Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell?

by Horace Greasley

  A few weeks into the operation two German SS officers walked in to the shop. Three prisoners waited patiently on shoeboxes by the door. They were told to leave, their place in the queue had been taken, and one of the SS soldiers sat down. The other walked over to where Horace was shaving a prisoner and cuffed the man across the back of his head. Horace recognised the guard instantly. He was a towering man of six foot three with a noticeable stoop and a craving for unnecessary violence against the prisoners. The men had nicknamed him Big Stoop and he was to be avoided at all costs. There were strong though unsubstantiated claims that he had beaten to death more than half a dozen prisoners in his previous camps.

  ‘Hinaus, dies ist jetzt mein Platz.’ ‘Out, it’s my seat now.’

  The prisoner scuttled across the floor, his head half shaved. As he got to the doorway the other guard kicked him in the seat of the pants.

  ‘Hinaus!’ he screamed.

  Horace was stunned and a little wary that he was now alone with two German SS men. As he stood there with a cut-throat razor in his hand the hatred inside him welled up. The German lowered himself onto the shoebox and pointed to his face.

  ‘Shave good,’ he instructed.

  No, he wanted to say. I don’t want to shave you. But he knew what the consequences would be if he refused.

  Horace made a point of washing his razor as best he could and as he lathered up his customer his hands trembled gently. As Horace prepared to begin, the German made a point of unbuckling his holster belt with his heavy Luger 9mm pistol encased inside. He placed it on his knee and said something Horace did not understand. He pointed to his throat and traced a finger down his neck then took the Luger from the holster and pointed it at Horace. All of a sudden Horace knew exactly what he meant as the German replaced the gun in the holster.

  Horace looked the German straight in the eye and smiled reassuringly.

  ‘Listen here you ugly bastard, if I do spill any of your blood you can rest assured you’ll be in no fucking state to pull the trigger of a gun.’

  The German’s colleague by the door jumped up and shouted something to the man in the seat. He kicked the shoebox away and shouted at Horace. Horace groaned as he realised the waiting German spoke perfect English and had relayed the remark to his friend.

  The brutal assault lasted a full five minutes.

  The German used nothing but his holster. He battered Horace to the floor around the head and face and continued relentlessly with the assault as Horace lay in a pool of blood, desperately attempting to cover his head with his hands. Blow after blow was landed with the heavy leather holster and the steel grip of the gun. The attacker was breathing heavily now and seemed to take a break from his exertions. He studied the bloody mess of the prisoner before him. Horace was unrecognisable and on the brink of unconsciousness. The SS officer seemed happy with the mess he had made of Horace’s head and face. Then he started on his body. The back first, then around the kidneys and the shoulders. Horace winced as the Luger connected with his collarbone and he felt a crack.

  The German finished off with his legs, battering Horace’s thighs, hips and shins and eventually after the prolonged assault, too tired to go on, he relented and it was over. Before he left he bent over and spat in Horace’s face, stood up and aimed a final kick to his stomach.

  Horace lay breathless on the floor, too sore to move. His whole body ached; his eye socket, his nose, collarbone and four fingers were broken, several of his teeth lay on the floor swimming in his blood. But inwardly he smiled… he had won. The German would not be getting his shave. Despite his injuries he could not have been happier as he lay in his own blood, his body a broken mess. Eventually he drifted off into a strange, satisfied unconsciousness.

  After five minutes the door opened. Horace had not moved; he was unable to move.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ – the cunts have killed him.’

  It was Flapper Garwood. He, John Knight and Daniel Staines tended their badly injured comrade as he lay still on the floor.

  ‘I can’t feel a pulse,’ Staines said, ‘he’s pretty fucked up.’

  Horace was breathing – barely – and at the third attempt Dan Staines managed to find a faint trace of a pulse. They decided against moving him and instead treated his injuries on the floor of the makeshift barber’s shop. They bathed his wounds with cold water and managed to splint his broken fingers with bits of wood pulled from the doors of the hut.

