Another opportunity arose to disrupt our work that seemed safe from repercussions but might be effective; this one was to do with cabbages. Germans were very fond of their sauerkraut and it was an important part of their diet, so keeping a continuous supply of the white cabbages they needed was important to them. We used to work for hours on end in these enormous fields, row upon row of the beastly things. It was back-breaking and exhausting work. We were bending down pulling cabbages out of the hard ground with one hand and with the other, slicing off the bottom with a curved knife. The outer leaves would just fall off the bottom of the cabbage, leaving us with the white centre. These were thrown into nearby baskets and when they were filled, we carried them to the side of the fields and emptied them into the waiting carts. The farm workers or some of our men drove them off to the railway station.
Later on that day or the next, we would march down to the railway sidings just outside Freystadt where wagons were waiting for the cabbages to be loaded so that they could go off to the processing factories like the potatoes. We unloaded them by hand into the covered wagons. When they were full, railway officials would come along and lock them up. The wagons sometimes stayed there overnight before leaving on their long journeys to their destinations all over the country. We hung around knowing this, and when there was nobody about, some of us would sneak onto the tracks again and walk along the wagons looking for holes and gaps in the wooden sides. When we found one, we undid our flies and aiming very carefully, peed through it onto the cabbages inside. With any luck you could get one big jet in which would spray everything inside.
I like to think about the damage we did; that we must have spoilt loads of cabbages which travelled on their long hot journeys to the storage depots and then on to factories for processing. Let them rot. There was a simple satisfaction in sabotaging the sauerkraut. That sort of act of defiance felt good at the time but sadly it was short-lived.
Feelings of helplessness were never far away. We felt this most at times when we witnessed things completely beyond our understanding and our control. You never felt sorry for yourself after the terrible things you saw.
It was probably a few years later in the war that this happened, when we started to hear more about what was happening to the Jews, the political prisoners and minority groups persecuted by the Germans. We knew there was a concentration camp not far away at Stutthof. I saw something terrible happen and I want you to know about it.
I was in a party of about twenty men and we had been sent again to load cabbages at the railway station. As we were working, another train pulling a load of cattle trucks, like the ones we had travelled in, drew up on the opposite line. A large number of German guards appeared and started unbolting and sliding back the doors. I remembered what it felt like inside, hearing that sound, not knowing what was going on and what you would find when you finally got out.
The trucks were packed with people: men, women and children. They were being pulled out by guards and pushed along the tracks. One guard got impatient and grabbed hold of one woman and started yanking her out. She had a little baby in her arms and he snatched it from her. The baby started crying and he threw it onto the ground and started kicking it like a football along the track. The woman screamed and got down and rushed towards her baby bending down to pick it up. The guard shot her in the back of her head. Just one bullet did it. And that tiny baby was just lying there, no longer crying.
Imagine how that made me feel. What could I do? Absolutely nothing. I could only stand and watch. It was frightening. The violence. There was no reason for it. They were wicked. And I felt such anger and hatred. Hatred towards every German in the land.
* * *
There was no time that we prisoners didn’t think or talk about food. I used to say, ‘When I was in civvy street I couldn’t stand mutton stew or tapioca but God give me a bucket of it now.’ Were we able to complain about it to anybody? What do you think?
Every once in a while German officers visited from headquarters. They must have been quite high-ranking from the look of them, in their long black leather coats, with a cane in their hand which they kept click clacking on their coats as if to say, ‘We’re in charge. Watch your step. We’ve got you here.’ They would come and see us working on the farm or visit our billet to check the building and have a look round. I expect they reported back how efficiently run everything was and how well looked after the inmates were. They spoke reasonable English and were able to talk to us or rather address us.
‘Is there anything you men want?’ they asked.
‘Yes, we want more food,’ we said.
‘Grass is good enough for you people,’ they replied.
One of our chaps called Bill (I remember his name because I found out that he lived across the park from me in Barking) had been collecting fleas in a matchbox. Funny what some men do to amuse themselves when they haven’t got much entertainment. I suppose he didn’t want to waste them once he’d spent all that time picking them off himself. Thought they might come in handy or maybe he was keeping them as pets for a bit of company. I know how important that little mouse was to me when he visited me in my prison cell during my spell in solitary confinement.
As the officers were leaving, Bill somehow managed to sneak up behind them and empty the contents of the matchbox onto the collar and back of their coats. We had a laugh later on, thinking about those officers sitting in their fancy car scratching themselves all the way back to their HQ. And then possibly spreading them to the other officers and then so on through the ranks and right across the whole German Army.
You got used to them. Fleas that is, not the Germans. Never got used to the Germans and what they were capable of doing. But fleas on your body and in your clothes, you had to accept them. Even if you managed get rid of them you would catch more from somebody else soon enough. So you were always scratching and searching your clothes for them. A lot of the time you weren’t even aware you were doing it. You would be playing cards or reading a letter from home, pausing to have a good scratch. Sometimes you would pick them off your clothes between your finger nails, squeezing them dead. If it was your turn to have a bath that week you hoped you might drown a load in the water.
