The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  But in the hours after leaving Buchenwald, while in boxcars loaded with only 25 men, a pot of ersatz coffee warming on a small coke stove, Harvie and the others could not believe their good fortune. Over the course of the three-day trip they ate bread, margarine and sausage, and, once each day, real soup prepared by a field kitchen. The guards were still armed, but they were old enough to be the airmen’s fathers and were shocked at what they heard about the men’s treatment in Buchenwald.

  As they walked the two miles from the siding to the POW camp, instead of the foul smell of death, their noses were filled with the scent of pine. Instead of the dance of death by human skeletons behind electrified barbed wire, they saw men in uniforms playing football, and RAF and Luftwaffe officers on the sidelines watching the game. Instead of being ordered to strip to be sheared like sheep, Harvie and the others were led to a shower room, where “they were able to luxuriate without harassment, in the delightful warm water, with smooth Red Cross toilet soap, and … dry themselves, not on rags as [at] their last shower in Buchenwald, but on fresh white towels also supplied by the Red Cross.” Instead of stained rags or worn clothing stolen from those burned in the ovens, they were given uniforms, two sets of clean underwear, socks and two shirts. Instead of being led to a rock-strewn field or desperately overcrowded barracks, they were led to a barracks with pictures of loved ones pinned to the walls; with cubby holes for personal possessions; with bunks, one for each man; and with tables complete with plates, knives and forks. Even a gramophone played music.

  The same latrine and “Smelly Nelly” that had so distressed Father Goudreau years earlier delighted Harvie. Later Harvie would learn that hunger stalked Stalag Luft III. Given their wretched condition, it was unlikely that any of the new arrivals was a German plant, but with a new tunnel begun, the Escape Committee took no chances. After the execution of the 50 escapers, the Kriegies feared that as the Reich crumbled, Hitler would order the execution of all Allied POWs. Therefore, instead of leading out of the camp, “George” led toward the German guards’ compound, where if necessary the POWs would seize weapons and fight their way toward whichever Allied army was closest. Unlike when the Germans discovered “Tom,” the discovery of this tunnel would endanger Father Goudreau; he could hardly have claimed ignorance of the escape tunnel that began immediately behind his chapel.

  Harvie was interrogated a few hours after he attended his first church service since the one at which his squadron asked for God’s help on D-Day. The following Monday, after having been initiated into the mysteries of circuit bashing, Harvie was given his first high-protein Red Cross parcel. Later that day, he received his full security clearance, which meant that, though no longer a bombardier and still so weak that he could barely make one circuit, he was again a man at war.

  LATE OCTOBER 1944, VICTORIA, BRITISH COLUMBIA

  HUBERT AND WINSOME BLENKINSOP LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO THEIR SON

  Although written by a lowly British signals corps driver named Ernest Betts, the letter was like manna from heaven. One day, Betts had stopped at a country house near Webbekom, Belgium, to barter for some eggs. Welcomed into the Pypens’ house, he saw a photo of what he took to be an RAF officer. When he asked who he was, the family told him that they had hidden RCAF Squadron Leader Edward Blenkinsop in the weeks leading up to 11 August. Betts’s letter showed that Hubert and Winsome’s son had survived the crash of his Lancaster bomber, and he had known kindness. Not only this, but he “was not hurt much,” wrote Betts. His abbreviated story of Blenkinsop trying to teach the Pypens’ three daughters English sounded so much like their Teddy. The Pypens, who “thought the world of him,” were, Betts told the parents in Victoria, “very lucky not to have been shot for hiding him.”229

  Betts probably knew more than he wrote. No censor would have allowed the words through telling of Blenkinsop being blown out of his Lancaster bomber and landing so hard he dislocated his shoulder and was knocked out. Likewise, Betts could not write what he knew of Blenkinsop’s move from safe house to safe house, or that for a few weeks he had lived in a vermin-infested hovel. And delicacy might have kept the Pypens from telling Betts that, the morning after Blenkinsop arrived, Mrs. Pypen found him in tears from the incessant itching, the shame of wearing lousy rags and the fear that he might infect the children of his benefactors. According to Paula Pypen, who was then 18 years old and smitten with the airman, her mother did more than just wash the Canadian evader again and disinfect the bedding; she cared for him as she would have her son, who would have been the same age had he not died when he was little. Betts likely also knew of Blenkinsop’s plan of waiting for the advancing Allied armies to reach him. But in early August, following the murder of a prominent local collaborator, the SS moved to settle accounts with the Resistance. Blenkinsop was arrested with the Pypens’ son, Jos, and another man as they ran from the Pypen farm moments after word arrived that the SS had started mass arrests in the village.

