only of food. Gone were the days when his first thoughts were of a particular girl back home, a pair of pert breasts or the soft downy pubic hair of Eva Bell. Now, instead, his early morning dreams were of bread and meat, his mother’s homemade pies and scones and fruit cakes. And as the awful realisation hit him every morning when he awoke and realised where he was, his first thoughts were of death and torture, of control and brutality, and how his fellow man could commit the acts he was witnessing first hand. And then came thoughts of home and his family and just how long it would be before the Third Reich would sweep up through England and into his home town.
Horace turned over. It was not yet time to get up and face the bleak day ahead. For that’s what it was: he was in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. He recalled reading the book as a teenager, but this Bleak House was a hundred times worse. For everyone is lonely in Bleak House. Everyone in Bleak House is lost.
Horace closed his eyes. Perhaps he could put off the horror of the day ahead for another hour. His feet ached; he had not removed his boots since the night in the field in Belgium. He’d tried several days afterwards but it was as if his boots, what was left of them, were glued to his feet. As each day passed the glue strengthened and his reluctance to discover just what sort of condition his feet were in grew.
Fort Eight Posen had been an old First World War cavalry barracks. The prisoners slept in what were once the stables. There were no bunks, no blankets. The buildings and the filthy, broken-down straw were alive with mice and cockroaches and lice. The conditions inside Fort Eight at Posen were a living paradise for body lice, which lived in the seams and folds of clothing – the dirtier the better – and were transmitted by infected clothing and bedding as well as direct contact with an infected person.
Horace was luckier than most as he’d managed to conceal an old nail file in the breast pocket of his uniform. He kept his nails short and clean, a barber’s tradition and a habit he found difficult to break. Horace didn’t scratch, he rubbed. The men with nails – filthy dirty nails – clawed at their bodies where the lice were biting, compounding and spreading the problem.
Every prisoner dreaded that first initial sign. The men would wake in the morning and minute, dark brown specks of louse excreta would clearly be visible on the skin. Several days later the biting would start. There was no escape, no hot water to wash in, no soap, no earthly chance of keeping clean. The lice fed on human blood, and after their feast would lay eggs on skin and in the creases of clothing. The infection caused intense itching, demoralising and degrading the men who could do little about it.
The itching was irritating beyond belief and scratching was unavoidable. Even when the skin had broken, the poor men still couldn’t help themselves and huge sores grew into large ulcers as each day passed. And then the flies, part of nature’s food chain, moved in. It was common for a man to awaken with hundreds of tiny maggots feeding on the exposed pink and yellow pus-infected mess.
Horace lay on urine-soaked straw. The strong smell of ammonia always lingered in the air, as some men were too weak to stand and answer the call of nature. Horace was barely able to move. It was as if the life had been sucked from him. His feet throbbed every few minutes from the exposed flesh on his heels rubbing against his boots. It had been weeks since he had removed them, memories of the pain when he had put the boots back on in a field in Belgium too intense to tempt him to take them off again. He longed for the wet grass poultice his friend had applied.
The rat still gnawed away at his stomach lining and lice ran across his skin, torturing him each minute of every day. At times, even though he knew they were biting into his flesh, he let them. Let them have their fill of my blood, he said to himself, perhaps then they’ll leave me alone.
Worse lay in store every couple of days when nature called and he was forced to defecate. The prisoners would put it off as long as they could but inevitably after two or three day’s cabbage soup, their bowels would need to move.
It was called the toilet block. Horace didn’t know why. He was generally about 30 yards away when the smell kicked in. As he reluctantly got closer the smell intensified and it was all he could do to prevent himself throwing up. He needed to keep the food in his stomach as long as he could. Some of the men couldn’t manage it and grew weaker by the day.
The block itself was crude. A floor made of wooden planks had been nailed onto a huge frame over an exposed tank. Two 3ft by 20ft gaps had been left exposed and at waist level, on a separate framework, two long planks had been nailed loosely into place. The prisoner would sit between the two planks and shit through the gap into the tank below. No privacy, no sinks, no running water, no toilet paper. The prisoners cleaned themselves on whatever they could get a hold of, normally a handful of grass. Some didn’t bother.
At ground level an eight-inch diameter waste pipe poked out. Every few weeks a tanker arrived, connected a powerful suction pipe to the valve and literally sucked out two tons of human excreta. As the pipe sat four feet above the base of the tank, the tank was never emptied completely. Always four feet of shit for the flies to feed on. In the summer months it was simply unbearable – a fly and cockroach paradise.
