The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  EARLY FEBRUARY 1942

  The six coal-dust briquettes provided to the barracks each day did so little against the cold spilling into the hut through the ill-fitting windows and door that Hodgkinson dreamt of burning his bunk to create a fire strong enough to warm his feet. The Germans provided only black bread (made from barely edible rye husks, potatoes and sawdust) and, three days a week, wretched-tasting, thin Swede soup. Without the Red Cross–supplied can of Spam, sardines or salmon; powdered milk; a bar of chocolate; prunes or raisins; and the hardtack and marmalade they ate for breakfast, starvation would have stalked the British side of the camp too.

  Several weeks earlier, a couple of hundred officers—from the RAF, RCAF and other Commonwealth air forces—cursed Colonel Manfred Fitzleben. They did not blame the Kommandant for the execrable food or cold barracks. What riled them was the order to fall out on the camp’s Sportplatz for close-order drill, something most hadn’t done since flight-training school and which the avoiding of was a mark of honour among airmen. Fitzleben’s first attempts at company-major English were credible: “Com-panee, Atten-shun.” But the language he studied at Oxford before the last war and practised after being captured at Vimy Ridge couldn’t stand the strain. “Not a single man jack of you move now,” he ordered, “or I’ll shoot you with a ball of your own shit.”42 The men’s laughter hung in the cold air that reminded Hodgkinson of home, but under Fitzleben’s eye, they practised their marching four more times that day. And the next, and the next.

  The food did not improve, the cold lingered and, despite a few recreational activities, the crushing boredom remained. Yet after a few weeks, the men noticed a change in themselves. From mocking the drills, they began looking forward to the order to fall out. The better they marched, the straighter they walked, and soon their morale improved. And that, the Kommandant told Hodgkinson, was the point.

  Fitzleben’s claim that he wanted to reawaken the prisoners’ esprit de corps and pride, which soon shone through their scruffy clothes and increasingly gaunt faces, set Hodgkinson back on his heels. For a moment, the war symbolized by the swastika flag in Fitzleben’s office and the picture of his Führer opened like a scrim in a theatre, and Hodgkinson found himself standing in front of man whom he could respect, and he reached to shake his jailor’s hand.

  27 FEBRUARY 1942, STALAG XXI-D, POSEN, POLAND

  FATHER HERMÉNÉGILDE CHARBONNEAU’S SECRET LIFE

  For some months after arriving at Stalag XXI-D, in a fort built a century before to deter a Russian invasion, he’d been allowed to meet with Fathers Pellerin and Larivière, who were in camps nearby. But save for one recent visit with Larivière, that privilege ended at Christmas. Even if Father Herménégilde Charbonneau had suspected it, he could have never written that the visits were stopped because of the Gestapo, which, in its effort to bend the priests to its will, isolated them to prevent them from giving each other mutual absolution.

  Charbonneau’s 27 February letter is a masterpiece of fact and indirection. He writes of the morale-sapping effects of hunger, augmented by the incessant cold that because of hunger made the winter even more of an enemy than it was in Canada. He writes of the humiliation he felt witnessing POWs trade £15, watches or wedding rings for a single piece of bread.

  German censors, he knew, would read “the present situation—a young priest among 750 soldiers—is not without worry” not as a reference to his physical safety but as referring to the difficulty of maintaining his morale in sacerdotal isolation. True, his roommate, Dr. Davidson, shared clothing and, more importantly, the chocolate and other foods sent from the United States. But he was a Protestant, and neither he nor any of the Catholics could provide the intellectual life the priest not long out of the seminary was used to. Worse, the prison camp was denuded of religious life. The soldiers’ way of coping—cursing; singing obscene songs; having shouting matches; boxing; engaging in meaningless conversations, often about women—were alien to the gentle, bespectacled priest.

  Toward the end of the letter, Charbonneau’s emotions fairly spilled out. His characterization of Monsignor Johannes Pietsch’s letter as “the first, very comforting words, from my congregation” is a cri de coeur; Pietsch had evangelized around James Bay. A few lines later, after writing in his own hand the dehumanizing words “British POW” Charbonneau realized that he’d allowed something like despair to rear its head and ended the letter “Je m’excuse, T.R. Père.”

