The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  MID-JUNE 1944, A GESTAPO PRISON, STETTIN, GERMANY

  CARSWELL HEARS EVEN WORSE TORTURE

  The intense beatings had stopped. Yet whenever Mac and Carswell were marched from one part of the prison to another, if they didn’t move fast enough, guards kicked them and hit them with their rifle butts. Even given their diet of one bowl of thin soup and a piece of sour black bread a day, they were made to stand throughout the day, except when they were taken out for “exercise.” In the yard, an SS guard with a long leather stick ensured that the malnourished men ran around a track and performed long stretches of calisthenics. The tormentors amused themselves by making the soldiers crawl—so often that Carswell’s knees were raw and bruised.

  The screams of male and female prisoners being tortured were, if anything, even harder to bear.

  18 JUNE 1944, STALAG XXI-D, POSEN, POLAND

  FATHER LOUIS LARIVIèRE FINDS THAT WAR LEADS TO QUESTIONS ABOUT CATHOLIC DOCTRINE

  Given the substance of the letter to Father Ducharme, it’s likely that the German censor had an easier time with the Latin close “Tibi in Sapientia!” (Onwards to wisdom!) than with Father Larivière’s complex theological arguments. We can be certain of two things, however; the censor did not enforce the rule that POWs were to write in English or French only and, probably because Larivière hid it in Latin, missed the Oblate’s riff on the title of the collection of Churchill’s speeches (that men captured after 1943 would have known), “Onwards to Victory!”

  Larivière’s concerns grew directly out of his wartime experience tending to huge flocks and flocks in widely separate camps. For years he had exempted himself from the rule of Eucharist Fasting for practical reasons. Now, the priest raised in the village of Saint-Zacharie de Beauce, Quebec, went further and told his brother in Christ that the rule made sense only if transubstantiation was the miraculous conversion of the Host and wine into the body and blood of Christ and not symbolic, as believed by the Protestants whom Larivière had come to know well for the first time in his life.

  After years of close contact with men who were so different from the devout rural Catholics he grew up with, the Oblate asked in his letter if the mass itself “could be generalized for the workers.” The question, let alone the answer, placed him some distance from the Quebec Church’s embrace of corporatism, which saw workers as a subservient group in society, and especially from Abbé Lionel Groulx, who called for les Canadiens français to return to the land where they would be insulated from industrialism, Anglo-Saxon individualism and socialism in equal measure.

  Earlier in the war, Larivière’s letters emphasized the uniqueness of the priesthood. Pushed by the strain of having to travel hundreds of miles to and from different camps without priests (and his recent extensive reading of European history, including, it would seem for the first time, of the Reformation), Larivière asks whether “sacerdotal power” (the ability to give communion and give absolution) should be given to deacons, the minor orders and even “the laity,” who were the “faithful living in the world.”196 Such questions display an openness of mind that is inverse to the reality of his imprisonment.

  MID-JUNE 1944, SERBIA, YUGOSLAVIA

  REID MEETS GENERAL DRA

  Reid understood the reasoning, but the Chetniks’ decision to divide the group of evaders into smaller groups so that the Germans could not recapture all at once disturbed him. He knew he’d been well-treated and that Draža Mihailovic’s men had done what they could for them. Still, he couldn’t shake the doubt left by the RAF intelligence officers who advised seeking out Tito’s forces. The safety Reid had felt when with the Americans (whose intelligence officers had told the evaders that the Chetniks would cut off their ears) vanished when he once again found himself the lone Westerner with five or so Chetniks, moving in a generally northwest direction.

  “I knew showing that I was nervous would only arouse their suspicions, so I tried to remain indifferent,” remembers Reid. “I was able to compare the silk map from my escape kit with the terrain I was moving through and knew generally where I was. Each day, we met peasants who supplied us with unleavened bread, cheese and sometimes beans and occasionally hard-boiled eggs.” Though an Albertan who had ridden working farm horses, Reid had little experience on a saddled horse.