  St. Gilles Prison, where Blenkinsop was taken after being arrested, already held some 50 Allied airmen. Ironically, the prison named for the patron saint of fear of night was a Bruxellois version of Fresnes, another island of torment shrouded by what the Gestapo itself called Nacht und Nebel—Night and Fog. In addition to the beatings, isolation and putrid food, the Germans staged mock executions, which Blenkinsop knew about because other officers tapped out word of these horrors in Morse code on the prison’s pipes.

  Word that Blenkinsop had been seen alive in Belgium heartened the pilot’s family in Victoria, who paid special attention to the news stories that told of the Canadian Army’s advance toward Belgium. They had no way of knowing, however, that on 30 August, German guards evacuated St. Gilles Prison.

  Even as 40,000 German soldiers fled Holland and Belgium, the SS made plain its demands: each prisoner was to prepare two parcels; one with toiletries and some food to be taken with them, and another with valuables that would be sent on later. Shoved into trucks and then cattle cars, the prisoners were in various states of shock and panic. The moment of elation vanished quickly when the train stopped almost as soon as it started. For instead of the doors being slid open by Allied troops, whose guns could be heard in the distance, or by Resistance workers, the train sat under a baking sun for hours.

  As was true of so many other trains filled with civilian men, women and children—and POWs—there was not enough room for everyone to lie down. Nor, of course, was there adequate food or water. As October passed into November, the train crossed into Germany. Just after midnight on 3 November, it reached a suburb of Hamburg. Then, Blenkinsop and 52 other Allied airmen and more than 300 Belgian prisoners disappeared into the Neuengamme Concentration Camp.

  9 NOVEMBER 1944, AT A TRAIN STATION ON THE WAY TO STALAG LUFT III

  CDWARDS IS AMAZED THAT GERMAN SOLDIERS PROTECT HIM

  The stamp on his POW record is clear. Carter-Edwards was transferred to Stalag Luft III on 9 November 1944. The words spoken by a Luftwaffe officer are, however, less distinct. All that mattered was that after 101 days, Carter-Edwards was about to leave Buchenwald.

  “I don’t remember gathering up anything or even how we arrived at the train,” says Carter-Edwards. “Harry Bastable who, like Carter-Edwards, had been shot down on 8 June 1944], who had also been in the infirmary when the rest of the boys left, told me we left the camp together. The only part of the trip to Stalag Luft III I remember is when, at one of the stops, the guards wanted to get something to eat, so they led us out of the train car and into the station. It didn’t take long for the people in the station to realize we were airmen—Terrorflieger—and they soon started threatening us. The guards pointed their rifles at the crowd and, to protect us, led us back to the train.”

  MID-NOVEMBER 1944, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND

  HARVIE FINDS THAT A CHURCH SERVICE MAKES HIM HOMESICK

  Since arriving at Stalag Luft III, Harvie had been initiated into the mysteries of tin smithing, tunnel engineering and how fer
rets searched for tunnels; how a well-timed cup of real coffee, piece of chocolate or cigarette could suborn a guard; and, amazingly enough, ballroom dancing. When he first saw the paper on the bulletin board offering dancing lessons, he thought it was “a subtle British joke” but soon found that the men viewed these classes as seriously as they did those in accounting or the common law, or the lecture by the Kriegie who once raced at Monte Carlo.230 The presence of three of his barracks mates in the class did not lessen his nervousness when he went to his first lesson. The instructor drew on a blackboard, mapping out foot movements with the precision of a navigator.

  Harvie was surprised by his reaction to dancing with the male instructor, who took the female part. It took only moments, but the drab barracks in the middle of Silesia in a camp that held 40,000 dissolved as he fantasized about asking a girl at the Ritz-Carleton in Montreal to dance and surprising her with his footwork. In his daydream, Harvie held the girl in his arms as he “effortlessly led her through the most intricate steps and routines…. We would retire to the candlelit table in the corner where, holding hands, she would easily persuade me to talk about my heroic wartime adventures.” When the reverie ended, he saw another POW “with a faraway look on his face humming to himself while taking odd little steps and turns” and knew that, for at least a few moments, he too was dancing with his girl.