  Charbonneau’s ministry, if not his life (as well as others’) required that the censors buy the picture of the anguished priest, for it hid a truly remarkable story.

  Upon arriving in Posen, where, he knew, the Germans had murdered priests, including numerous Oblates, Charbonneau asked a workman in the camp to carry a letter, written in Latin, to one of the few Oblates remaining in the area, thus beginning a clandestine correspondence with Father Jean Woziwodski. Carried into the camp by another workman or various young women, Woziwodski’s letters, which were written in excellent French, detailed the Nazis’ persecution of the Church and thus had to be burned immediately after Charbonneau read them. In an effort to protect his life and Woziwodski’s, Charbonneau wrote in such a way as to hide both his and his reader’s identity; if discovered, the lives of the couriers, all involved knew, were beyond earthly protection.

  EARLY APRIL 1942, ON A TRAIN TO STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND

  ANDREW COX DOESN’T BELIEVE AN EXPLANATION

  After four days of the four-hours-standing/four-hours-sitting regimen the men packed into the cattle car imposed on themselves, Andrew Cox’s arms, legs and back ached. Yet he counted himself lucky. For while he could do nothing about the fetid smell of the unwashed men around him, at least he wasn’t next to the excrement-filled metal bins, the foul contents of which slopped over onto the hapless men near them.

  Locked in the cattle car, the men could not see the sky above the marshalling yard, but the drone of bomber engines told them that the night was relatively clear. When the roar of bombs exploding close enough to rock the train drowned out the men’s prayers, Cox knew that that afternoon, through the blue haze of cigarette smoke, his comrades in Bomber Command had seen the marshalling yard he was now in, on the maps tacked to briefing-room walls.

  The next day, before it reached Stalag Luft III, in Sagan, Poland, Cox’s train pulled into a station, where the guards allowed the POWs to disembark and stretch their legs. Across the platform, Cox saw a long line of cattle cars loaded with men, women and children who, a guard said, were being relocated to the east. Though unaware of the unfolding “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” the “anxiety, dread and haunted eyes of these people left [the POWs] with a feeling that the guards were not telling [them] the truth.”43

  6 APRIL 1942, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  FATHER ROBERT BARSALOU SENDS A SECRET MESSAGE IN A LETTER ABOUT EASTER

  At 9:30 p.m. on Easter Monday, Father Barsalou looked back with satisfaction on the observance of Easter, which began with the baptizing of a 22-year-old British soldier on what in his Scottish homeland is called Black Saturday, the only full day during which Jesus was dead. His German censors would have been pleased that he wrote of having enough tobacco to enjoy a smoke now that Lent was over, and that he wrote in glowing terms of the makeshift chapel, the Cross of which was blackened with shoe polish.

  What they almost certainly missed was a secret message in the sentence that praises Father Raoul Bergeron for building the chapel. Barsalou could be sure that his readers back in Canada would recognize that the sentence “Le Père Bergeron avait élevé un magnifique reposoir” would be understood both as praise for Bergeron’s carpentry skills and as an echo of Genesis 33:20, when, after he reached safety in the land of Sechem, Jacob “raised a magnificent altar.” Barsalou had no way of saying that even at these highest of masses, in order to stretch their supply of wine, the priests used a pipette to place into the chalice four minute drops of wine, which after transubstantiation
was turned into the blood of Christ.

  21 APRIL 1942, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  THE SS TRIES TO BREAK THE PRIESTS’ COMMUNION

  The improving weather and the priests’ transfer from bleak Sandbostel to Milag und Marlag Nord moved Brother Roland Cournoyer to lyricism when describing their new camp: “Half is on a small grove where the small birds come at all hours to entertain us with their gentle songs.”

