Across the Bridge

by Robert Grieve Black

  At first it seemed that the prison camps were in Germany but when the letters arrived the picture became clearer. Kenny’s letters came from Stammlager 21A and Ian’s from Stammlager 20A. This was shortened to Stalag and the numbers in Roman numerals; hence the ominous name Stalag XXA. Ian in XXA was in Thorn (Torun), about 120 miles west and a little north of Warsaw in Poland while Kenny was also in Poland but near Wroclaw next the Czechoslovakian border. Stalag XXIA was at the town of Schildberg (Ostrzeszow). This confusion of changing names and moving frontiers was difficult for the folk back home to absorb so it was always easier just to say the boys were in a German prison camp.

  While all this was taking place many miles away on the other side of Europe the war edged its way also into the quiet glens of Argyll. The women went into action with the knitting needles to make socks and gloves and balaclavas. The War Office advertised the need to produce more food at home so every square inch of land around Baravullin went into the production of vegetables, mostly potatoes. Some families were evacuated from Glasgow to Benderloch and Baravullin played host to a few of these. For a time the radio brought daily reports of the “Battle of Britain” in the air and the “Blitz” in London. Glasgow and Clydebank took their share of bombs so the war crept ever nearer.

  The biggest shock for Benderloch came on the 23 of December 1940. The P&O Shipping line had a cargo ship called SS Breda sheltering in deep waters called Oban Roads between the town of Oban and Benderloch. She was on the way from London to India and was waiting to pick up a convoy. Her cargo was fighter planes and spares, other military hardware, 3000 tons of cement and some animals. A formation of Heinkel bombers took off from Stavanger in German occupied Norway looking for convoys. As they sped across Scotland one pilot got his sights on SS Breda sitting in the bay and let go four 550-pound bombs around her. She wasn’t hit directly but the blast caused extensive damage. A salvage attempt was put in action and they pulled her into shallower water.

  The animals got free and swam ashore, nine dogs, ten horses and the ship’s pet monkey. Bad weather interrupted the rescue and the ship drifted back out to deep water and sank. Only her mast and funnel were visible at high tide. There she remained throughout the war years to remind the Highland folk that the war was never far away.

  The Oban Roads became a frequent assembly area for Atlantic convoys and two “Ack-Ack” anti-aircraft batteries were installed on the Benderloch side. Soldiers became a familiar sight around the village and often received “Highland hospitality” at the MacKenzie house. Jessie MacKenzie’s cakes and tea often brought the lads visiting. Or was it Teenie, the young lady of the house that was the attraction? She enjoyed the attention and sometimes walked back down the road with one of the soldiers, a harmless flirtation, she thought.

  Her brother Calum didn’t agree. By chance he came home on leave one day and met Teenie and her escort on the road to Baravullin. Teenie had never seen her brother so angry. How dare she consort with the soldiers while her own man was a prisoner in a foreign land?

  “But we were just walking to the end of the road,” protested Teenie.

  “It makes no difference. How do you think Ian would feel if he came up the road like me just now and saw you just walking with another man? I insist you stop seeing this man.”

  “But he just comes like the other boys for tea and scones. We have to be nice to them. How would you feel? You would be the first at the door for some of Mammy’s scones.”

  “I suppose I would but you shouldn’t go walking with them. Alright?”

  “Oh, Calum, you’re too old fashioned but alright maybe you’re right. Is it alright to walk with you?” she slipped her arm in her brother’s and they walked back to the cottage together.

  Nearly two thousand miles away at that moment Ian Black was licking the edge of a postcard to Teenie. His message was not particularly romantic. “Please send socks!”

  17. CHRISTMAS STOCKINGS

  Torun, July to December 1940

  In July the landscape had seemed quite like home and the weather too. It was pleasantly warm with frequent rain showers. The tents were not so pleasant when it rained. So many men crammed into a small area, no privacy, no space to call your own. Everybody became irritable and the constant commands, barked in German, gnawed at nerve ends.