  Flapper was nearly in tears. ‘I’ll get that big cunt back, mark my words.’

  John Knight looked up. ‘You and whose army, Flapper? Remember where you are, no weapons, no guns. Nice thought mate, but it ain’t ever going to happen.’

  Flapper looked over to Horace’s cut-throat razor lying open on the floor and started to think.

  After two days Horace regained consciousness and the men gave up a little of their own rations in order to build up his strength. In a bizarre way it was the best thing that could have happened to him. He lay in what was labelled the sick bay: a room no more than six feet by six with a bed made from discarded ammunition boxes. But it had a mattress of sorts and Horace’s wounds had been washed and disinfected and treated with paper bandages. But best of all, his boots had been removed when he had been too weak to argue. His blackened flesh had been pulled away like the skin of a peach with the lining of the boot but the medic had bathed them and disinfected them and the oxygen did the rest as he lay for many days, his feet bare and exposed to the cool, moist air.

  Horace grew stronger by the day, but the medic argued with the camp commandant that he was not to be moved and reminded him of the terms of the Geneva Convention. He had complained vociferously about the attack but the commandant had merely shrugged his shoulders and said what did he expect – he had threatened to cut a guard’s throat.

  Horace lay there for a further six days, thinking about life and his family and atheism and girlfriends and poor Tom Fenwick, but above all how against all odds, no matter how small the victory, how he could make a difference. He thought about the shit he had thrown from the train and about the great friends he had around him and about the working party in the Jewish cemetery – about Flapper Garwood and how the toughest man he had ever met broke down and cried like a baby as he relayed the horrors of what was to become his normal daily routine.

  To the consternation of the medic, Horace insisted on resuming his duties only hours after he had been granted another 48-hour spell in the sick bay. His old boots had been discarded and he now stood in wooden clogs, his feet wrapped in flannelette, protecting him against the cold and the hard wood of his new shoes. He would not see another pair of socks for over four years. The clogs felt strangely comfortable, the MOD telling him they would keep out the wet weather and at the same time allow his battered feet to breathe.

  The POWs stood and applauded him as he made the short journey to his workstation early that morning and the German guards looked on uncomfortably as he shuffled into the room. Big Stoop, who had inflicted the beating, would not return to the barber shop. Horace knew he would not, nor any German in a Nazi uniform.

  Horace had his victory. Horace Greasley, on his own against Big Stoop and the might of Third Reich, had won. He had turned a corner. He had his pride back again.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  Come winter, Mother Nature showed no sympathy to those interned in an unheated German prison camp. Horace thought he had experienced some harsh winters back in Ibstock but nothing had prepared him for the mind-numbing temperatures he faced that in first winter of 1940/41.

  He remembered a BBC radio presenter announcing temperatures of ten below when he was about 14, as Horace, Mum and Dad, Sybil, Daisy and Harold had sat huddled around a roaring fire just a few days before Christmas. He remembered being sent out into the frozen back yard for another scuttle of coal as the falling snow found its way down the back of his neck, and how the cold metal of the scuttle had drawn the heat from his fingers. That winter in Poland, t
he temperatures would touch nearly 40 below.

  The former cavalry barracks had been designed to be camouflaged from the air. Two thirds of the living quarters were underground and the roof of the huge complex was turfed with rough grass. It was like an enormous fridge.

  The horses had been stabled on the lowest floor, now the sleeping quarters of the Allied POWs. The next level up, still underground, had been the sleeping quarters and the offices of the cavalry, and now housed the German guards. They had their home comforts: decent bunks, a kitchen and an area to relax with a huge open fire constantly burning from September onwards, and even a library and snooker table. The level above ground was a series of individual outbuildings, offices and private dormitories for the officers. Again, each room appeared to have a log-burning stove or fire grate constantly burning. The logs were well stockpiled under cover near the entrance to the fort. The camp was surrounded by forest so firewood was not a problem, and the guards ensured the prisoners kept up a constant supply as the winter grew harsher.

