The Prisoner's Wife

by Maggie Brookes

  Footsteps stop close to me, and someone says, “All right, mate?”

  I lift my head and grimace.

  A man with sergeant’s stripes nods encouragingly. “Nearly over now.”

  I nod, and he moves away. But it’s not over for me. It will never be over for me.

  * * *

  On Good Friday, March 30, the guards set lookouts to scan the horizon for tanks. In one direction they report sightings of Nazi Tigers; in the other, American Shermans. Our prison camp is smack in the middle, under the flimsy protection of the Red Cross flag. There’s a vibration of nervous tension, as if all the men around me have drunk too much coffee. The sound of gunfire is incessant, and it seems to come from all directions, all around us, as though we are in the center of a typhoon that may wipe us out as it spins away. I pray that I’ll be hit by a stray bullet. I don’t want to live without Bill.

  I watch prisoners exchanging addresses on the parade ground as if it’s the end of term at school. A plane flies low over the camp. All round me, men shout, “Hit the deck,” and throw themselves to the ground, covering their heads with their arms. I stay on my feet, shading my eyes to watch the plane go over, letting its crew target me if they will. But it doesn’t open fire. A few days earlier, the prisoners were given paint and allowed to climb onto the roofs of the huts to paint “POW” in giant white letters. Perhaps the crew of the plane has read the message on the roofs.

  And then, as the men are getting to their feet and brushing down their coats, there’s utter silence. The firing has stopped. We all look around nervously, as though this is the prelude to some gigantic explosion. But nothing happens.

  “Maybe this is it,” whispers Max.

  Others join in. “Perhaps it’s all over?”

  A tremendous roar goes up from the gates, as if the final goal has been scored at a football match, and someone shouts, “It’s the bloody Yanks!” Max grabs my hand, and I’m pulled along by him toward the gate to see what’s happening.

  I can’t get a view for all the heads in the way, but Max raises me up to see a US jeep, with six GIs sitting in it, laughing, as it’s lifted from the ground by starving prisoners and carried into the camp.

  Everyone around us goes crazy, crying, laughing, hugging one another. They whoop and yell for joy. “It’s over. It’s bloody well over.” Many men have tears pouring down their faces; others embrace each other rapturously as a stream of trucks enters the compound. Max hugs me and presses his lice-ridden head to mine, but I am a stone.

  All around me men are saying, “It’s over! It’s over! It’s over!” as though only saying it will make it real.

  Outside the fence, columns of armored cars decorated with American stars speed past, their occupants standing to throw packs of cigarettes and chocolate to us. Near the wire there’s a scramble to gather up the bounty, but Max says, “There’ll be more where that came from. Let’s not get trampled in the rush.”

  The side is dropped from one of the trucks that has been driven into the compound, and two American women with perfect hair and wearing red lipstick begin to serve coffee and doughnuts. The smell of sugar and real coffee coming from the truck feels like a mirage. The camp loudspeaker crackles into life, and we pause for a moment to hear an announcement, for someone to tell us all this is true, that we are free. But no announcement comes. Instead we hear the scratch of a needle on a record, and the opening of a dance tune booms over the camp.

  “It’s ‘In the Mood’,” laughs Max, and the music plus the overpowering smell of doughnuts and real coffee is more convincing than any words could have been. Stick men in rags start to dance with one another. The whole camp has transformed into a fairground, a circus. Another food truck dishes out meat sandwiches made with the whitest bread I’ve ever seen in my life.

  Near the cookhouse the Americans have gathered the Nazi guards into a huge cage. They look terrified. One of the US soldiers guarding them says to me, “Go on. Point out who was cruel to you. I’ll kill him now. No one’ll know.”

  I raise my eyes and scan the faces for the man who broke Bill’s nose. But when I find him, I think, What’s the point? and shake my head.

  And then, beyond him, behind the cage of guards, across the parade ground near the latrines, something catches my eye. I shift and grab Max’s arm to stop him.

  “What is it?” he asks, following my gaze.