  “Raus! Raus! Raus!” was the friendly morning call.

  By the time all 18,000 prisoners had roused and the roll call was checked they had sometimes to stand two or three hours. It was a game played out daily. The prisoners intentionally messed up the head count, so the guards kept them on parade until they had their numbers checked. Breakfast was the mushy potato soup and they had to line up with mess tin or tin helmet while this delight was slopped up. Later in the day there was some black bread and “coffee” made from acorns. Everybody needed fresh underwear and socks but they never seemed to come.

  Through August and September the days were spent building huts for winter. As one more hut was completed the tent village shrunk a little but this too, was a game where the prisoners were the only losers. They could have finished the building work in half the time but why co-operate with the enemy so they spent a few more weeks than necessary in tents. Unlike many of the prisoners, Ian liked building huts. Fitting windows, hanging doors, installing woodstoves. This was his stock-in-trade.

  The Red Cross visit re-established arrangements for letters to go home but on a controlled basis and only on official Stalag paper or specially made fold-over postcards. The massive influx of prisoners had interrupted the mail service but the Red Cross officials insisted on its importance for the men’s moral. Ian decided to write to Christina. She could then tell his father that he was alright. (He didn’t know, of course, that the British Army Form B. 104-83a had been sent to his father at the end of July.) He also wanted to know what had happened to Calum and Kenny. And please, please try and send some socks! His boots were still in good condition but all the marching had played havoc with his socks. The mail system however, wasn’t exactly next day delivery. Every piece of correspondence was scrutinised and censored by both the German and British authorities and replies from home were directed back through the same system.

  As the days rolled from summer into autumn the huts were completed but there was still no mail from home, still no socks. Each hut was built to take 300 men, 50 three-tier bunks along each side, a small stove in the centre and electric light bulbs hanging from the roof joists. Each bed had a rough mattress but no blankets. A large batch of Polish army greatcoats was acquired and these served for daytime wear and as bedcovers at night, not so practical on the rainy days.

  The leaves fell from the trees and the ground hardened with the first winter frost. The north wind began to make its presence felt and the morning roll call was now taking just an hour or so. The watery soup was more welcome if only for its warmth. A letter arrived from Teenie with news of her brothers, but still no socks. The holes were now so big that all five toes “peeped through”.

  The good news was that none of the family had been killed and Calum had managed to get away at Dunkirk. He came home to Benderloch for a couple of days and was now back in service. Kenny had been captured at St. Valery and so also had sister Katy’s husband, Gillies but by now Ian was fairly sure they weren’t at Torun.

  Christmas bells began to jingle around Torun and the snow looked like it was here to stay a while. Horse drawn sleighs became commonplace while wheeled vehicles just bogged down and became unserviceable. Morning roll call became much faster. Nobody really wanted frostbite just for the fun of messing up the guards. The cold in fact began to form a common bond between prisoner and guard. They were all in a foreign land in a hostile climate. Sometimes the guards were even a little envious having to stay outside guarding the perimeter fences while the prisoners were “warm” inside.

  The temperature fell well below zero and ice started to form a skin on the interior of the huts. Wood for the stove was thickly coated with snow and ice. A supp
ly of coal arrived and each hut was allocated one bucketful per day. The men were now wearing their greatcoats both day and night. They had to break two or three inches of ice to obtain water and there was no real means of heating water to wash or shave. Razor blades were hard to find anyway. The Red Cross parcels were slow getting through on the snow-covered roads and there were still no parcels from home. Small items took on a barter value. One cigarette bought half a Gillette razor blade. The cigarette was seldom smoked but held for future barter. Sometimes it didn’t exist at all but was simply the unit of currency jotted down to keep track of who owed what to whom. The half razor blade on the other hand was used if its owner could procure some soap and lukewarm water. Of course there wasn’t the luxury of a safety razor to hold the blade. That’s why half a blade was more useful, held deftly between thumb and forefinger. There was no real hurry except in getting shaved before the water froze again.

