After an anxious 24 hours, officials in Canada picked up a Radio Berlin broadcast to the effect that the passengers and crew had landed in Occupied France.16 A month later, Life magazine published “The Sinking of the ‘Zamzam,’” written by Charles J.V. Murphy with pictures by David E. Scherman, two American journalists who had been on the ship. Before releasing Scherman, the Germans had developed and approved the pictures of people in lifeboats and of the sinking ship that later ran in Life. The Germans knew nothing of another roll that, with seven-year-old Peter Levitt on his knee, Scherman surreptitiously shot of Atlantis/Tamesis and then hid in the bottom of his toothpaste tube. Hundreds of copies of the ship’s silhouette were printed and placed in the wardroom of every Royal Navy ship of the line, allowing the battle cruiser HMS Devonshire to identify and sink her six months later.
LATE MAY 1941, ON A TRAIN TO GERMANY
RCN SURGEON LIEUTENANT CHARLES M. FISHER FACES DOWN AN ARROGANT PRUSSIAN
The ten days he spent on the prison ship after being transferred from the commerce raider Thor, which sank his ship, HMS Voltaire, on 4 April 1941, Charles Fisher’s rank of surgeon lieutenant merited him a berth in a cabin with some Swedish officers. Though the Kriegsmarine had sunk their neutral ship, the Swedes were not prisoners of war and hence were provided with a liberal supply of the liquor aquavit, which did little to dull the memories of the days Fisher spent in Thor’s hold. There, the physical conditions were bad enough, with three wooden decks, each supplied with an oil drum that served as a latrine, around which formed stinking sludge. But what really riled the doctor on loan from the RCN was the Germans’ decision to ignore cases of gonococcal conjunctivitis, pulmonary tuberculosis and diphtheria.
Conditions barely improved once the prisoners were landed in La Rochelle and marched to the same former cavalry barracks that Ross and the other survivors of A.D. Huff had passed through before they were sent via Holland to prison in Germany.17 Fisher’s most vivid memory of this POW camp was the free-for-all that followed the dumping of a huge pile of used clothing, which he suspected came from interned political prisoners. Remembering the chilly night just passed, Fisher did not care if the clothing matched, only whether it would pass the test of the officer who, shortly after Fisher took the navy oath, advised him, “Never be cold.”
From the prison camp at Saint-Médard-en-Jalles, where they detrained four days later, Fisher could see Bordeaux’s famous vineyards. Prisoners, including a 75-year-old British woman, slept on rough-hewn floorboards. After hearing that 90 men had escaped from the last train to take prisoners to Germany, Fisher concluded that the diet of “weak flour soup with a trace of vegetable” was designed to debilitate them; the men quickly lost weight and, more importantly, “wounds refused to heal.” An epidemic of chills, fever and general lassitude suggested dengue fever, sandfly fever or encephalitis.
For the trip from Saint-Médard-en-Jalles to Sandbostel, the site of Stalag X-B, the Germans herded the men into the same sort of cattle cars that took the 1st Canadian Division to the front in 1915. The cars were built to hold “40 hommes ou 8 chevaux”; the car was so crowded and dirty that the men felt like they were sharing the car with 40 horses—although that would have at least provided some warmth as they shivered in the unheated car during the cold nights. Geneva requirements notwithstanding, the Germans did not provide any water during the trip; indeed, when the train was stopped and a Frenchman upon hearing shouts of “eau” brought a water jug to Fisher’s car, the German guards smashed it. A day later, Fisher learned just how little his rank meant to the “huge, fat-faced, beady-eyed, brush-cut Prussian madman” who led a group of guards into the stinking boxcar after the Germans realized that several men had escaped through loosened sideboards.
In an effort to stop the guards who were punching, kicking and slapping—with the flat part of their bayonets—his shipmates as other guards pointed pistols and rifles at the bedraggled men, the 22-year-old educated at the University of Toronto, who was the Senior British Officer present, loudly objected to his men’s treatment. As the Prussian turned toward the surgeon lieutenant, so did the other guards, whose guns and obvious drunkenness made Fisher fear of his life. The Prussian, however, had something less lethal but still demeaning in mind; he whipped his riding crop down toward Fisher’s head a number of times.
