The Forgotten
Page 30
The censors too remained active, deleting 12 lines (or almost half) of a letter written by Father Robert Barsalou’s father. Aware that any obvious mention of the deletions would itself be censored, Barsalou deftly places the words “12 lignes censurées” after a long—and triumphal—statement about how his 12 tomato plants have produced 400 tomatoes, albeit ones smaller than those in Canada, and before what the censor no doubt viewed as a routine statement about placing oneself in the hands of divine Providence.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
October–December 1944
We have to fight this battle not only with guns in daylight, but alone in the night, communing with our souls, strengthening our faith that in common men everywhere there is a spring of innocent aspiration and good will that cannot be sealed.
—JOSEPH PRIESTLY
EARLY OCTOBER 1944, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, WEIMAR, GERMANY
EDWARD CARTER-EDWARDS SURVIVES IN THE INFIRMARY
The memories are indistinct, which makes them so different from what Edward Carter-Edwards remembers of the last moments aboard his plane: the explosion of the shell, the burning port wing and his crawl to the escape hatch in the Halifax Mk III’s nose cone. His memories of being in the infirmary are of voices too far away to hear, hazy faces and hands that he knows helped but that he could never shake—memories so different from those of landing and of running down the moonlit path and of taking the right at the fork in the road, or of the British woman (herself trapped in Occupied France) who brought him food while he hid in a barn for a week.223 He can remember the second safe house, where a Resistance leader said he’d be shot if he couldn’t prove he was a downed Canadian airman, and, some weeks later, the moment of betrayal when he and three other Allied airmen were pulled from a car in Paris and beaten by jackbooted Gestapo agents. The memories of Fresnes Prison, where he had so little food he passed blood, where fleas and lice infested his clothes, and the sounds of other prisoners being beaten and shot there are also clear. He sees the bed changes in the night in Buchenwald’s infirmary, the Doktor barking out orders that barely registered in his feverish brain, as through a glass darkly.
Few who entered Buchenwald’s infirmary lived. The guttural order that hovers still in Carter-Edwards’s consciousness came from the Doktor, who followed the principle laid down by the camp’s first Kommandant, Karl-Otto Koch: “There are no sick men in my camp. They are either well or dead!”224 The word Krematorium that the Doktor pronounced on his daily rounds meant “kill this one”—usually with an injection of carbolic acid, followed by a fiery end.
Carter-Edwards survived for two reasons. First, at night the orderlies “submerged” the Canadian delirious with fever; that is, they moved him from bed to bed so that the Doktor would not recall him from the day before and order his death. The orderlies, who belonged to the Communist underground, took this risk because they saw Carter-Edwards and the other Allied airmen as military leaders for their planned uprising. The second reason he survived was that one night he heard a voice that he not only understood but for some reason trusted, telling him to stand. When he did, Professor Alfred Balachowsky, whose work at the Pasteur Institute interested the SS enough to ignore the fact that he was Jewish and to assign him the laboratories at Buchenwald, stuck a large needle in Carter-Edwards’s back and into his infected lung. As he pulled back on the syringe’s plunger, he drew into the needle many cc’s worth of infected fluid, saving Carter-Edwards’s life.
3 OCTOBER 1944, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY
GEORGE SHAKER LEARNS THE DETAILS OF D-DAY
It was, all in all, a good day.
Toward evening, a lecture by a Royal Marines commando captured in Normandy thrilled George Shaker and the other men from the A.D. Huff. Lieutenant Hart whet their appetite with stories of training in Scotland. Then he told of D-Day—of tens of thousands of men marching into hundreds of ships, of hundreds of planes towing gliders, of the parachutists, of the huge naval guns and of the landings on the beaches the Kriegies now learned were named Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah. He told them of his dash across the beach, of capturing two villages and of being captured in a third. Not even hearing of the men who died terrible deaths dampened their mood. For Hart’s words fleshed out the BBC reports and what the flights of hundreds of Allied planes above heralded.