Horace was physically weak, but far worse was his mental state. His mind was near to breaking and he dreamed and hallucinated by the hour. Still the nightmares continued: of Germans in his village, Germans in his home, Germans terrorising his mother and sisters. And the dreams continued long after he awoke. Jackboots everywhere. Skeletal bodies littered the floor, some snoring, some moaning and one man on his knees sobbing a prayer to his Almighty.
‘Oh Lord, why have you forsaken me? Why do you do this to me? Why do you make me suffer so much?’
Tom Fenwick’s father had been in the Church of England ministry and Tom was brought up in the way of the church.
; ‘Shut the fuck up, Fenwick,’ a voice shouted close by. ‘He ain’t fucking listening now. Get some kip.’
‘Why, Lord? I’m a good man. I pray every day. If this is a test of my faith let it end now. Surely I have passed? Give me a sign, Father.’
The last few words were said between tears, barely a whimper. He turned to Horace.
‘He doesn’t hear, Jim, does he?’
Horace looked into Tom Fenwick’s eyes. He was beaten: all hope had gone. As a small boy he had followed the Ten Commandments to the letter. He’d believed that good would always triumph over evil, that the man in the clouds would always listen and answer his prayers.
‘Thou shalt not kill, Jim. That’s what the good Lord tells us, and yet these men are breaking his commandments every day and he lets them get away with it. Why isn’t he stopping them?’
Horace shook his head.
The tears were streaming down Tom Fenwick’s face now as his voice rose.
‘Why doesn’t he do anything, Jim? Why doesn’t he stop them like he stopped the tribes that plotted against Israel?’
Horace opened his mouth to speak, ready to tell Tom Fenwick that his God didn’t exist. Horace always had his doubts, wondered how his brother could have been sucked in so easily. Harold had wanted his twin brother involved. He had wanted him to attend at least one or two services he preached at. Horace had refused, wondering why so many grown men and women wasted so many hours of their lives preaching and praying to someone or something they had never met, never touched, never even seen. He could understand the ancients worshipping the sun, the giver and taker of life in times of darkness and bad summers. Yes, he could understand the man who would pray for a good harvest, pray for the sun to shine…
Yet he’d always kept an open mind. He’d admired the teachings of the Christian church. He’d respected the man Jesus Christ and his ideals, respected and somehow believed, or rather hoped, that good would always triumph over evil. Until now.
There was no God. There couldn’t be.
At that very moment it was he who wanted to stand up in the pulpit and preach to this man and tell him how ridiculous his belief was. But there was no need. At that same moment Tom Fenwick lost his faith, lost the God he’d believed in for as long as he could remember – and Horace saw it in his eyes. The young man buried his face in his hands and sobbed like a baby.
After the roll call the prisoners were marched over to the far side of the camp to the kitchen. Their daily ration was one bowl of cabbage water soup and a third of a tin loaf of stodgy, heavy, dark brown bread, an hour or two after they were woken around seven. It was the highlight of each day. Horace broke his ration of bread into three for the long day ahead, as did most of the men. Horace sat with Tom Fenwick who, unusually, wolfed down his bread ration in one. It was the action of a man taking his last meal, though Horace didn’t know it at the time.
The fort was surrounded by a huge moat, though empty of water. The only way to exit the fort was across a drawbridge patrolled on either side of the wall by German guards. To set foot on this bridge without permission was tantamount to suicide.
Tom Fenwick smiled at Horace and mumbled something about being reunited with his father again. Before Horace had realised what was happening, Tom Fenwick sprinted towards the bridge, screaming something undecipherable at the top of his voice. As was intended, it drew the attention of every German soldier on duty and as he leapt onto the wooden gantry he was cut down in a hail of bullets before his feet touched the ground. Still the Germans pumped more bullets into the body lying on the wooden surface and Thomas Albert Fenwick breathed his last.
Horace looked into the faces of the soldiers who had ended the life of the young man without hesitation. They were smiling, congratulating each other… not unlike the praise Horace had received from his father all those years ago as a teenager when he had taken down a fast-running hare or rabbit at long distance. It seemed the Nazis had enjoyed their early morning sport.
The Waffen SS ran Fort Eight at Posen with an iron fist and near hatred for the incarcerated men. There was a total lack of respect for the soldier who had ended up there. The SS were indoctrinated that the honourable man died on the battlefield and only the lowest surrendered or were captured. The beating of a prisoner was a common occurrence; a man just had to look at a guard the wrong way and the shit would be kicked out of him.
Within a week the prisoners fit enough to stand on parade were asked by an SS officer if any of their civilian occupations could help with the glorious German war effort. It was the wrong approach. The men kept quiet – except one.
‘I will help the marvellous German war effort with my civilian work skills.’