LATE MAY 1941, STALAG LUFT I, NEAR STETTIN, GERMANY
ANDREW COX IS HUNGRY AND EMBARRASSES THE KOMMANDANT
The diet of one-tenth of a loaf of black bread, two small potatoes, a spoonful of “goon jam” (wood pulp and artificial flavour), a little margarine, ersatz coffee and the odd stolen potato that Andrew Cox had to eat each day left a gnawing hunger that was lessened only slightly by the foodstuffs in regular deliveries of Red Cross and personal parcels. The welcome taste of home was hardly an extravagance; from the point of view of weight and bulk, the chocolate, sent by Cox’s wife, for one, was the most efficient way of delivering badly needed fats and calories. In the harsh world of a German POW camp, the warm clothing, shaving equipment, toothpaste, soap and cigarettes she sent were anything but “luxury items,” as Cox jokingly called them. Cigarettes not only satiated nicotine addiction and suppressed appetite, they served as currency and as a means to suborn guards.
The Geneva Convention required the Detaining Power to attend to the “intellectual and moral needs of prisoners of war,” in part to deal with the crushing boredom of incarceration. Equally important for the Detaining Power was the reality that time spent reading, painting, in class, studying or rehearsing a play was time not spent disrupting the camp’s routine or planning home runs. By the end of the war, the Red Cross alone had sent POWs almost 240,000 books, while, at the behest of individual families, publishers sent hundreds of thousands more in five-pound packages.18 Reading, one POW recalled, was “probably the greatest morale factor in the camp next to the Red Army.”19 Even books the men didn’t like were important, for they too took up time, and their minds out of their camps.
By the time Cox arrived at Stalag Luft I, the “POW University” was up and running. Kriegies could take courses from Oxford or McGill. The Red Cross arranged for their exams to be proctored by local German professors.20 In the weeks before the Oblates arrived at Milag Nord in late June, George Shaker, another Canadian who had been aboard the A.D. Huff, took shorthand, and studied Spanish and Chinese. Hundreds of servicemen became thespians and stagehands. In May 1941, on a windup record player, Cox heard the words and music of Bing Crosby, Deanna Durbin and Noël Coward, which transported him part of the long way home.
In late May, however, Cox’s preferred activity involved flies and hornets. After capturing large ones, he would tie a thread around one of each bug’s legs. Attached to the thread was a cigarette-sized paper cylinder with such messages as “Germany kaput” or “Hitler nicht goot.” 21 To the Kommandant’s great embarrassment, a number of these messages reached the nearby village.22
4 JULY 1941, STALAG X-B, SANDBOSTEL, GERMANY
LES RELIGIEUX ARE SENT TO GERMANY
For the ten days they were in the same transit camp that Fisher and the men from the A.D. Huff passed through, les religieux hoped that what they saw as their Babylonian captivity would be short.23 Despite the rigours of the camp, which, as Father Barsalou learned on the second night there, included being shot at for leaving the barracks after dark, the priests were allowed to minister, with the honour of saying the first mass behind barbed wire falling to Father Charbonneau. Other masses were said for a somewhat surprising group, Catholic lascars. On 30 May, the joy they felt at the conversion of a British soldier evaporated when a local Oblate official told them that, despite official entries, they were going to be sent to POW camps in Germany.
It is a measure of how powerful the experience of being in a POW camp is that, after being in one for only a week, the everyday world of the train station seemed alien. As they “glanced about at the neatly, well-dressed Bordeaux citizens milling about the station carrying their bagga
ge here and there, munching on large sandwiches, drinking wine, conversing enthusiastically on the events and their plans for the day and the days after,” les religieux felt as if they had come from another world, recalled Brother George-Aime Lavalée.
The Germans piled so many other men into the cattle cars that there was not enough room to lie down. A pail served the office of a latrine. The priests and brothers were given only two small bottles of water. In an overloaded cattle car filled with stinking, unwashed men jostling against each other, setting up even a makeshift altar was impossible. Accordingly, each recited a “messe blanche,” a mass said while reading their missals, observing the silences, as reminders of their communion.