  The same could not be said of the group that Reid saw riding toward him and the others when one day they had stopped in a village for food. “Though they wore British battle dress, they were a ramshackle lot, but they rode like experts. Then the peasants called out ‘checha,’ which I later learned means ‘uncle’ in Serbian.”

  This bearded man who resembled a university professor spoke some English, but Reid found it easier to converse with Mihailovic in French. “He seemed to recognize my uniform, and we exchanged a few words. But what stands out was the obvious esteem with which the peasants and his men held him,” says Reid. “Later I learned about his military prowess and expert knowledge of Yugoslavia’s forbidding topography. But there, in the lightly wooded area where peasant huts were scattered, what I saw was an almost medieval fiduciary relationship between him and these people who revered him.”

  28 JUNE 1944, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  FATHER CHARBONNEAU CONSIDERS THE “SCHOOL OF DARWIN”

  Father Desnoyers’s letter showed none of the joy that coursed through Father Pellerin’s a week earlier, only part of which was due to Pellerin’s receipt just prior to his birthday of a parcel that included clerical robes that fit him perfectly. Feeding Pellerin’s mood was the “joyous news on the breeze bringing us hope that we might soon find liberty,” a manifestation of the post–D-Day optimism.

  The military situation, about which they had only the haziest idea, was not what weighed on Desnoyers, nor on Father Charbonneau. Neither regretted doing missionary work in the POW camps, yet after three years, they found the numbers of their flocks and their apostolic influence disappointing. In a time and place when it could be expected that men would turn to religion for hope and support, Charbonneau estimated that only 5 per cent of Catholics came to mass of their own volition and that 90 per cent of Catholics were hostile to their faith. The Catholics were so poorly educated that, like the polite Anglicans Charbonneau lived with, they embraced the “school of Darwin.” According to Desnoyers, this “pseudo-scientific materialism” did more than simply draw a false division between science and religion; it determined on which side of the divide each man stood. Compared with the Basutos, who were hungry for the Word, even the Catholic Kriegies were practically atheists all but indifferent to the religion of their forefathers.

  Charbonneau was not wrong to summarize the difference between the curates and the other POWs with the term “Darwinism,” though the divide actually had less to do with different views on evolution (which had been rejected by Pope Leo XIII in 1880) than it did with differences between fathers’ and brothers’ education and view of agency in the world and that of the other POWs.197 Having passed through the collège classique system in Quebec, taking bachelor’s and then master’s degrees, the brothers and fathers not only were the best-educated prisoners (they were fluent in Latin and read Greek) but they also had areas of specialization—for example, theology, holy scripture and canon law—that were nothing like what even other university-educated prisoners studied: accounting, engineering, law.

  The gap yawned even wider between les religieux and the thousands of tradesmen. Moreover, despite superficial similarities between the monastic life and that of the sailors at the camp—such as the regulation of the day by bells—the seamen were concerned with load balancing, pipe fitting, navigation and engineering. The green dots on the radar officer’s cathode ray tube could peer almost into the future, while an asdic (sonar) operator listened for pings that revealed the deadly U-boats in the deep. Even as religious a man as MacDonald, who wrote home telling of his great joy that he’d gone to his first full mass since being shot down and asking for a missal, saw himself as active in the
world in a practical way different from les religieux, for his tool was the bomb sight.

  LATE JUNE 1944, ON A TRAIN TO STALAG VIII-B, LAMSDORF, GERMANY

  CARSWELL AND MAC ARE RECOGNIZED AS POWS AGAIN

  After weeks of mistreatment and hearing the screams of other prisoners being beaten senseless, Carswell and Mac found themselves being hustled down a windowless hallway by an SS man with a machine gun at the ready, and thinking, “Please, God, don’t let it end here!”198 The moment of greatest terror—rounding a corner—ended not with the rattle of the machine gun but with the sight of a short, fat, ordinary German soldier leaning on his rifle, waiting to pick up his charges.

