The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  Goudreau’s prayers on the evening of 6 April, the third to last day of Lent, were different. Now, he prayed for the souls of 41 as yet unidentified men whom the camp’s new Kommandant, Oberstleutnant Erich Cordes, told the Senior British Officer, RAF Group Captain Herbert Massey, “were shot while resisting arrest or in their endeavors to escape again after having been rearrested.”180

  9 APRIL 1944, EASTER SUNDAY, POSEN, POLAND

  FATHER LARIVIèRE SAYS NOTHING ABOUT SURVIVING A BOMBING RAID

  Two weeks earlier, Father Desnoyers wrote Father Cyr Roy, “It seems as you talked too much: ten lines [of your letter] were blacked out and are illegible.” Now it was Father Larivière’s turn to wonder what Father Antoni Toupin had said in the nine lines the Germans removed from his 3 January letter. As Toupin accepted the admonition to remain “en garde!” he welcomed the news that on Easter Sunday Larivière presided over three masses and, knowing of Larivière’s love of music, that two were sung.

  Larivière could not spell out the implications of the decision that, come the end of the war, the Oblates and Sacred Heart Brothers would be repatriated as “interned Canadian civilians and not military chaplains of British troops.” His years’ long effort to have the priests and brothers brevetted into the Royal Navy had failed, and thus in order to buy supplies needed to conduct mass, the Oblates would remain dependent on both German goodwill to pay them a stipend and on their fellow prisoners, who gave them a portion of their pay.

  Used to Larivière’s formal tone, Toupin would have been struck by the emotion and psychological insight in the last part of the letter: “My flock are almost all old prisoners (i.e. soon four years). The duratio dura (!) [hard times] of their captivity, the longer it is, becomes all that much harder on the nervous system. It’s not an additive factor but, rather, is multiplied by the length. It’s time for it to end, otherwise, neuroses will multiply.” Larivière was unable, of course, to tell his friend in Ottawa that these anguished words stemmed not from an outbreak of barbed-wire psychosis but from the terrifying experience on the Easter Sunday that had just passed.

  Despite what he wrote, Larivière did not conduct three Easter masses, presumably dissembling because the censors knew he had previously written of such plans. As he and his guard were making their way through the picturesque streets of the city to the work commando site ten miles from Posen, where Larivière was to say the third mass, the steady drone of aircraft engines triggered the wail of air-raid sirens. When Larivière turned to join the throng heading for an air-raid shelter, his guard pulled his gun to stop the priest. [Larivière later learned that the guard had lost his family when a bomb hit a shelter and that he had spent four days living in rubble.] The guard led the priest to the Posen-East train station, a mile away. A second wave of American bombers heading for the Telefunken and Focke-Wulf factories, near the city’s beautiful medieval core, passed overhead, their bomb bay doors open.181 The two men scarcely had time to take shelter at the foot of one of the station’s concrete walls before the roar of the blast wave washed over them and the earth began trembling. When they looked up, they saw grey plumes of smoke and pulverized stone and brick rise up into the sky above the town square.

  15 APRIL 1944, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND

  TOMMY THOMPSON WONDERS, “DID ONE OF THESE MEN DIE IN MY PLACE?”

  The sullen mood that had fallen over Stalag Luft III after the Kriegies learned that 41 men had been executed dissipated slightly around midday on the 15th when some of the captured escapers returned to the compound. For Father Goudreau, who reckoned time by both the Julian and ecclesiastical calendars, their return seemed the fulfillment of the previous day’s offertory prayer that recalled the Israelites’ deliverance from bondage in Egypt.

  Whatever joy the POWs felt drained away a short time before dusk when a Kriegie stopped to read a notice pinned to the bulletin board. Too many men gathered round after he called out that it was a list of names for them all to see it, so he read it out. The names of Canadians George McGill, Pat Langford, Hank Birkland and George Wiley were among them. Dead too was Roger Bushell. “That’s not forty-one—it’s forty-seven!” called a man who counted what amounted to a dirge.182

  More than a month later, while the Kriegies were building a memorial for the murdered men, which still stands in the German military cemetery, another paper was posted in the compound bearing another three names of men executed by the Gestapo. According to Tommy Thompson’s grandson, Jesse Beauchamp, for the rest of his life, Thompson was haunted by the fact that to execute 50 men, another man died in his stead.