There were forty-five of us fighting over one little tin bath – or bowl should I say. We could just about sit in it with our legs dangling over the end. We probably had a bath once a fortnight as it took most of Sunday to get enough hot water from the copper which was always on the go – if we had enough wood for the fire. It was a real palaver when it was Jimmy’s turn as he was tall and had to do a sort of Houdini contortionist’s act to get himself clean. Two of us usually shared the same water, which soon turned grey with our accumulated dirt. Unless you could be bothered to skim off the black specks of drowned fleas before your turn in the water, you shared those too. We all longed to have a proper shower and dreamed about the time we would.
But I always thought about those poor Jews we had seen and wondered what conditions were like for them in the camps they were being transported to. Of course, after the war I heard the full story about the concentration camps and that ‘taking a shower’ had another meaning altogether.
7
Bullseye
I always say that it was the International Red Cross who brought us home. Without the British and Canadian food parcels we received, a lot more people would have died. How would we have survived all those years without those extra rations? We thought of them as luxuries but really they were no more than what any ordinary man should have been getting every day. When those shoe boxes started arriving wrapped in brown paper tied with string it was like Christmas. We already had the snow so we were excited like little kids.
We were unlucky where we were, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, as all the consignments of Red Cross parcels were delivered to Stalag 20B. After sorting, our allocation was meant to be sent out to us but, of course, most did not get sent on to us. We never got our fair share. I suppose you can’t blam
e the chaps there for taking some of ours for themselves. Most men in the main camp got theirs once a week or fortnightly while we had to wait as long as seven weeks between deliveries. A basic parcel looked like it had everything a man could want although it was never enough and we often had to share a parcel with somebody else. We usually distributed what we had within our own particular group of friends; we five looked after ourselves.
As a rule we got a packet of tea, sugar and milk, either dried or condensed, and butter. There was some kind of meat like corned beef or streaky bacon, which came out of the tin coiled up in a long strip. There were sardines or pilchards and jam and cheese. There were biscuits, known as pilot biscuits, which were hard and didn’t get broken in transit. We had prunes or other dried fruit and always a bar of chocolate, usually Cadbury’s fruit and nut. We got extras like mints and jelly, soap and toothpaste and a sewing kit. And plenty of cigarettes, fifty Player’s in a round tin.
We all smoked, of course. What else was there to do to relax after a long day out working? But cigarettes were also useful for bartering with the guards for extra food, and occasionally with villagers. It had to be somebody you could trust and you were always careful not to let anybody see you do it. You would give the person twenty ciggies and he would see you got an extra loaf from the village. As they took the cigarettes first, you had to trust that they would come up with the goods. Of course, they could get into serious trouble if the authorities found them fraternising with prisoners so they kept their side of the deal.
When the food was gone, we kept the packaging to use again. We were all good at saving odds and ends for a rainy day. Cardboard boxes were good for storage or could be cut up and used for insulating your clothes and boots. String was useful for hanging up clothes to dry or came in handy at harvest time to tie round your trouser bottoms to keep mice from running up your legs in the hay barn. Empty tins and lids could be bashed out to make tools and containers. A tin of KLIM, the Canadian dried milk (the word Milk spelt backwards) made a good jug, thanks to Heb who got himself a job at the local smithy.
That came about one morning when the Unteroffizier asked us at roll call if anybody had worked in a blacksmith’s. Heb put his hand up straightaway and said, ‘Ja.’ Of course, he’d never been near a smithy in his life but they weren’t to know that. You had to use your wits in this place and look for any opportunity that could be turned to your advantage. The local blacksmith needed help because his son had been called up so Heb was taken down there and shown what to do. He was a quick learner and must have been quite good at it because he continued to work there on and off for quite a long time.
At lunchtime the blacksmith went back home for his meal, leaving Heb on his own in the workshop to have the bread and soup which was brought out from the house. He used the time to make things like nails, hooks and kitchen utensils for us depending on what scraps of metal were available. He was treated well there and was always busy with one job or the other for the locals as well as helping us back at camp.
One of our favourite treats from the Red Cross parcels was Rowntree’s jelly, which came in cubes. If we got enough packets to make it worthwhile heating up some water and using our precious wood, we made one big one. When we opened our parcels and looked through the contents the shout, ‘Jelly!’ went up. Once we had three packets, two orange and a lemon, and for some reason my pals gave me the job of making it. It took ages for the water to boil on the wood burning stove as we kept feeding bits of twigs in to keep the fire going. I managed to get enough hot water to melt the jelly. It was winter and the snow was about 18” deep so I thought that it would set nicely outside in my tin bowl.