  LATE JUNE 1944, RAVNA GORA, SERBIA, YUGOSLAVIA

  REID NARROWLY AVOIDS BEING CAPTURED

  After weeks of walking through the rugged mountains of southwest Serbia, bathing in streams and experiencing the extreme temperature changes of day and night, Reid had a new appreciation of the poor bloody infantry’s lot in life. One day, as the Chetnik-led party approached a town, he got to put into practice some of what his father had learned as an infantryman in the First World War: “One of the Chetniks went ahead until he saw a light in the window, and then we advanced that far. Then, in a repeated leapfrog-like manner, we came to the centre of the small town.

  “It had been a hard day, and when the sun went down the temperature dropped quickly, so the chairs, hot food and especially the slivovitz [at the restaurant we stopped at] were welcome,” says Reid, his voice quickening as he recalls the almost theatrical moment when, after hearing some commotion outside, the fat restaurant owner came rushing into the backroom and spoke to Reid and his comrades in an excited yet low voice. “I didn’t understand a word he said. But from his face and hand motions, even before I saw the others jump to their feet I knew we were going to have to make a run for it.”

  Reid and the Chetniks slipped out the back door before the Germans came in the front, but the Germans too could read the restaurateur’s face. By the time the Germans had run back to their trucks, started the engines and turned on the headlights, Reid and the Chetniks were on their stomachs, each crawling through a different row in a maize field. “I hadn’t got very far into my row when, thanks to the headlights and inspection light, I saw a German soldier in the next row.” As his heart pounded so hard that he could hear his blood flow, Reid doubted that the thin stalks of the animal feed corn would keep him hidden. But the stalks produced just enough shadow for the German to pass him by. “A few moments later, he turned around, and we could hear the others walking back toward the restaurant. I guess they were more interested in getting some food and a good drink than in searching for us,” says Reid, who followed the Chetniks to the northeast corner of the field, where they climbed aboard a wood-burning truck, something the Canadian airman had not known existed.

  EARLY JULY 1944, RENNES, FRANCE

  LANCE SERGEANT STAN DUTKA IS INTERROGATED

  Stan Dutka was one of a group of 15 North Novas to surrender to Oberstleutnant Karl-Heinz Milius’s teenaged thugs. He saw the bodies of the eight Canadians shot in Authie, the remnants of the body the tank ran over, the two men murdered by the truck driver and the murdered body of Tom Davidson, whom he’d grown up with and worked with in a mine in Stellarton, Nova Scotia. The Germans’ handling of the POWs they captured and let live in Normandy was eerily similar to how they treated the survivors of Dieppe. Rooms so full of men—in one more than 40, like Dutka, wounded when an American pilot unable to distinguish between a column of POWs and German troops swooped down in a strafing run—that they could not sit or lie down. No matter what Geneva said, hour followed hour without food or, more importantly, water appearing, until 7 June turned to the 8th and then the 9th.

  Two Canadians died on the six-day march from Caen to the hospital at Rennes, during which the Wehrmacht refused to supply bandages and medical aid, though French civilians did what they could. After spending ten days in the hospital, which was so denuded of supplies that the French medical personnel believed the soldiers would be better off in German hands, Dutka and several other men were turned over to the Germans, who promptly crammed as many as they could into a truck bound for a POW camp. Once there, when asked how many troops had landed, Dutka answered, “Fifteen million,” adding helpfully that for every man there was also one tank.

  EARLY JULY 1944, RAVNA GORA, SERBIA, YUGOSLAVIA

  REID AND SOME AMERICANS TRY TO MAKE A HOME RUN ON THEIR OWN

  They’d been travelling for about three days, since the pre-dawn darkness when they’d crept silently away from the Chetniks, who had been leading Reid and a few downed American flyers further and further from the part of western Yugoslavia controlled by Tito. “We were a pretty sorry-looking lot,” recalls Reid, whose RCAF battle dress was dirty and torn, “which was good, since it allowed us to make it look like we were peasants tilling the land when German patrols came by.” Difficult as these moments were for his American friends, they were even more nail-biting for Reid: he realized after they’d struck out on their own that the cord around his neck had broken and he’d lost his identity disks. “Without the flashes on my uniform or my identity disks, the Germans would have been able to ignore my claims to falling under the Geneva Convention and turn me over to the SS instead of sending me to a regular POW camp,” he says.