  The sleeping quarters of the prisoners never saw any sun, never felt the warmth of an oil-fired stove or a burning log. It had been badly designed; Horace sympathised with the poor horses that had once been stabled there. The temperature in that basement hell rarely crept a few degrees above the temperature outside. The only heat generated in there was the body temperature of the men who slept there.

  To a man they dreaded the hours of darkness as the temperatures plummeted in January. The basement slept five prisoners to a stable stall, a space given over to one horse when the barracks were in use. The men huddled together for warmth, but snatching a few hours’ sleep was nigh on impossible. They shivered collectively, changing positions through the night so that the man on the end of the stable stall would not freeze to death. Inevitably, some still did.

  Horace described the cold in a small diary he wrote during his captivity. He asked for some paper to keep the records of the prisoners’ conditions with body lice, and the camp commandant supplied him with a small notebook and two pencils. He wrote:

  One could not imagine how cold it was down there. Take the coldest you have ever been back home in England and double your discomfort. Imagine the coldest, most severe winter’s day you had ever the misfortune to be out in. I cast my mind back to a walk home from school in early February 1929. We had all been caught out by the severity of a winter blizzard as we made the two mile trek back home. That morning had been relatively mild, none of us had bothered with hats or gloves, but temperatures had plummeted as the day went on. By the time we left the school gates the snow had begun to fall gently and we all thought it a great wheeze. A mile into the journey home a full scale blizzard had developed and I don’t know yet how we all made it home. I sat in the kitchen propped up against the black lead stove like a block of ice as Mum thawed me out with warm sweet tea.

  I remembered that day. I remembered that day well as I lay shivering in my icy tomb in Poland, my warm breath freezing instantly as it left my mouth. I would have gladly traded ten of those days against one night in this stinking, shivering, frozen shit hole. But the worst of it was that it went on night after night, week after week, month after month. There was no respite from the cold.

  The endurance of the men holed up in that basement was staggering. They were walking, talking zombies. In the morning they were simply glad they had survived another night and prayed that their daily ration of cabbage soup served a few hours later would be hot. Some days it was not. Occasionally the German guards whose job it was to keep the fire going under the huge cauldron had simply let the fire go out as they could not be bothered to make the short journey to the log pile. They did not care; they had had their daily breakfast of ham and eggs and hot coffee, and within an hour would be back in front of an open fire toasting their feet. Horace could not believe the pure selfishness and the mental torture these brutal SS soldiers doled out.

  Every day, no matter what the weather, they would be forced to complete the formalities of a roll call, and the worse the conditions the longer some guards would make it last. During a snowstorm the guards would often take a heat break, as the prisoners called it, and would reappear after 20 minutes, their faces reddened by the fire they had been sitting in front of. They would grin and laugh among themselves as they looked at the poor emaciated souls covered in a thin layer of snow as the icy wind whipped through the camp.

  Why? thought Horace. He tried to put himself in their shoes, wondered what his reaction would be towards German prisoners of war if he had been on the other side. As much as he hated the men now smiling at him he could not imagine in his wildest dreams that he would treat a fellow human being this way.

  None of it made any sense. They wanted the men to work yet they kept them in conditions worse than a dog’s. They kept them in such a malnourished state that a day’s work was nigh on impossible. They beat the prisoners, tortured them both physically and mentally. Horace wondered if they had ever thought about what would happen to them if they lost the war. He looked out for a kind soul in his time in that first camp. Perhaps just one SS man who would not kick out at the prisoners, would not be so handy with a rifle butt. Perhaps just one soldier with an ounce of compassion who would give an extra ladle of soup on a specially cold day or keep the cauldron fire burning an extra hour or two to give the prisoners some relief from the biting cold. He looked to the officers giving the commands, looked into their eyes for just a glimmer of concern as one of their number doled out a beating to a prisoner who had not moved quickly enough or who had dared to question an order.