  Still no parcels, no underwear, no socks! The situation was becoming drastic. Frostbite was becoming a real danger. Ian’s socks now had no toes and no heels. Necessity, it is said, is the mother of invention. After about twenty shaves Ian’s half razor blade was cutting his face so he abandoned shaving. He sat on his bunk looking at the useless blade thinking that maybe he should have smoked the cigarette and just grown a beard. That’s what he would have to do now anyway. He laid down the blade and removed a boot to contemplate the current sock situation. Suddenly he had an idea. He took the razor blade and nicked a two-inch sliver of wood from the side of his bed. He trimmed it to a thin shape with a pointed end and then delicately cut out an eye in the other end. He now had a darning needle. All he needed was some wool and he could darn his socks.

  He rolled back on his bed and laughed. He remembered Glen Lyon and Meggernie, thousands of bloody sheep, tons of wool. He remembered clipping time, the warm spring wind and the woolsacks stuffed full with freshly clipped wool. He remembered the songs from school when he had to sing in Gaelic and had no idea what he was singing. He learned later that most were songs from the Hebrides, wool-making songs, where the women sang as they laboriously combed the wool and teased it into thread. He remembered his Aunt Sarah sitting knitting by the fireside on cold winter nights. He remembered the first pair of stockings that she knitted for him and how he’d caught the top of one on a fence the first day he wore them. He laughed again as he remembered how the wool pulled away from the top in handfuls once the link in the stitch was broken.

  Suddenly, he stopped laughing. He looked down at his frozen foot and pulled off his stocking. They weren’t army issue. They were a pair that Teenie had knitted and given him when he came home at New Year. God, that seemed like years ago. He took the razor blade and gently slit the wool at the top end of the sock. He pulled warily as the wool started to unwind and kept pulling until he had removed about an inch from the length of the stocking. He cut it loose and threaded the fixed end through his “needle” then carefully sewed the end firmly so it wouldn’t come undone. He rolled the newly acquired wool into a ball and proceeded to darn the toes and heel until he had a serviceable sock and then did the same with the other. By the time the first socks arrived from home he had ripped back most of his stockings until he just had the feet left. In the meantime the needle passed it’s way around the hut as other soldiers joined the darning club.

  That, more or less, took care of his feet but it was a bitterly cold and miserable Christmas. New Year was worse for the Scots lads in the camp. Just one wee dram would have made all the difference; instead the usual potato sludge and a celebratory bar of Red Cross chocolate. February brought another fall of snow, Ian’s thirty-fifth birthday and the news that he was moving out. He was going to an Arbeits Kommando, a work camp near the town of Graudenz about fifty miles further down the Vistula. Just before they left some parcels arrived from home; the long awaited socks and a balaclava and some food items.

  About one hundred prisoners were loaded onto trucks and the convoy trundled out of Podgorz towards the cantilever bridge across the Vistula. Just over the bridge they caught their first sight of the real world for six months. It seemed strange how ordinary people bustled about the town, the businessmen in top hat and tails, boys pushing carts and women going shopping. The reality, in fact, seemed unreal but it was a welcome break from the austerity of camp life and the prisoners chattered like excited children as they spotted each new aspect of Polish life. Just as well that they didn’t know of the beautiful little gingerbread delicacies in the bakers’ shops. Morning potato soup was already beginning to curdle in their bellies in the bouncing vehicles. North they went along narrow dirt track roads, flat straight roads with trees either side, rutted with the snow and slush. At Graudenz they stopped outside the town while the drivers checked their maps and then went down a narrow lane into a clearing in the woods.

  They disembarked from the trucks with some trepidation as the guards pointed their guns and signalled them into a line. A jackbooted commander stepped forward and addressed them in English.

  “If you look to your left gentlemen you will see your accommodation has not yet been assembled.”

  They turned to see three wooden huts in sections lying in the snow.

  “When you have them assembled you will not have to sleep in the snow.”