  Five weeks earlier, just after arriving at the POW camp, had Harvie talked to Father Goudreau after Sunday services, he likely would have agreed with the priest’s complaint that the men were not devout enough. Now, the Canadian pilot had stopped going to Padre Douglas Thompson’s services, though not because he had suffered a crisis of faith. Rather, he found that, far from linking him to the Divine or to his family back home, the hymns and music he had learned as a child made him unbearably homesick.

  20 NOVEMBER 1944, DEUTSCHE WERFT SHIPYARDS, NEAR HAMBURG

  BLENKINSOP IS A SLAVE LABOURER

  The letter from Squadron Leader W.R. Gunn shattered the hopes the Blenkinsops had carefully built on corpsman Betts’s letter. True, Blenkinsop had survived the crash of his plane, but he was now under a death sentence for having been caught out of uniform. Hoping that a statement from Sir Anthony Eden might save their son, the Blenkinsops wrote to him; their decision to work through the British foreign secretary showing just how underdeveloped Canada’s machinery for dealing with its POWs was.

  Unlike Reid, who was given every Sunday off and laboured in the dry salt mine, during the coldest and wettest winter in generations, Blenkinsop slaved away outside at the Deutsche Werft shipyards near Hamburg, wearing only a paper tunic and wooden sandals. Day after day without any breaks, Blenkinsop’s day started in the middle of the night. At noon, he and the other slave labourers were given their one meal: 200 grams of sour black bread, 10 grams of margarine and the ubiquitous watery soup. By late November, the Canadian, who shivered through the night on a paillasse while sharing a thin blanket with a prisoner named François Fernand, had fallen desperately ill.

  4 DECEMBER 1944, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  LES RELIGIEUX HEAR THE PROMISE OF REPATRIATION

  Many POWs report that even as conditions in the camps became harsher because Allied bombing prevented the transportation of coal from the Ruhr Valley, guards became friendlier and some Kommandants relaxed a few rules. Earlier in the war, when each was serving in adjoining parts of Milag und Marlag Nord, the SS had prevented Fathers Barsalou and Bergeron from meeting for sacramental purposes. Now, however, for the second time in just a few months, some of les religieux were attending a religious retreat.

  Just after finishing the mass, Father Pâquet announced, “The [Swiss] ambassador delegate is in the camp in order to tell you some very happy news.” Later, toward the end of the retreat banquet, which consisted of chickens and duck, Pâquet rose and, with a glass of wine in his hand, said, “Those passengers who remain of the Zamzam will be repatriated. All that we lack is a boat, and we expect one at the beginning of January.” Several of the priests and brothers wept openly. Brother Georges-Aimée Lavallée was not at all surprised that after 66 days of rain, that afternoon the sun shone brightly.

  MID-DECEMBER 1944, STALAG LUFT IX-C, MÜHLHAUSEN, GERMANY

  ROBERT PROUSE DIGS UP TREE STUMPS FOR FIREWOOD

  The order to draw their Red Cross parcels was not accompanied by the usual excitement. For according to the Kommandant, these would be their last because of the ceaseless bombing of depots and trains. Combined with the earlier cut-off of coal-dust briquettes, this foretold a sorry Christmas and a cold and hungry winter.

  The deep cold soon forced the Germans to agree to allow the POWs to forage for wood to heat their barracks; to heat their own barracks, the Germans imposed a 10 per cent “tax” on them. For the first few trips, the Kriegies had use of an old, sway-backed horse, but it soon died, leaving the weakened men to drag the wood back to camp. Though the POWs could have overpowered the guards “with the Allied advance and constant bombing, plus the increasing itchiness of the Jerrys’ gun fingers,” recalls Prouse, there was no point in doing so.231 Further, had they made a break for freedom, the Kommandant would have cancelled all future foraging parties, and those left behind would have remained desperately cold.