  Horace looked, but found nothing.

  It was mid-March 1941 before the weather started to turn. At least a dozen men had died simply from the cold during that awful winter. The snow turned to rain, the droplets carrying the smell of death, of hopelessness.

  Big Stoop had beaten another three men to death and had raped two more of the younger prisoners from the outside working party in the forest beyond the camp. He had chosen them himself, unable to control his homosexual desires. Homosexuality was not to be tolerated in German-occupied territory in 1941. The two young men were raped then beaten to within an inch of their lives, and left under no illusion as to what would happen to them if they dared breathe a word about the sexual attack. Big Stoop had loaded them, battered and broken, into a cart pulled by two prisoners and claimed to the commandant he’d caught them attempting to escape. Horace could not help noticing the look of sheer hatred on Garwood’s face every time Big Stoop’s name was mentioned. If Big Stoop was anywhere near, Flapper positively trembled with rage.

  Mercifully, the temperature seemed to increase as each day passed. The men resumed their duties in the Jewish graveyards now that the frozen earth had thawed out, some work parties continued to stockpile wood and Horace went on cutting lice-ridden infected scalps.

  Horace sensed the change of regime in the camp almost overnight. Their daily ration of soup had been increased and incredibly, an odd fleck of meat had made a most welcome appearance in it. The camp commandant had begun to address the prisoners once a week, informing them that they were being treated well and that he had adhered to the Geneva Convention when it came to the treatment of prisoners. A cup of sweet tea had been introduced in the afternoons and the SS guards no longer seemed intent on physical confrontations for the slightest of reasons.

  At last, the broken down, lice-infested straw in the sleeping quarters was removed and the urine, dried excreta and dead cockroaches hosed away. When the basement was dry, fresh straw was moved in and the prisoners ordered to spread it out in their individual stalls. Candles were issued to the prisoners, so not only did they have the luxury of light in their stables at night but they were able to burn the lice from their bodies and clothes. Things, it seemed, were beginning to look up.

  A day or two later a German guard appeared in Horace’s barbershop with new scissors and a new cut-throat razor, and a small gas stove was made available so Horace could heat up the w
ater, giving the prisoners the luxury of a warm shave. In the yard adjacent to the front gates a crudely constructed wooden outside shower was built, with rubber piping leading from the main water supply. The men were ordered to strip and file, 20 at a time, into the showers. The water was icy cold, but still Horace enjoyed what was his first real wash in nearly a year. He was freezing but he did not want to leave. The Germans supplied scrubbing brushes and soap and the men grasped the opportunity to rid their bodies of the filth and grime, of the caked-on shit, the lice and the eggs that had poisoned their bodies for so long. Some scrubbed so hard they bled.

  As Horace and his pals lined up to be given fresh underwear, clean flannelette and the stolen but clean uniforms of Polish, French and Czechoslovakian soldiers long since gone, he noticed that a few of his fellow prisoners were actually smiling. It was a sight that had been so alien to him. They were smiling; his comrades were bloody smiling. At last, Horace thought, the Germans were beginning to show a little compassion for their fellow man.

  It was not the case. Two days later an inspection delegation from Geneva in Switzerland turned up at the camp. It had been a charade; the Germans wanted to show how they had complied with the terms and conditions under the convention. Horace and his fellow prisoners looked on in disgust as they were lined up for roll call in their pristine new clothes. Most of the men had gained a few pounds, their bodies clean, free from lice – not yet back on them, but they would return. The camp commandant smiled as he showed off the new showers, and gloated as he pointed out the fresh dry straw that made up the prisoners’ beds in the stable.

  The men were asked if they had been mistreated in any way. Several SS guards stood menacingly behind the delegation, rubbing at their rifle butts, one of them drawing a finger across his throat. The prisoners almost in unison shook their heads.