  The huts were assembled fast including one for the guards. That night they did not sleep in the snow but without beds or a stove it was cold enough.

  From spring to autumn that year they worked in the fields, heavy back breaking work but by summer there was a regular supply of goods both from home and from the Red Cross. From the farms came the occasional egg or piece of cheese, bread or milk. Fresh vegetables or fruit could sometimes be “acquired”. Working outside in the summer months was not unpleasant and by harvest time Ian and friends had a good suntan. That summer tens of thousands of German troops passed through Graudenz on the way to the Russian front. Watching them head off towards a winter war the prisoners didn’t feel any envy.

  With a carpet of autumn leaves on the ground and the first scent of snow in the wind the camp closed down and the trucks arrived to take them back to Torun. Or so they thought. The trucks moved out and instead of going back to Torun they crossed the Vistula and went west through the town of Bromberg and to a village called Nakel. Another set of build yourself huts awaited them and the promise of somewhere to sleep once they had built them.

  Ian spent Christmas of 1941 in the comparative comfort of a wooden hut in Nakel. He had stockings now; his health was fine and was better able to withstand the bitterly cold winter months. Someone acquired a couple of accordions, a fiddle with one string missing and a trumpet and created a “Philharmonic, Highland, Ragtime Band”.

  In February they were on the move again. Back in the trucks they trundled slowly through the snow back towards Graudenz but then they turned across to the south side of the Vistula just before the town and came back west for about ten miles. They turned off into a dark wood before the town of Kulm and down a bumpy track they came upon their next holiday camp. This time the huts were already built. Nobody told them where they were and they moved in to this new billet thinking they were back at Graudenz. It didn’t matter anyway. A camp was a camp, a field was a field and one sugar beet looked much like all the rest but in this camp they were to cut more firewood than sugar beet.

  18. DEAR JOHN

  Near Torun, Poland, 1942

  From February till November in 1942 Ian was in the little work camp near the town of Kulm. It is a quaint little town built on one of the few hilltops in the Torun area. It is better known by the Polish name of Chelmno.

  When the snow cleared the men were divided into groups to work in the farms or forests or sometimes in local workshops. Everyone who worked received vouchers by way of payment. These were called lagergeld and in theory were exchangeable within the economy of the Reich but in practice there was nowhere the prisoners could go to redeem their value. It was just a tantalising paper exercise to show that
it was not slave labour. None of the prisoners were under any illusion as to the reality of their situation.

  Escape, though always on their minds, was never a realistic prospect in the middle of a land they did not know and unable to plan accurately any escape route. Some tried unsuccessfully but very few ever got all the way back to the U.K. and each attempt made life more difficult for everybody with punitive reprisals. But in these work camps “bugger-up” was the name of the game. If they had to work for the enemy then they would do as little as possible and poor standard work. Starting with the inevitable morning roll call, where several re-counts were the norm, everyone enjoyed putting a spoke in the wheel of the Wehrmacht and evenings were spent telling stories of the silly pranks these grown men had played on the guards.

  Survival in prison camp relied greatly on comradeship. With so many men living together under difficult circumstances there were frequent squabbles so there was a tendency to form small groups of friends. Sometimes the common bond was the regiment, sometimes home origins and sometimes just chance. There was sometimes friction between Scots and English but this was never a problem for Ian, a Scotsman born in England. With Bob Shand, a twenty-year old conscript from the north of Scotland, Bob Potter, a detective constable from Scotland Yard and Pete Daly a jovial little Cockney he formed a close friendship, sharing cigarettes, chocolate bars and worries. When one was down the others helped revive his spirits. Sometimes they all felt down together and other days some little, silly thing could lift them from a downer – some mail, a Red Cross parcel or some misfortune that had befallen one of the guards

  The four of them were singing and fooling around one night just before “lights out” and the guard came in and told them to shut up, muttering as he left something about “Schottlanders”. As the door closed behind him the two Scots burst into laughter as Pete Daly flew into an indignant rage.