  I duck left to try to catch another glimpse, but the caged guards are blocking my view. A shape. For just a second, I thought I saw . . . half-hidden . . . I strain to get a clear view past them. They move and block my line of sight. The sound of whistling reaches me. It’s the nightingale song. But I’ve been disappointed before, and now rather than lifting, my stomach plummets. It will be that stranger again, whistling our tune, taunting me.

  We reach the end of the cage and would now have a view across the parade ground to the latrines if my vision weren’t clouded by tears. I stumble, and Max, catching my arm, stops dead, lifting his hand to shade his eyes, gazing where I was looking before. The whistled notes rise, and I blink my eyes clear. It’s a figure I’d know anywhere. He turns and looks straight at me.

  It is.

  It’s Bill.

  Epilogue

  Bill takes my hand. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s go and find someone in charge.”

  I pull Max by the sleeve. He has to be with us, to be there at the end.

  The three of us press on through the crowds of singing, dancing, laughing men.

  “Like Trafalgar Square on New Year’s Eve,” says Bill.

  We come to the offices where the camp commandant used to work, and at last I believe that this is real. I have found Bill, and we are going to England.

  Bill says very firmly, “We need to see the person in charge,” and there’s something about the urgency and conviction in his voice that the American soldier hears. For a few minutes, we stand and watch the fairground the camp has become, and I think of the terrible distance we have walked and of all those who fell on the way. I bless Scotty’s generous soul. Without his sacrifice, I wouldn’t be standing here. I see the faces of all those I love, not knowing whether they are alive or dead, in pain or suffering, somewhere on this war-ravaged continent: my father and mother, Jan, Marek, Ralph. I grip Bill’s and Max’s hands on either side of me. They are all I have left, all that I know, all that I have to take into the future with me.

  Those of us who’ve survived will have a huge job to do, to rebuild the cities and towns that have been reduced to rubble, to rebuild lives torn by grief and separation, to build a new and fairer world where the poor will be housed and fed, where this will truly be a war to end the senseless waste of war forever. And looking out at the celebrations in front of us, strength flows through me. If we’ve survived all we’ve experienced, we can do anything.

  A GI ushers us inside. I’ve never been in the commandant’s office, but behind his big oak desk now sits a tall and rangy American colonel. Bill and Max automatically salute him. I wave my hand ineffectually, feeling oddly calm and detached.

  “Yes, soldier?” he asks. “Something urgent?”

  Bill steps forward and pulls me beside him.

  “Yes, sir,” says Bill. “This prisoner isn’t a soldier. She’s my wife. She’s Czech.”

  “Good God.” The colonel rises to his feet, staring into my eyes. I remember Ralph’s astonished face, six months and five hundred miles ago. The colonel starts to come around his desk to examine me more closely. Fear has fallen away from me, and I look back at him, look clear-eyed into this new world I’ve been spared to inhabit. Bill’s hand is squeezing mine like he’ll never let it go, but this moment is mine, earned from all the terror and hardship.

  I hold up my other hand for silence and clear my throat, pulling myself up tall. “Good afternoon,” I say in the English accent I’ve been practicing in my mind for so long. I turn
my head to Max and then to my darling Bill. They are both smiling encouragement, and I find I’m grinning all over my face.

  I step forward, and the words rise up and circle my head like uncaged larks. “My name is Mrs. Izabela King. I’m very pleased to meet you.”

  Author’s Note

  This astonishing story was first told to me in 2007 by Sidney Reed, who lived in the same sheltered accommodation as my mother. We were in the elevator when he said, “I bet I could tell you a story about the war which would make your hair stand on end.” I could hardly believe what he was telling me, so a few days later, I arranged to go back and talk to him more about it. We sat for a couple of hours, and I took pages of notes. I couldn’t doubt the authenticity of what he was telling me—the details of how the Czech girl’s presence was announced to the hut, of how she coped with her period, of the way the men worked together to protect her, felt absolutely true. I knew I had to write this story, and it had to be in the voice of the Czech woman trapped in a perilous world of men. Despite my experience as a historical documentary researcher and producer for the BBC, I was daunted by the difficulty of writing it as a novel. I toyed with the idea of writing a radio play, but I was a recognized poet, and in the end I wrote a long narrative poem that was published online in 2008. I thought I was done with it, but the story kept nagging at me. I wanted to know more, and I wanted to share it with a wider audience than poetry readers.