The wooden Crosses tucked into their belts meant nothing to the guards at Stalag X-B, in Sandbostel, who met the exhausted priests and brothers with bayonets at the ready. The few who had been able to take their belongings from Zamzam found the heavy suitcases strained arms and bent backs, causing them to stumble as they marched the five miles to the POW camp enclosed by two high barbed-wire fences that ran parallel to each other, separated by a couple of yards called No Man’s Land. At every 100 yards stood a 15-foot-high guard tower equipped with spotlights and machine guns.
Like the hundreds of other barracks at the camp, through which a million prisoners would pass (and where some 50,000 died), Barracks No. 63 was a 140-by-40-foot wood-framed, uninsulated hut. Both the pillows and paillasses were filled with straw and wood chips, and were more solid than the three-level bunks themselves. “On the very first night, one broke and the sleeper below it was shocked to receive in this rather impolite fashion his companion in his arms,” Brother Roland Cournoyer later recalled with a smile. “Imagine the noise and the mess, not to mention the weight of the sleeper.” This happened many times over the years, “and it was hard for the witnesses to avoid laughing and teasing the stunned victims.”24
Used to thinking in symbolic and Christological terms in which daily life imitates Christian mystery, the Oblates and Sacred Heart Brothers saw the sand-swept camp as symbolic, as a modern-day Valley of Humiliation. Being forced to stand naked for hours while being deloused after arriving at the camp Brother Georges-Aimé Lavallée recalled as being “treated as non-humans.” Showers were welcome, but since there were no dividers in the room, they were uncomfortably immodest.
For their German captors, the photographing of each man with a small blackboard on which his POW number was written hanging around his neck was a mere bureaucratic moment. For les religieux it seemed an inversion of both baptism and the solemn ceremonies in which the priests and brothers received their religious names. Brother Antoine Lavallée coped with the indignity of being reduced to a number by mocking the metal identity disks that aped the crucifix and symbolized the barbed wire ringing the camp: “Oh number 104 452! / You will now stand for me for my family, my friends, my surname and my given name…. / And, if I die, Oh! Little piece of tin, / You will not lie with me in the cold bier, / But half of your lifeless face will be put on the cover of my tomb, / And the other sent to my loved ones in Canada.”25
Even for men used to the regimented life of a religious order, lining up three times a day to be counted was humiliating. So were the meals. Breakfast consisted of two sardines or a couple of prunes, while lunch was watery soup with a few potatoes and traces of sausage, or a “stew” containing bits of dried fish. Fisher, who was in the camp at the same time, forced himself to eat this revolting dish until “one day a full-blown glassy fish eye swam into my spoon and stared fixedly” at him. What meat—horse meat—they were given was often crawling with maggots. The cutting of the loaf of coarse black bread into pieces—each man was entitled to three thin slices—was another humiliating ritual. Growling stomachs pushed aside thoughts of convivial breaking of bread and, even, the symbolism of the Last Supper as they watched the cutting of the bread with eagle eyes and stooped to pick up crumbs from the floor.
The decision to send les religieux to a Stalag instead of interning them in a civilian camp in Vichy France or Germany, or granting them the honorary rank of captain, accorded to padres, and thus sending them to an Oflag (an officers’ camp), meant that they would be treated like regular soldiers and as such were required to work. In and of itself, this was not a humiliation. But their nauseating job involved shovelling excrement from the latrine into “Smelly Nelly”—and then pulling it from the camp to a farmer’s field.
There were moments when the warm summer breezes blew, when if they closed their eyes, les religieux could almost forget they were in a POW camp. Or when they ministered to some of the 6,000 men held in Sandbostel, many of whom had not heard the gospel in years. The night of 18 June was not one of those times. “The alarm sounded as soon as the explosions began…. Outside the sky was set ablaze and all we heard was the dull revving of the engines and the rattle of machine guns. Everything was punctuated by the sinister sound of the bombs. ‘Had our last hour come?’ we asked ourselves. If you could have seen each of us, you would have seen terrified and panicked faces, and men praying,” Father Pellerin wrote in a letter.26
MID-AUGUST 1941, STALAG X-B, SANDBOSTEL, GERMANY
FATHER PQUET EXPLAINS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PRIEST AND BROTHER
What surely was one of the strangest meetings in the history of the Third Reich started with an order for the Oblates and Sacred Heart Brothers to come to Kommandant Spiess’s office. After the formulaic apology for their capture and imprisonment, Spiess handed a paper to Father Gérard Pâquet, the group’s de facto leader. The Oblate wasted little time objecting to the names on the list, of those who were to be sent to minister at other POW camps. The problem, he explained, was not that several of the men Berlin had chosen were British subjects by convenience; indeed, the Germans knew that the Sacred Heart Brothers were Americans who had taken British citizenship to expedite the paperwork so that they could get on with their missionary duties in Basutoland, which was part of the British Empire. Rather, the problem was that they were teaching brothers and not priests and, hence, were incapable of performing the sacraments or saying mass.