  LATE APRIL 1944, THE

  ANDREW CARSWELL AND MAC ESCAPE

  Andrew Carswell was at it again under his old identity as Private Dennis Reeves; as his new partner, Mac, was Private Joe Parsons. Once they had escaped from the Arbeitskommando at Eikhammer, each “became” a Czech electrician, with papers authorizing them to report to the work bureau in the port city of Stettin, from where they hoped to board a freighter bound for Sweden. The German guard at the farmhouse near Eikhammer where they were billeted accepted their papers. By contrast, the British corporal who served as the interpreter at the Arbeitskommando and to whom Carson introduced himself as a veteran of Dunkirk was less accepting. “Captured at Dunkirk, my fucking arse! … You’re a fucking Yank, me lad. What are ye doing in that British uniform?”183

  Catching the Irish lilt in the officer’s voice, Carson responded in kind. “Well, actually, I’m not a ‘fucking Yank,’ if you must know, I’m a ‘fucking Canydian,’ and we’re both swapovers from the RAF. We’re hoping that you’ll help us escape.” As they had been a year earlier, these last words were met with stony silence, which prompted Carswell to remind the British soldiers that it was their duty to escape. Like the Kriegies at the brewery and graphite mine, these men had every reason not to rock the boat; their wood-cutting quota was set so low that each day’s work was finished before lunch. Carswell’s argument, backed up by Mac’s (and his British accent), won the day, though the British corporal made it clear that their escape would have to be managed so that the Germans would not take it out on the men who remained in the Arbeitskommando.

  29 APRIL 1944, 4:33 A.M., OFF THE COAST OF FRANCE

  HMCS ATHABASKAN IS SUNK

  As did the men behind the guns on a thousand other ships and boats, those aboard HMCS Athabaskan and HMCS Haida called it “fucking around off the coast of France.” They were referring to part of the preparation for the long-awaited assault on Festung Europa. Just after 3 a.m. on 29 April, the two Tribal-class destroyers were ordered to leave the motor patrol boats laying mines that they had been keeping watch on, in order to intercept two German destroyers. At 3:49 a.m., Athabaskan’s radar picked up the two German ships and a moment later Haida’s gunners opened fire, while Athabaskan’s forward gun fired star shell that dissolved the dark night under a garish light of burning phosphorous, revealing the German ships. “Enemy Shipping Ahead. Stand By,” called out one of Athabaskan’s officers. As Captain John Stubbs’s gunners awaited the order to fire, the helmsmen aboard both ships steered toward T24 and T27, a manoeuvre designed to put them between the German torpedoes they assumed were racing toward them at some 20 knots.

  Athabaskan’s leading writer, Stuart Kettles, recalled the moment the torpedo exploded as a kaleidoscope of a muffled roar, a dull red flash and then the dropping away of the 377-foot-long ship from beneath his feet, an aftereffect of the blast wave that lifted the 2,500-ton ship partway out of the water. The blast destroyed Athabaskan’s aft port quarter, killing almost every man there and causing heavy bunker oil to flow into the sea. As Haida, still firing on one of the destroyers, made smoke to cover her stricken sister and Able Seaman Harry Liznick reached the Oerlikon guns amidships, Kettles heard Stubbs call out, “Stand by to abandon ship. BUT DON’T ABANDON YET!” Liznick must not have heard Stubbs’s order, for when the aft fuel bunkers exploded a few minutes later, he was still at the gun.

  The bla
st blew Liznick against a bulkhead, stunning him, and sent sheets of flame more than 40 feet high. “Boiling hot oil, red-hot pieces of [metal turned into] shrapnel, flying timbers and anything that had been torn lose by the explosion filled the air,” recalled Kettles, who had crouched on the open deck and covered the back of his neck with his arm. As shells in the magazine began exploding, Harry Hurwitz, Liznick, Kettles and more than 120 other ratings and officers shed their steel helmets and joined the “Paratroop Battalion.” The light from their burning ship showed clearly the oil-covered water and, worse, the absence of even one of Athabaskan’s lifeboats or Carley floats, all of which had been destroyed by the explosions.