All the cubes melted and a lovely fruity aroma arose from the bowl as I kept stirring. I carried the hot liquid outside, walking carefully so as not to spill any on the way. I balanced it on a pile of snow outside and then went back in to get warm again. We all forgot about it until Laurie said, ‘Chas, when did you last check the jelly?’ So off I went back outside only to find that the bowl had turned upside down and there was nothing there. The snow had melted and the bowl had tipped over and all our lovely liquid jelly had disappeared into the ground. Pity I didn’t do any science at school or I might have thought of placing the bowl on a piece of wood, even a stone or brick, a surface which didn’t conduct heat. Terrible waste of jelly, hot water and fuel! It was a long while before we got any packets of jelly again in our parcels. And when we eventually did it wasn’t me asked to make it.
Gradually over time, we received more parcels and some of these came through from home. I wrote to my mother asking for new socks and underwear and a few months later they were delivered. Lily sent me a knitted scarf for my birthday once. It was amazing to think that items like these, requested by thousands of men like me, were able to get across war-torn Europe to us. Fantastic!
My brother-in-law, who was a fireman, sent me one of his jumpers. It was dark blue, in a sort of shiny material which was very warm. Unfortunately, it had a ribbed neck and bottom seam which caused a lot of discomfort to me, not just in the camp but especially on the Long March. Lice like nothing better than a warm, cosy place to settle down and start a family, and seams in clothes are ideal for that. It is, however, almost impossible to find and remove eggs from there. Some people used a lighted match and ran it along a seam to burn them off but it wasn’t always successful. Better to be warm and lousy, I believe, than die of cold.
Like all the other men, in all the POW camps everywhere, I treasured every single present I received. I didn’t like asking for things from my family. Even though they weren’t luxuries or treats but essentials, I always felt bad about my mother having to send stuff out to me. I was worried all the time. I didn’t know what she and other members of the family were really going through. Letters were always cheerful and didn’t tell me what was really happening at home. Was the family safe? Was the shop doing OK? How were they managing for money? I felt useless. Lily had a career of her own now because she knew that I might not come back. Not that she said that exactly in her letters but joining the ATS got her away from her family and helped her become financially independent. If only I had some proper money I could send home.
Who needs money when you’re stuck in the back of beyond with nothing to spend it on? What would be the point of paying wages for the work we did? So why would they give us this paper money which could only used in a POW camp? It might be OK for fellows in the big camps who could buy razor blades and soap but there was nothing here. You could gamble with it, use it to roll your own cigarettes or it might come in handy to wipe your bottom if you were caught short somewhere. Cigarettes were our main currency.
The German government introduced a system of payment to prisoners of war for the work they did in the labour camps. It was called Kriegsgefangenen Lagergeld – prisoner of war camp money, and they paid ‘wages’ with these little tiny notes like doll’s house money – about the size of a cigarette card. This currency was only valid within a POW camp so it was pretty useless. What’s the point of winning a game of Rummy or Sevens and having a handful of these Reichspfennigs at the end of a game?
One day some of us were playing cards and Heb was doing well, collecting notes from us each time he won a hand. A guard came into the room to see what we were doing as he heard all this cheering (and booing) after another of his wins. This particular guard was a decent sort of chap, one of those you could talk to: us with our pidgin German and him with his hand signals. He watched us playing for a moment before coming over. I think he had his eye on Hebby’s winnings on the table and asked us what we were going to do with the money.
‘Nichts,’ – nothing, we said, ‘Nichts zu kaufen,’ – nothing to buy.
‘Magst du Musik?’ – do you like music? The guard started to mime playing the piano.
‘Ja, ja,’ we said, wondering why he’d asked. And Jack, who was very musical and could play the piano, came forward and repeated, ‘Ja. Ja. Musik,’ running his fingers up and
down an imaginary keyboard. ‘Ich liebe Musik,’ – I love music. ‘The piano. Das piano?’
‘Ach ja. Das Klavier,’ – oh yes, the piano, the guard corrected. ‘Schön,’ – lovely, he said.
Jack nodded. ‘Ja, das Klavier. Schön,’ and looked at us all. We nodded in agreement, not sure where all this was leading. ‘Musik. Ich liebe,’ we chorused.
The guard smiled and started miming playing a piano accordion, moving his arms about as though pushing bellows in and out. ‘Sie möchte,’ – you would like, pointing at Jack, ‘ein Akkordeon?’
Everybody said ‘Ja, ja,’ looking at each other, ‘Ein Akkordeon. Ja, ‘ wondering if the guard had gone mad. I couldn’t believe it; he was asking us if we would like an accordion. How on earth could he get us an instrument or anything like that? Perhaps he had one at home he wanted to get rid of and saw an opportunity or he had a friend who could get one. But I couldn’t see what he or any shopkeeper would do with our camp money, which was worthless.
A few days later the guard came back. He said he had been to a shop in the town to find out how much they wanted for the instrument and he named an amount. Let’s say it was 1000 Reichsmark and we said ‘Ja, ja,’ again, and collected up all the money we could find and handed it over. He came back the next day carrying an enormous parcel, properly wrapped up in paper with string round it. He hadn’t tried to hide it and nobody had stopped him on the way into the camp. We pushed Jack forward to receive it. ‘Go on, it’s for you,’ and ‘you can play.’
Survivor of the Long March Page 9