And that morning, Shaker and some of his shipmates received personal parcels. The cold and rainy weather that had set in early (and which would soon both bog down the Western Allies and slow the Russian juggernaut) made the warm clothes all the more welcome. The thousands of cigarettes, sent in packages of 500 from the T. Eaton and Hudson’s Bay companies, too cheered the men, even as their arrival triggered one of the inexorable laws of economics. On the black market, the price of 100 cigarettes fell by more than half, to between 30 and 35 reichsmarks.
5 OCTOBER 1944, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, WEIMAR, GERMANY
JOHN HARVIE WATCHES IN HORROR AS MILITARY DISCIPLINE FRAYS
The morale and nutritional boost provided by the arrival of some 2,000 Danish policemen could not have come at a better time. For weeks the Allied airmen had subsisted on tasteless, dry sawdust-enhanced Brot, made somewhat more palatable by rubbing garlic on it, and an intermittent ration of “sausage” paste that even dogs ran from. Near starvation had caused ribs to appear and bodies to retreat further into the amorphous clothes that provided no protection against the cold winds blowing through the wide avenues of Buchenwald. Military discipline, which Squadron Leader Phil Lamason (the Senior British Officer in the camp) moved on their first day in Buchenwald to enforce, produced, the airmen believed, a pool of mental strength necessary for them to survive. On 5 October, the bonds of discipline frayed when, after the midday soup did not even approach sating his hunger, a flyer “broke ranks and ran to the food tubs which were about to be carted back to the kitchen.”225
All knew the hopelessness of finding anything in a tub, for as disgusting as the slop was, the men who ladled it out made sure nothing went to waste, any amount that wasn’t divided by the ladle’s own justice being distributed by way of a lottery. The flyer’s hunger they knew too. More frighteningly, each step he took toward the food tubs measured the distance each of them was from violating his own oath, the man’s footsteps marking the path from being “an officer and gentleman” to the final collapse into the Hobbesian world, where those whose strength was not completed wasted stole food from the weak.
Divided among the more than 80,000 souls in Buchenwald, the Danes’ food could have supplied only a few calories or grams of fat or protein per person. Although committed to a concentration camp, the Danish police thought of themselves as prisoners of war and so gravitated toward the Allied airmen, with whom they generously shared their food. Even this largesse would not last long, but for a few days, John Harvie and the other Allied airmen tasted sweetness or the unctuousness of fat, which lifted spirits and, if not filling bellies, held off the inner beast for a while.
15 OCTOBER 1944, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY
SHAKER’S DIARY RECORDS THE QUICKENING TEMPO OF THE WAR
Shaker’s diary records the ferrets’ discovery of the tunnel that had been in use for two months and the stately progress of fleets of bombers, the dull thud of their bombs exploding somewhere near Bremen providing the bass line. The war news seemingly spills forth so fast that on 8 October, Shaker resorts to bullet points:
• American 1st army made small breakthrough around Achen
• Canadians have a hard struggle in Holland
• Russians staring heavy offensives and wiping up back territory
• Landing on Greece progressing favourably
• Largest air-raid over Germany yesterday
A day later, his diary tells of the capture in Holland of four Canadian soldiers, who arrived at the POW camp ragged and torn, and in need of medical attention. He knew of the impending liberation of Budapest by the Red Army. Shaker errs by thinkin
g the glowing night sky meant that the important naval base at Wilhelmshaven had been bombed; the 1,000-plane RAF raid was, in fact, against Brunswick and caused a firestorm that killed hundreds and destroyed much of the city.
MID-OCTOBER 1944,
GEORGE REID IS BEATEN
The foreman at the Arbeitskommando did nothing when, on his first day in the salt mine, George Reid insulted the Reich by saying, “Ah, in Canada nicht Schaufel [not shovels]. All is machine.”226 The German got his revenge a few days later when, after accusing Reid of spitting at him, he beat the Canadian. The trigger for two further beatings, one with a pick handle, was the foreman’s frustration at not being able to finger who was sabotaging the mine’s electrical system; Reid, as it happens, was not responsible.