  29 APRIL 1944, ON A GERMAN DESTROYER

  STUART KETTLES SURVIVES ATHABASKAN’S SINKING OFF THE COAST OF FRANCE

  For a moment, Stuart Kettles thought Able Seaman Lester McKeeman, who was wiping heavy bunker oil from Kettles’s mouth, nose and ears, was joking when he said, “On a German destroyer. They picked us up about nine o’clock this morning.” Soon, however, McKeeman had rubbed enough oil from Kettles’s eyes so that he could see the German eagle on the uniforms of ratings with Sten guns and rifles at the ready.

  Kettles couldn’t remember how he ended up aboard a German destroyer. He recalled jumping, the drop to the sea and, after bobbing back to the surface, “wiping the oil out of my eyes, and spitting the English Channel back where it belonged.” He remembered the slow rollers that threw George Parson onto his face and his own attempts to wrap his legs around Parson so that he could hold him in place long enough to turn on Parson’s life jacket’s light. He also remembered the transformation of a “ghost like form” into Haida, his swim toward her, the sailor yelling to swim toward her fo’c’sle, which didn’t register for a few vital moments. By the time Kettles began swimming toward Haida’s bow, the false dawn of nautical twilight made it too dangerous for the ship to remain stationary to pick up survivors. To signal to the men in the water that he was about to leave, Captain Harry De Wolf ordered his engine room to briefly engage the ship’s screws in reverse. The wash generated by the ten-foot, six-inch screws pushed Kettles a half mile away.

  In the minutes that followed, despite there being 84 other men in the same waters, Kettles found himself alone. Soon his legs and arms grew numb in the cold water near where Admiral Nelson destroyed Napoleon’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar. The slow-rolling waves of the ebb tide were even more dangerous, for they rocked Kettles like a baby in a cradle. “It wasn’t long before this motion made me very sleepy,” he recalled, and with no one to speak to, Kettles knew he could not stay awake much longer. He likely saved his life by pulling up the headrest of his life jacket just before losing consciousness.

  Not far away, Harry Liznick and a number of other men who had made their way to a Carley float thrown into the water from Haida were taken aboard a German ship. Liznick was tormented both by the large blisters caused by splotches of burning oil that fell on his face and arms, and the memory of Lieutenant Clark, who died of exposure as they swam toward a float. Led at gunpoint into a hold, Liznick saw some of his shipmates trying to shower off the thick oil. Just when he’d given up doing so because the hot water had run out, a German sailor came into the hold and motioned for Liznick and another man to follow him back onto deck, where the German naval rating pointed to the body of Able Seaman Charles Pothier, who had just died of exposure. The naked and oily men were ordered to move the body out of the way.

  A short time later, the Germans gave Liznick and each of his comrades a blanket and a cup with which to scoop out a measure of warm gruel.

  EARLY MAY 1944, BREST, FRANCE

  RCN ABLE SEAMAN HARRY HURWITZ DROPS THE “Z” FROM HIS NAME

  Since fishing him from the sea, the Germans had been softening up Harry Hurwitz. The psych-ops had started even before they were landed in Brest, France, when the German sailors pointed to and praised the fortifications of the Atlantic Wall. Once ashore, the Germans divided the RCN men into two groups and then put them into small single-man cells in austere barracks. The monotonous food, which was never quite enough to fill their stomachs, and the foul ersatz tea were calibrated to weaken the Canadians’ resolve. The Germans’ most important psychological tools, however, were the denial of cigarettes (which the men got around by rolling mattress straw in old paper and smoking it) and the Sten gun–enforced ban on speaking to each other.

  “Du bist ein Yid?”

  As the black-uniformed Gestapo officer looked down intently at him, Hurwitz fought to keep a poker face. “No, I’m not Jewish,” he said, wondering if his attempt to hide his origin—by dropping the z from his name when he was first interrogated—had failed. The German, speaking English with only the slightest of accents, then asked where Hurwitz’s parents came from. Hurwitz knew that Geneva required he give only his name, rank and service number. But the Gestapo officer’s question prompted the 21-year-old, who knew that before the war his parents had lost contact with family in Germany, to try to hide his Jewishness. “My mother’s family is from Lithuania, but both she and my father were born in London.”

  The Gestapo officer leaned over and with a thin, unnerving smile repeated, “Du bist ein Yid!” Hurwitz tried again to argue but was waved off with “You’re Jewish and from Montreal.”

  Seeing no way out and knowing that his life now depended on an officer in one of the most Nazified services of the Third Reich honouring Germany’s signature on the Geneva Convention, Hurwitz asked, “How do you know?”