  I returned to Sidney Reed for another afternoon, but by this time his memory was less sharp, and the details seemed muddled. He told me he’d been in “Straflager” 166, but his son said he’d been imprisoned at Lamsdorf, Stalag 344. I began to doubt the story. But thanks to Philip Baker’s Lamsdorf website, I discovered that the English work camps were given E numbers and that there was indeed an E166, and it was at Saubsdorf quarry, which Sidney had described so clearly to me. Now my hair really did stand on end, and my research began in earnest.

  I visited the Imperial War Museum, the National Archive and the British Library. I read published books and private diaries and joined the Lamsdorf Association. I realized that a prisoner in a labor subcamp of Lamsdorf would have been subjected to the terrible Long March from Eastern Europe into Germany. According to a report by the US Department of Veterans Affairs, almost 3,500 US and Commonwealth POWs died as a result of the marches. I wasn’t at all sure I could write something so harrowing.

  My husband went with me to the Czech Republic and drove the route from Vražné, through Poland and Germany to Hartmannsdorf as I took hundreds of photographs, and we searched out locations for the novel, including a possible farmhouse for Izzy and a church in which she might have married Bill. As we drove, we tried to identify barns and buildings in which thousands of men could have been billeted overnight. We visited the site of the Lamsdorf prisoner of war camp on an appropriately snow-covered day in March 2016.

  Then I began to write. The pages of notes I had from Sidney Reed could only give me a sketch outline. For the rest, I had to depend on written accounts and my own imagination. Sidney couldn’t remember the name of the Czech girl or her husband, though he’d heard they’d made it back to England. So the characters of Izabela and Bill are invented, as are their friends Ralph, Max and Scotty. The character of Scotty grew from a memory of Sidney’s of a member of the notorious Glasgow razor gang at Saubsdorf, and Kurt was based on a sexually predatory guard recalled by Sidney.

  This is a novel, not a documentary, but every researchable element is based on historical truth. My dad was a POW in Italy and Austria, and some details came from the experiences of him and his friends. It was a stroke of luck that Saubsdorf happened to be the work camp at which the prisoner Horace Greasley fell in love with the quarry owner’s daughter, Rosa Rauchbach, and that he wrote a book about his escapades.

  Details of prison camp life have been drawn from a range of sources. Every step of the terrible Long March comes from eyewitness accounts, particularly drawn on those so meticulously chronicled in The Last Escape. There were three principal march routes across Europe from the different POW camps. I chose to send Izabela and Bill on the shortest. Many prisoners walked farther, for longer, and suffered worse deprivation and cruelty, and many died before they could reach safety. Some incidents I’ve included actually happened after the time span of this novel. For example, on April 19, 1945, at a village called Gresse, thirty Allied POWs died and thirty were seriously injured (possibly fatally) when strafed by a flight of RAF Typhoons.

  Although this is a work of fiction, it’s also the true story of what happens when fascism is allowed to flourish.

  FACTS AND FIGURES

  In terms of getting the facts right, I am particularly indebted to Sebastian Mikulec for checking the accuracy of the chapters set in the Lamsdorf camp and answering endless detailed questions with unfailing patience, and also to Martin Vitko, who gave me painstaking feedback on the Czech chapters and explained the complexity of the country’s history. The names of many places in this story have changed since 1945. The village now called Vražné was actually called Gross Petersdorf (Dolní Vražné) in 1944; Lamsdorf is now Łambinowice; present-day Supíkovice was called Saubsdorf during the war. I hope I will also be forgiven for using the names Poland and Czechoslovakia when referring to regions called by different names during the war. Historians will know that in 1918, after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Czechoslovak Republic was created. The new country included Moravia, Bohemia and Silesia—German-speaking regions that were known collectively as the Sudetenland. Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938 was widely welcomed by the German-speaking inhabitants. Ninety percent of the people then living in the village now known as Vražné were German speaking, though for the wider region the language was nearer to 50 percent German and 50 percent Czech. After the war most of the German-speaking people were forced to leave.