  Reid had used some of the money in his escape kit to buy bread, cheese and Turkish delight, so it wasn’t hunger that prompted the evaders to approach a peasant wearing homespun clothes. “Rather,” says Reid, “we realized that while we had no trouble determining which way was west, the rugged land made actually going west extremely difficult and we would need help.” The peasant was friendly but to Reid’s dismay led them back to Ravna Gora, from where they had just come. Fortunately, none of the Chetniks he turned them over to realized that Reid or the other men had slipped away from another group of Chetniks and, rather, simply assumed that they too were recently downed airmen.

  21 JULY 1944, STALAG XX-A, TORUN, POLAND

  MACDONALD EXPLAINS “UNCLE JOE’S” ROLE IN HOW HE CAME TO BE AT A NEW CAMP

  Neither Ian MacDonald nor Andrew Cox knew the name of the Russian offensive, Operation Bagration, or the numbers involved, which would have shocked them: more than 1 million Russian troops; 24,000 artillery pieces and mortars and more than 4,080 tanks and 6,334 aircraft, divided into a number of armies attacking across a front that ranged from the Baltic to the Black Sea. By early July, however, they could hear the guns of the 3rd Belorussian Front, which their families back home in Canada knew from the newspaper headlines had already pushed the Germans back 300 miles, and from Smolensk and Minsk. The Soviet advance was so quick that MacDonald, Cox and the other POWs were moved from Heydekrug in Lithuania first to Torun, in north-central Poland, and a few weeks later to Stalag XI-B, near Fallingbostel, in Lower Saxony, with the result that the postcard MacDonald wrote on 21 July does not have a censor’s stamp.199

  MacDonald chose his words carefully, including “As you can see, we’ve changed camps for military reasons,” which likely would have passed muster with his usual censor, Geprüft 3, as would rote lines about hoping that the war would end soon. MacDonald was uncharacteristically daring, however, when he explained in a parenthetical comment what the military reason was: “old Joe was getting too close”—“old Joe” being a reference to “Uncle Joe Stalin.”

  LATE JULY 1944, RAVNA GORA, SERBIA, YUGOSLAVIA

  REID HAS A STRANGE CONVERSATION WITH GENERAL MIHAILOVIC

  “It was obvious that all of this had to do with someone important,” says Reid, referring to the long table laid with plates and fine cutlery that had been set up in the field by a small house not far from Ravna Gora. “Eating is an extremely important communal activity for the Serbs, so I wasn’t surprised that I was invited to this picnic, though I was embarrassed by the ragged flea- and lice-infested remains of my uniform, especially when a Chetnik officer directed me toward one of the two vacant seats at the middle o
f the table.”

  A short time later, to Reid’s great surprise, General Mihailovic strode up to the table and sat down next to him. In more than passable English, he started discussing Canadian constitutional arrangements, of all things. “I was astonished that he knew the difference between the governor-general and the lieutenant-governors. The discussion was surreal. In front of me were people who lived by a blood code and who fought their war on horseback. And there I was, an airman from half a world away, discussing the reserve power of the British and Canadian monarchies,” says Reid.

  After they’d finished eating, the general asked Reid if he would stand at the end of the table so that, as an honoured guest, he could take the salute of the Chetnik platoons. Having had three shots of slivovitz, Reid was a little concerned about how steady his hand would be while saluting. He needn’t have been, though diplomacy demanded that Reid not let on that he realized that, just as Confederate General Magruder had famously done in 1861, Mihailovic made his force look larger than it was by having the men march by Reid several times. Before Mihailovic rode off with his detachment, he signed and gave the Canadian a 500-dinar note, on which he had also written in Serbian: “May Godspeed find you safely home.” Reid still has it.