  In a letter to an old classmate, Father Barsalou was more serious and makes clear something all POWs felt as they write to their loved ones: that letters, be they the ones that were once in the hands of a wife, mother or religious brother back in Canada or the ones written on paper stamped Kriegsgefangenenpost, dissolve space and time, uniting the sender and recipient through the act of reading. “Contact! … This paper had actually been in my home in Montreal! It had been touched, handled, folded by loving compassionate hands …. Touching it was touching them, an invisible embrace, a reunion, a banishing of all the grime and horror and ugliness,” explained another Canadian POW upon receipt of his first letter.44

  It may have taken Brother Roland Courtemanche’s letter months to reach Milag Nord, but what he said about their common vocation dissolved not just time but distance. For, Barsalou wrote, their lives, one in a prison camp in northern Germany and the other as a missionary to the “Esquimaux” on the shores of Hudson’s Bay share much besides the cold. Is a year behind barbed wire all that different from “le Barren Land et le grand silence blanc?” wrote the priest, who knew that even when profoundly alone, they were united in communion with each other.

  The SS had a finer understanding of this communion than their abjuration of Christianity might suggest, as les religieux learned after Fathers Barsalou and Bergeron were moved to separate compounds. To stop the fathers, who were a mere 60 yards apart, from taking part in the sacrament of confession, they were prevented from meeting. When the SS saw that the fathers would stand at the fence and shout to each other, the SS wove straw into the fence so they would not be able to see each other. However, this didn’t keep the fathers from standing at the fence and shouting “mysterious words (presumably in Latin), which had significance only to people in the know.”45

  LATE APRIL 1942, OFLAG VI-B, DÖSSEL, GERMANY

  VERNON HOWLAND ESCAPES

  The camp’s barbed wire ran up each end of the building’s rear wall. Set in the middle of that wall was Vernon Howland’s first goal, a window that faced out of the camp. Ironically, because that window looked into the corridor on either side of which were punishment cells, reaching it required first getting sent to the cooler, which he and five other men arranged by swapping identities (exchanging clothes and identity disks) with men who had committed such minor infractions as failing to salute a passing German officer. The second and more difficult step occurred a few days later during the 9 p.m. latrine run when a staged disturbance distracted the guard while a POW slipped open the bolt on the cell’s door.

  A short time later, just before jumping to the ground, Howland, the last of the men to escape, gingerly closed the window behind him so that the Germans would waste time trying to figure out how he had escaped through a corridor’s locked door. Despite the moonlight and reflection from the searchlights, Howland reached the woodpile but could not find the food and water that dragooned Polish workers had promised to leave. A few hours later, while making his way for a rail yard, he saw a bank of snow and dug out a mouthful to quench his thirst. He was soon doubled over, retching his guts out, for the snowbank was in fact “an old manure pile covered in snow.”

  At dawn, realizing he wouldn’t reach the marshalling yard, he hid under a low tree branch, crawling to a clump of bushes when children started playing nearby. In the afternoon, the soldiers walking by worried him less than did the police dog, which, perhaps because of Howland’s rank odour, turned up its nose at him.

  That night, Howland hopped a train heading west, jumping off it shortly before dawn. After barking dogs warned him off from an attempt to steal food, he boarded another train. By this time, his dehydration was so severe that he began hallucinating an escape partner.

  His imaginary consort did not argue when Howland pointed out that the situation was so desperate that travelling during the day was worth the risk. When he tried to move to a train heading toward Holland, Howland hoped that the presence of French workers milling about would hide him. He hadn’t gone more than a few steps before a guard stopped him. The delusional Canadian forgot that he was wearing another man’s identity disk and gave his real name, which put him outside the Geneva Convention’s protections and almost landed him in the arms of the Gestapo. Fortunately, a few phone calls established his identity. A few days later, Howland arrived at Stalag Luft III.