  The officer smiled and said, “Before the war, I worked at the General Electric plant on 1st Avenue and LaSalle Street in Saint-Henri in Montreal [a Jewish neighbourhood], and I used to see you walk past the plant on your way to and from school.” As the officer spoke, Hurwitz’s hands grew clammy and his stomach tightened in panic. Would the thin metal of the identity disks around his neck protect him from Germany’s rage against the Jews, he wondered. Choosing to ignore the Reich’s regulation, which violated Geneva, that Jewish prisoners of war were to be segregated from other POWs, the Gestapo officer said, “Your secret is safe with me.”184

  4 MAY 1944, OTTAWA

  THE DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE’S REPORT ON POWS

  Canadian officials in Ottawa knew that the Germans were not complying with Geneva’s requirement to provide the same rations to POWs as to garrisoned troops. Citing the amount of food contained in the Red Cross parcels, at Oflag VII-B, in Eichstätt, Bavaria, the Kommandant cut the POWs’ rations by 30 per cent. A month later, on the same page as the banner headlines announcing the invasion of Normandy, the Globe and Mail reported the docking of the SS Gripsholm, carrying several hundred repatriated wounded and sick POWs, 36 of whom were Canadian and from whom Ottawa learned how POWs supplemented their meagre rations. A guard in the guard tower would lower a basket with a chicken, eggs and bread, and haul it back up with cigarettes, cocoa and a couple of chocolate bars. Information also came from letters, including one by MacDonald written from a POW camp in Heydekrug, Lithuania; in it he wrote: “The boys were catching sparrows and eating them. They say sparrow stew tastes very good.”

  Nevertheless, Ottawa knew, morale remained high. So did the Canadians’ allegiance to their Allied comrades. When camp officials at both Stalag Luft III and Oflag VII-B, responding to reports by repatriated Germans of how well they had been treated in Canada, offered the Canadian officers special preferences, such as an extra letter home a month or more parole walks, the “Canadian Club” refused them unless they were extended to all British officers.

  5 MAY 1944, STALAG LUFT VI, HEYDEKRUG, LITHUANIA

  IAN MACDONALD’S LETTER HOME

  The drought was almost over; in two days, Ian MacDonald would receive two letters from his parents. Some weeks earlier, frantic over the possibility that, since he had not heard from them, they had not received any of his letters or postcards, MacDonald wrote a short note on a Red Cross form reserved for POWs who had not received mail for three months.

&n
bsp; He also wrote a regular aerogram, the bulk of which explains the instructions he had given the Air Ministry vis-à-vis his pay and insurance. In the 15 months since he last heard from them, MacDonald had grown more concerned about his family’s finances and instructed the Air Ministry to send his parents the maximum amount possible. Sensitive to the implication that his proud father was unable to provide for his wife and three children still at home, MacDonald wrote, “Use whatever you need regardless of how much it is.”

  Knowing that the German censors would not allow him to explain why he was now in a POW camp in Lithuania, MacDonald did not bother trying to find a way to slip past the censors the fact that he had been moved from Dulag Luft because bombing raids had devastated the area.

  7 MAY 1944, FILIŞIA, SOUTHWEST ROMANIA

  RCAF WARRANT OFFICER NORMAN REID TOUCHES THE LIPS OF A DEAD FRIEND

  The pre-flight ritual prior to his 41st, and what was to be his final, mission over Occupied Europe did not include urinating on their Wellington bomber’s tail wheel. “As romantic as this image is,” says Norman Reid, who in 1944 was an RCAF navigator, “our engineering officer made it damned clear that peeing on the wheels was dumb because the uric acid ate into the wheels’ bearings’ housing and the synthetic rubber tires, thus increasing the chances of an accident on takeoff or landing.” Preparation at the aerodrome in Foggia, Italy, included careful study of the location of the 300-foot-long, double-span steel bridge over the Jiu River near Filişia, and the optimal altitude for dropping the 4,000-pound armoured “cookie bomb.” As well, since they were going to be flying close to Yugoslavia, which the Germans did not fully control and thus was a better place to bail out, if necessary, than over Occupied Romania, Reid’s crew was briefed on the complicated politics of the kingdom established after the First World War; although they did not know it, just weeks earlier, Churchill had shifted his support from the monarchist general, Draža Mihailovic, to the Communist leader of the partisans, Tito.