It was Frank Talbot, an airman from Worcester. The prisoners were dumbfounded. Some sneered and hissed.
‘My skills were made for the wonderful German soldiers.’
The SS officer smiled as he spoke. ‘Excellent… and what was your profession back in England, prisoner?’
Talbot looked back at the mass of prisoners and then back to the SS man.
‘I am an undertaker, sir.’
A huge cheer rang out from the ranks of astonished and laughing men. After the beating that followed, Frank Talbot spent two weeks in the sick bay with a fractured skull and a broken tibia. He would tell the men afterwards that the pain he suffered was worth it.
The men were ordered to reveal their civilian roles. Incredible though it seemed, a gentleman’s barber would be spared the normal duties. By this time every man in the camp had lice and keeping prisoners’ heads shaved was the only way to control the spread.
Horace was shown into a small room adjacent to the offices of the camp and a queue of POWs made to line up outside. It was there that Horace shaved the lice-ridden heads from dawn until dusk with no running water or electricity. As the day went on his feet swelled inside his battered boots until they cried out for mercy, but by sitting the prisoners on an old shoebox and distributing his weight from one leg to the other every few minutes, he managed to give each foot a break. And he thanked his lucky stars that he could manage cutting hair, for nothing could be worse than the work the outside parties were being made to undertake.
The first workers returned after day one looking more pale and gaunt then their starving malnourished comrades inside the camp. Flapper had been one of those assigned to the work party. He said that at first that the men were glad of the change of scenery, happy about the fresh air and a little exercise as they’d been marched the short distance just outside the village of Mankowice.
They had been carrying shovels, picks and spades and some assumed they were about to start work on a building project, perhaps digging the foundations for a new factory or maybe another camp. They had stopped outside a graveyard and one by one were ushered through the gates of the elegant, well-kept cemetery.
At first Flapper believed they were simply there to tidy things up, a gardener’s working party. Then he noticed the names on the gravestones. Isaac and Goldberg, Abraham and Spielberg. And the Star of David carved or painted into each stone. A Jewish cemetery. Given the rumours that flew around the camp there was no way the Germans would want to trim the bushes and control the weeds. Instead the prisoners were instructed to dig a hole six feet deep.
‘This grave is for anyone who disobeys my orders,’ an English-speaking sergeant explained.
The full horror of their task became clear as he rambled on. They were to exhume the dead bodies of the Jews and rob them of everything they had taken with them in death. Gold rings, watches… even the gold fillings from their rotting teeth were pulled out with pliers. The SS stood watch as the crumbling skeletons were abused, robbed of everything. Afterwards the remains of the bodies were taken to a huge pit dug by a previous party and thrown in without ceremony. Garwood cried as he relayed the details to his friend: the bodies of small children and women dressed up in what were once their finest clothes – mere rags now, soiled rags – and how the prisoners had been
made to strip the skeletons bare, just to make sure nothing was missed.
‘Is nothing sacred to these bastards, Jim?’ he asked between tears.
It had been a bad day, possibly the worst so far. As each day, week and indeed month passed since he had been captured, Horace had drifted off to sleep at night thinking things couldn’t get any worse. But they did.
As unpleasant as conditions were, Horace could not complain about the task he had been allocated inside Fort Eight at Posen. The men were glad of the respite and a pleasant conversation as they sat in the makeshift barber’s chair. It was as if an air of normality had returned to their wretched lives in the few short minutes it took to take off their hair with a cut-throat razor, cold dirty water and a lather stick.
Both barber and client transported themselves back several years and a kind of make-believe act took place for a few precious moments before reality kicked in again and the men were back to face the brutality of the SS soldiers and the ruthless conditions outside of the room.
‘Off to the dance on Saturday night, sir?’
‘Why yes, Jim… and you?’
‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world, sir. Got myself a pretty little thing to take along too, her name’s Eva.’
‘Fantastic, Jim, you’re a lucky man. I noticed her too, figure like an hour glass and well built up top.’
‘I’ll say, sir.’
Another filthy creature crawled down the gleaming blade of the razor. Horace squashed it as it settled on the nail of his thumb, leaving a bloody imprint as the blood sucked out of its host exploded from its miniscule body.
‘Managed to get your hands on them yet, Jim?’
Horace smiled, pursed his lips and smiled at his client.
‘I’ll say, sir… Finest pair of tits this side of Leicester, nipples like bloody organ stops,’ he laughed.
And so it went on, and at times Horace felt he was actually back in his old employer’s shop in Leicester. That was all he could do, play with his mind: imagine and play tricks on it. He would get through the war; he had to.
Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? Page 8