  Numbers are difficult to be certain about. As Lamsdorf was a processing center for the Arbeitskommando work camps, the numbers of prisoners it housed fluctuated daily. However, there were thirteen thousand beds for British soldiers, and about twelve thousand British soldiers at the Arbeitskommando at any one time. Seven hundred sick British POWs were taken from the camp on January 15, 1945, just before the mass evacuation on foot began on January 22, 1945. This continued over several days, in groups of one or two thousand, until 21,867 British POWs from the camp and the Arbeitskommando had set off on what became known as the Long March.

  We do know that Lamsdorf was the largest camp for British POWs—every third captured soldier wearing a British Empire uniform was eventually moved to Lamsdorf. The German authorities called it Britenlager—the British camp. However, these “British” servicemen included 271 Indians, 1,543 Canadians, 1,829 Australians, 2,217 New Zealanders and 1,210 Jewish Palestinians. We also know that the International Committee of the Red Cross classified it as the worst prison camp for British prisoners, and inmates referred to it as “hell camp” because of overcrowding, malnourishment and hard work.

  In some labor camps, men were paid in “Lagergeld,” a paper currency that could be exchanged in special shops.

  It is impossible to know how many men died on the Long March, because it’s even hard to be certain about the number of Allied prisoners held by the Nazis. In 1944 the number of British prisoners was thought to be 199,592, but at the end of the war, the number of POWs logged as having returned home was only 168,746. What happened to those other 30,846 men? It may be that the first figure was wrong, but many of them must have died on the Long March. There are reports of one working party from which eighteen hundred men set out on the Long March, and only thirteen hundred completed it, with 30 percent dying en route.

  And finally, Sidney Reed didn’t know exactly where the Czech girl came from, or her name. The last he heard was a postcard from Manchester in 1945 that read, “Dear Corporal, We made it!” I hope that someone reading this novel might be able to identify the real I
zabela and Bill so I can pay tribute to their courage and love.

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Doyle, Peter. Prisoner of War in Germany. Shire Library, 2009.

  Greasley, Horace. Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? John Blake, 2013.

  Gudgion, H. J. A Gunner’s Scrapbook: Memories of 1939–1945. Privately printed.

  Gudgion, H. J. Pass the Parcel. Privately printed.

  Kee, Robert. A Crowd Is Not Company. Eyre and Spottiswoode Ltd., 1947.

  Nichol, John, and Tony Rennell. The Last Escape: The Untold Story of Allied Prisoners of War in Europe 1944–45. Viking Books, 2002.

  Wickiewicz, Anna. Captivity in British Uniforms: Stalag VIII B (344) Lamsdorf. Opole, 2018.

  Acknowledgments

  My first thanks are to Sidney Reed for telling me this story—and to the serendipity that brought us together, in an elevator.

  I can’t thank my husband, Tim Butt, enough for driving the route of the Long March through snow and ice with me, and giving me all the encouragement, time and space I needed to write.

  Thanks to my initial readers—Katie, Tim and Amy Butt; Johanna Charnley; Pippa Winton—and to Stephanie Cabot and Ellen Goodson Coughtrey, who gave such useful feedback.

  I would never have found the time to write the book if I hadn’t given up my full-time job, so I have to thank the Royal Literary Fund for giving me the fellowship that enabled me to do that and to focus on my writing.

  I am indebted to a group of historians, museum curators and writers:

  Sebastian Mikulec, curator at Centralne Muzeum Jeńców Wojennych, Łambinowice, who showed us around the Lamsdorf site in the snow, and read the Lamsdorf chapters for accuracy and answered so many e-mailed questions.