Whatever Spiess’s thoughts about the Nazi state he served were, likely it was his background as a Lutheran explained his “difficulty in understanding the difference between a priest and a teaching brother.”27 One can almost imagine him looking quizzically through a monocle and asking in a heavy German accent, “What is this, this ordination?” At all events, he looked embarrassed and agreed to let Pâquet draw up a new list, which included Fathers Goudreau, Larivière, Charbonneau, Boulanger and Pellerin.
MID-SEPTEMBER 1941, STALAG XXI-B, THURÉ, POLAND
FATHER GOUDREAU’S NIGHTMARE
Father Phillipe Goudreau went to sleep concerned. He’d expected the search of his suitcase to be perfunctory, for he was spending only one night at Stalag XX-A while on his way to Stalag Luft III. But the guards, envious of his kid gloves and alarmed by his Sesotho-English dictionary, looked further and found a hacksaw blade he’d forgotten about. Once asleep, concern gave way to terror as he dreamt that the Gestapo fired questions at him—Where had it come from? What was he going to do with it?—and responded to his answer that he’d bought it in Baltimore and then forgotten about it by savagely whipping him.
Reality was more prosaic, though no less dangerous. After being woken from the nightmare, he was asked by the guards the kind of questions he’d dreamt about. Mercifully, the real-life guards were more accepting than his imagined ones of the answer that he had brought the hacksaw blade from America because such items were not easily available in Africa and that he did not expect to have his voyage to South Africa interrupted. The guards seized the blade, of course, as well as his gloves and dictionary, this last, presumably, because they thought it was a code book.
As he lay in bed, Goudreau thanked Jesus that the guards who interrogated him knew nothing about the founder of the Oblate order, for between 1809 and 1811, while still a novitiate, Eugène de Mazenod smuggled letters bet
ween Napoleon’s prisoner, Pope Pius VIII, and the College of Cardinals. For had the Gestapo agents looked a little deeper in his bag, they would have found that he was smuggling letters to officers at Stalag Luft III, which, since he was not covered by the Geneva Convention, could have branded him as a spy and possibly cost him his life.28
LATE OCTOBER/EARLY NOVEMBER 1941, PRISON HOSPITAL, SAINT-OMER, FRANCE
RCAF PILOT OFFICER BRIAN HODGKINSON MEETS ANOTHER KANADISCHER PILOT
In their retelling, the moments seemed almost scripted.
The instrument panel exploding as a stream of 15-mm bullets rip through the Spitfire. The fire searing his leg and burning his right hand stiff. The plane’s death spiral making bailing out seem all but impossible. The moments during the parachute jump when the oncoming Messerschmitt 109 seems to be closing in for the kill and Brian Hodgkinson finds himself reciting the Lord’s Prayer. That plane’s last second banking turn, followed by a salute. The German Leutnant finding him on the ground and saying, “My, your name is—how do you say in English—a mouth-ful, yes?” before adding, “It is my duty to inform you that you are now a prisoner of war in the custody of the German Wehrmacht.” Regaining consciousness in a hospital, where the doctor says in perfect American English, honed during his eight-year medical residency in Milwaukee, “You’re chewed up pretty badly, son,” and who adds after Hodgkinson says he is from Winnipeg, “I know it well. Been there on a couple of medical conventions. Nice city, very nice city. But awful cold in the wintertime.” And the visit a few days later of a Luftwaffe officer named Gunther Langendorf, who learned English working in the tourist industry in Vienna and tells Hodgkinson, “I give you my solemn word, the Luftwaffe does not shoot enemy fliers out of their parachutes.”29 They were all too real, however, and lived by Hodgkinson in the last few days of October and the first few days of November after his Spitfire was hit over Calais.
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