After an altercation with another guard, Reid served an official sentence that, like the beatings, violated Geneva. He was locked for an entire shift in a room that was so filled with salt dust that the Germans did not let prisoners work in it for more than two hours at a time. After ten hours, his “throat felt like someone had run a wire brush down it” and he coughed up blood.227 The salt burned his eyes, making them so sore that opening or closing them was a struggle, while the jagged edges of the miniscule shards of salt crystal ripped open the lining of his nose, which bled copiously.
16 OCTOBER 1944, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, WEIMAR, GERMANY
CDWARDS OWES HIS LIFE TO A BRAVE DUTCHMAN
In the quarry, men whose skeletons were barely covered by paper-thin skin chipped out stones using picks and sledgehammers. There, bored guards took aim at prisoners covered in sweat and dust, or soaked by the rain, and then shot them for target practice. Today, second growth hides the scars in the earth carved by thousands of men, many of whom died, their bodies dragged back to the main camp, where they escaped the torment set in the pleasant hills of Thuringia the only way possible: “up the smokestack.” It is to this Steinbruch, or literally, “place of stone breaking,” that Carter-Edwards was ordered on the morning he was released from the infirmary.
The walk from the Appellplatz to the quarry took Carter-Edwards’s work commando past the gallows, past where three of his fellow Canadians had breathed their last, and through the SS compound, where Carter-Edwards saw the SS bandshell and a building that held the SS Kasino. But none of this registered in his befogged brain, which managed, still, to direct one foot in front of the other.
“My only clear memory is of that brave Dutchman, Kurt Baars, who must have been the foreman. When I reached the quarry, he took me aside and said that I was clearly too sick to work there and that he was going to put my name on the list as having died. ‘You’re going to go back to the infirmary. How you survive [there] is up to you, but this is all I can do to save your life,’ he said,” recalls Carter-Edwards in a tone of reverence for Baars’s risk.
16 OCTOBER 1944, STALAG XX-A, TORUN, POLAND
IAN MACDONALD IMAGINES HIS MOTHER IN THE KITCHEN
At least his mail, though not the packages his mother carefully packed for him, had started arriving again, so Ian MacDonald knew that, three months earlier, his parents had been well. The letters did strange things to time. No matter when the letter was written, POWs tended to read them as if they had been written just a few days earlier, and they had the effect of transporting the POWs back to Canada in an almost “cinematic” way. He “saw” his house and yard in the spring, when the trees were leafing and the flowers, coming up. He was as if at home watching the garden come to life, and his mother at the stove, an apron over her housedress, making apple preserves to use in pies.
The card written on 16 October arrived in Lourdes, Nova Scotia, on 21 December, while the letter he wrote at the beginning of October arrived on Christmas Eve. Though the letter dealt with what could appear as a serious topic—forced inoculations—MacDonald adopts a jocular tone, saying, “We’ll probably be riddled with needles when we get back.” The card doesn’t mention the inoculations, but its banter reflects better than did the letter’s assurance that his arm “wasn’t too sore” that he had suffered no ill effects from the inoculations.
On Christmas Eve, as the MacDonald family knelt to pray at midnight mass, they could not help but think about how, at the beginning of October, Ian was already thinking about their reception of his letter at Christmastime, and that on that holy night MacDonald’s overriding emotion was his desire for freedom.
21 OCTOBER 1944, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, WEIMAR, GERMANY
THANKS TO REICHSMARHSALL HERMANN GöRING, HARVIE AND 156 ALLIED AIRMEN LEAVE BUCHENWALD
The Allied airmen’s hopes rose when they heard that officials from Berlin would be coming to Buchenwald to investigate what even Kommandant Hermann Pister admitted was the mistaken commitment of the Allied airmen to the concentration camp. To help the officials establish that they were indeed airmen—and hence came under Geneva—Squadron Leader Phil Lamason ordered the airmen to go beyond giving only their name, rank and service number to also say when they were shot down and what squadron they belonged to; they were still, however, to refuse to answer any question that would tip off the Germans about the Resistance.