  The foragers used some of their dwindling supply of Canadian cigarettes to bribe guards, who not only allowed the POWs to remain unguarded in a room in the guest house where they ate lunch but also bought them good stout German beer. Several hundred miles away, at a POW camp near Schivelbein, Poland, not far from the frigid Baltic Sea, Stan Darch paid a teamster a pack of cigarettes to bring his wife a ball of yarn that came from worn-out socks to knit the POW a pair of gloves. For her troubles, Darch paid her with a bar of Camay soap.

  18 DECEMBER 1944, STALAG XVIII-A, WOLFSBERG, AUSTRIA

  FATHER JUNEAU SURVIVES A BOMBING RAID

  The POW knew that while the fleets that sailed across the Reich’s skies, some with more than 1,000 planes, heralded their freedom, they did not come without danger. Near noon on 18 December, six American planes mistakenly dropped their payload on Father Juneau’s camp, in Austria.

  The blasts threw men some distance away to the ground and killed 48 men, including two doctors in the small hospital, which was all but obliterated. Others, including Joseph Charles Hobling, the Anglican chaplain with whom Juneau shared a room, died in their barracks. Juneau would have died with him, but just as he reached the door to their room, he heard a voice saying not to enter it and he remained in the corridor. Thanks to “God’s mercy,” he told his parents in a letter written three days later, “I was not even wounded.” Providence did not, however, save a French priest.

  When the smoke cleared, Juneau saw that the tabernacle had been smashed. Some consecrated Hosts—which Juneau knew were the very body of Christ—lay on the floor among the wreckage, while others lay among the broken plaster, smashed into shards.

  24 DECEMBER 1944, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  CHRISTMAS EVE

  The men at Stalag Luft III knew that there’d be no repetition of 1943’s Rabelaisian celebration during which both the Kriegies and goons got so drunk on rotgut whisky that some of the former climbed the inner barbed-wire fence before collapsing in the area between it and the second fence (the Christmas spirit explaining why the guards didn’t open fire), and several of the latter ended up sleeping off their drunk under the POWs’ bunks. “How could the drab life of a prisoner of war,” Harvie wondered, “[have] room for such frivolous things” as Christmas decorations; the answer lay in the chapel.232 Harvie found there light glinting off the decorations and the chalice, and the white linen napkin in which Father Goudreau held it in the joint service with the Methodist Chaplain, Douglas Thompson. Whether they intensified homesickness, as they did for Harvie, or spun mystic chords linking POWs closer to their families, the carols unleashed a flood of memories, as did the tinned turkey, cranberry sauce and plum pudding in the special Red Cross parcels
distributed on Christmas Eve.

  At Milag Nord, where the light covering of snow added to the festive atmosphere created by the garland strung around Brother Antoine Lavallée’s barracks and the chapel, midnight mass in Stella Maris began at 11 p.m. By contrast, the Kommandant at Stalag VIII-B ordered that the mass be conducted earlier, which is why the chapel was full at 7:30 p.m. when the air-raid siren began to wail, just as Father Desnoyers was preparing the offering and the choir sang “Adeste Fideles.” A moment later, the camp lights went out and, as the choir continued singing, a few men rose and put up the blackout curtains. With only enough light for the congregants to see Desnoyers’s white chasuble and the shimmering of the chalice, the choir intoned the “Sanctus.” The siren’s wail had been long forgotten, but the chapel remained in shimmering darkness as the choir sang “Agnus Dei” in celebration of the birth of the Lamb of God.

  Near 3 a.m. on Christmas Day, as POWs across Europe lay either sleeping or remembering Christmases past, in one small corner of Westertimke, a subcamp of Milag und Marlag Nord, something akin to the Christmas truce of 1914 occurred. Six days earlier, Father Bergeron had agreed to conduct a second, clandestine midnight mass for 32 guards. The mass was unlike any other Bergeron had ever conducted. At no point were all his congregants present; rather, there was “a continuous coming and going of armed soldiers, of clanking genuflexions, of entrances and exits.”233 Since some soldiers could not be there for the blessing of the Eucharist, to ensure that the mass “counted,” Bergeron prepared Hosts for the sentries to take when they arrived—no matter where he was in the service. To lessen the chance that their officers would notice that the sentries had abandoned their posts, for which they would have faced the death penalty, prisoners took their places as the first light of dawn broke on the faux guards’ homeland across the sea.