  28 APRIL 1942, STALAG VII-A, MOOSBURG, GERMANY

  HODGKINSON WATCHES A MESSY EXPLOSION

  The “Biblical nudity” that distressed Father Goudreau and the “incredibly crude language” that shocked Brother Georges-Aimé Lavallée was for Hodgkinson simply a fact of life.46 Hodgkinson could accept the 30-holer sans partitions with equanimity but not the ten-inch worms—worms that kept the contents of the tank liquid enough so that it could be pumped into a honey wagon—which could slither onto the seats. Somewhat less bothersome was Dominique Fiouloir, who didn’t shy away from talking during “one of man’s most compelling moments of concentration.”47

  On 28 April, just as Hodgkinson buttoned his fly, the French POW provided some unintended excitement when, after lighting a cigarette, he tossed the still-burning match into the latrine. A moment later a sound resembling “a dozen tympani” began rolling through the ground as the methane gas trapped beneath the latrine caught fire. The ensuing explosion shot flames and then jets of excrement through every hole. Through the stinking, stygian miasma, Hodgkinson heard the astonished Fiouloir call out, “Sacre bleu! … Putain de Dieu! … Jésus Christ! … Mére de Dieu!” phrases Hodgkinson found fit the slapstick-like moment but would have made les religieux blush.48

  MAY 1942, STALAG XXI-D, POSEN, POLAND

  FATHER LOUIS LARIVIÈRE WANTS LES RELIGIEUX TO BECOME ROYAL NAVY OFFICERS

  After almost a year in captivity, the Oblates were unsure of their legal ecclesiastical status or who their Ordinary, or superior, was. In the Roman Catholic Church, bishops have jurisdiction of a diocese, thus the Bishop of Calgary or Bishop of Gatineau. Since the Oblates belonged to a congregation, they came under the jurisdiction of the Oblate Provincial, Monsignor Leo Deschâtelets. Had they reached Basutoland, their Ordinary would have been Monsignor Joseph Bonhomme, who was headquartered in Basutoland but because of the war, was stranded in Ottawa. By this logic, the Oblates in Germany should have been under the authority of the Provincial in Germany and those in Poland under the Polish Provincial. The Germans, however, would never have allowed this. In Poland, for example, their war against the Church cost the lives of 3,000 Polish priests, including 34 of 35 Oblates sent to concentration camps.49

  Since les religieux were being held as British POWs, Father Larivière, on 1 May, told Monsignor Johannes Pietsch in Rome that he had recently written to “Bishop Dey, Roman Catholic Chaplain to H.M. Forces, whom I take to be my Ordinarie).” Larivière was incorrect.

  To be under Dey’s authority, Larivière and the other priests and brothers would have had to be in the British Armed Forces. A request to be breveted as officers in the Royal Navy ran up against bureaucratic inertia in London. On 7 June, Father Barsalou enlisted the aid of Lady Encombe, patron of the Catholic Truth Society, to submit his request for “a temporary appointment as an RN Roman Catholic Chaplain in H.M. Fleet for the duration of captivity” directly to Archbishop Arthur Hinsley. Pushed by the facts on the ground in Marlag Nord, Captain F.W. Wilson Graham, the Senior British Officer, took it upon himself to appoint Barsalou the Roman Catholic chaplain of the prisoners in the Royal Navy camp. Barsalou took this appointment to mean that he came under Hinsley’s authority. Barsalou too
was mistaken.

  The Germans were equally confused about the priests’ and brothers’ status. In many ways, they treated them like officers, allowing some of them parole walks, and housing them with officers or in private rooms. The Germans did not, however, pay them either as officers or enlisted men, though they did pay the priests 14 reichsmarks for saying mass, which allowed them to purchase, from outside the camps, the materials necessary to say mass. Alone among inmates of POW camps, the priests and brothers in one camp were allowed to write to their brethren in Christ in others camps. When, later in the year, Father Paul Juneau was sent to Stalag XVIII-A, in Austria, the Kommandant considered him the chaplain for the English Catholics, housed him with the officers, and gave him an orderly.

  MID-JUNE 1942, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  MONTHS OF CAPTIVITY WEAR ON LES RELIGIEUX

  German rations—a thin piece of cheese for breakfast, vegetable soup devoid of vegetables for lunch and two pieces of stinking headcheese for dinner—left the Sacred Heart Brothers, who were suffering from extremely bad colds and diarrhea, believing that they’d never see Canada again. The Red Cross parcels were so important to Kriegies’ survival that the fathers would have overlooked the somewhat blasphemous way of reckoning time recalled by Surgeon Lieutenant Fisher, who soon would be joining them at Milag und Marlag Nord: “BRC” and “ARC,” Before Red Cross and After Red Cross.