On 21 October, the airmen’s fading hope turned to anxiety when they were ordered to assemble at the Effektenkammer, the storage building where the SOE agents had been ordered to surrender their personal effects before being marched to the Leichenkeller to be murdered. The airmen knew that their identity cards were stamped with the acronym DIKAL (Darf in kein anderes Lager), which meant “Not to be transferred to another camp,” and that Berlin had authorized kangaroo courts to try to execute what Goebbles called Luftgangsters or Terrorfliegers.
Instead, they found themselves in the final moments of a bureaucratic affair that began when a Russian prisoner who worked at a nearby airbase gave a note Lamason had written to a Luftwaffe officer telling of the airmen’s plight. Sometime later, two Luftwaffe officers, including Luftwaffe ace (58 victories) Hannes Trautloft came to Buchenwald, ostensibly to inspect the damage caused by the Allied bombings. In reality, however, he came to meet with Lamason to determine whether he and the other “airmen” were in fact airmen and not spies. Trautloft’s report, which told of the imprisonment of the Allied airmen, landed on Hermann Göring’s desk. The Reichsmarshall demanded that his officials get the airmen out of Heinrich Himmler’s bureaucratic empire and transferred to his.
Inside the Effektenkammer, the vaunted German bureaucracy returned to each airman the shabby clothing he’d worn when hustled out of Fresnes Prison, clothing that provided scant protection against the October cold. For the men who had been captured wearing their cut-down flying boots, the fleece lining provided the first soft and warm sensation they had experienced in months. Then the SS crosschecked numbers with identities, and the Luftwaffe officers checked each name against the nominal role authorized by Berlin. Finally, as the rain fell, the SS, unwilling to miss a chance to impress Göring’s men, provided a row of black-uniformed, machine-gun-toting troops who marched the 156 Allied airmen to the gate that when closed left behind 12 men, including Carter-Edwards and his fellow Canadian, Harry Bastable, and the American Roy Allen in the infirmary.
22 OCTOBER 1944, SAINT-JEAN-SUR-RICHELIEU, QUEBEC
JACQUELINE WRITES TO HER FIANCé, JACQUES NADEAU
The unseasonably warm weather that graced the small town along Quebec’s Richelieu River only intensified her loneliness. But in a mirror image of the tens of thousands of letters POWs wrote that strove to maintain their position within their families, Jacqueline’s letter shows that, despite his absence, Jacques Nadeau remained present. “Where is a small prisoner who awaits his hour of deliverance?”227—which in her native French is less a question about location than about time—she writes and then assures him, “Oui, Jacques, elle sonnera bientôt cette heure” (Yes, Jacques, the bell will soon toll that hour). Her prayers at morning mass asked that her fiancé come home safely.
Aware that he would not be reading her words for months, Jac
queline continues, “When you receive this letter, the winter’s coat of snow will probably cover the ground. It might even be 1945.” These sentences do more than tritely take into account the time lag between when the letter was written and when it would be read. By sketching Nadeau’s world as it exists when he reads the letter, Jacqueline placed herself in his time frame. Though the snow would not fall for months, she was writing about the scene as the snow crunched beneath his feet at Appell the morning the letter arrived at Stalag II-D, in Pomerania. By extending the period before Nadeau received the letter into 1945, Jacqueline was being realistic; by late October, no one believed that the war would end before 1945. Rather, Jacqueline brackets time and space so that even though they are separated, in the way that matters to Nadeau, she is with him in his present.
LATE OCTOBER 1944, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND
HARVIE HAS TROUBLE ADJUSTING TO A POW CAMP
Later they would learn about the 50 men murdered after the Great Escape. Later still, some of the men of the self-styled Konzentrationslager Buchenwald (Buchenwald Concentration Camp) club would come to feel that the Kriegies they met at Stalag Luft III, who had electric lights, regular if meagre food, and amenities such as toothpaste and single bunks, lacked, as RAF Squadron Leader Stanley Booker said (somewhat unkindly), “the soul, the magic of real companionship and dependence on each other.”228