The Forgotten

by Nathan M. Greenfield

  Goudreau also thought of the men much less fortunate than he, of the thousands who would grab what sleep they could on the frozen bare ground of barns. The corner of the barn in which Kingsley Brown spent the night had been designated as a urinal—and, in the middle of the night, one unfortunate man close to it called out, “Jesus Christ, old boy, that was my face!”241

  John Harvie was luckier; the Germans herded his group into a church, which, though unheated, soon began to warm from the body heat of the several hundred men. Each claimed what spot they could—under a pew, in the aisle, choir stall, pulpit or organ stall or, as two Canadians did, on the communion table itself. Some who did not collapse into a stupor found the strength to open a tin of cold bully beef or to eat a few dried prunes; the men from RCAF Flight Lieutenant Robert Buckham’s barracks ate better, having taken a page from Canada’s voyageur past and prepared something close to pemmican. Had he known of it, Goudreau would have approved of Harvie’s inner debate about what constituted sacrilege when the pilot saw the two men lying on the communion table, and the radio that had been set up at an electrical outlet in a corner of the pulpit so that they could listen to the BBC. The priest would also have approved of Harvie’s theological reasoning, “Churches were supposed to offer comfort and shelter to the needy. Surely we were in desperate need!”242

  LATE JANUARY 1945, ON THE ROADS OF CZECHOSLOVAKIA

  JACK POOLTON STEALS FOOD TO SURVIVE

  Priestly delicacy no doubt led Fathers Desnoyers and Larivière to write only of the atrocious suffering of men from frozen feet and skin. Carswell was less reticent. On the seventh night of the march, his group was herded into sheep pens. “Sheep shit,” he later wrote, “smells worse than cow shit. And the smell of sheep shit mixed with the human variety is indeed a very disgusting smell.”243

  The Kriegies’ vale of frozen tears turned tragic when the biting cold vanished during the day and the roads turned into quagmires. The muddy water soaked the men, who, when the temperatures plummeted at night, became even colder and more susceptible to diseases such as pneumonia and pleurisy, which quickly killed those already weakened by dehydration and malnutrition. To supplement the meagre bread ration, delivered only every fourth or fifth day, Jack Poolton snuck into root cellars and stole life-preserving potatoes. Later, driven by hunger, he “stole a bucket of swill that was being prepared for pigs.”244

  29 JANUARY 1945, ON THE ROADS OF EASTERN GERMANY

  SOME KRIEGIES FROM STALAG LUFT III FIND WARMTH IN AN ABANDONED FACTORY

  Harvie and the other men were thankful that instead of ordering them onto the road immediately, the Germans allowed them enough time to eat breakfast. Thus, though once again cold, Harvie felt relatively good. However, walking through the icy purgatory of eastern Germany soon sapped their spirits. Perhaps because the men had had a relatively warm night and started the day hopeful, when their morale began to fall, it fell quickly. The signs of depression—listless steps, silence and vacant stares—so alarmed Padre Douglas Thompson that he took the bottle of communion wine Harvie had been carrying in his pack and “moved up and down the line offering a sip to anyone who seemed to be in trouble.”245

  Harvie, Scruffy Weir, Father Goudreau and the other Kriegies, their fingers benumbed and their ears and cheeks windburned and frostbitten, trudged on. The still traumatized Carter-Edwards recalls, albeit hazily, the second night of their frozen odyssey, when they stopped at a warm factory. Left to their own devices by the German guards who stood outside, the Kriegies quickly found that the glass factory’s furnaces were still hot, which allowed them to cook their food and make tea and coffee. The discovery of hot water in the boilers prompted them to strip and wash themselves and their clothes, which were then dried by putting them near the hot furnaces. The luxuriousness of sleeping in clean, dry clothes in a warm room, even if on a hard concrete floor, was something Carswell and Fathers Desnoyers and Larivière could only dream about.246

  EARLY FEBRUARY 1945, SUDETEN MOUNTAINS, CZECHOSLOVAKIA

  GROGAN MOURNS A DEAD CIVILIAN

  Russian guns were close enough to blow up the bridge Grogan and the other Dieppe survivors had just crossed. Close enough so that among the mass of humanity streaming east were German soldiers, the wounds of some wrapped in paper bandages long since stained brown. Close enough so that, of the column of women they passed, none dared pause to try to scratch out a grave in the frozen earth for the dead babies they carried. Lying unburied but partially covered by the unrelenting snow were soldiers and civilians killed by American bullets “by light of day, Canadian and British by night, and Russian fighter planes at any time.”247

  Although most of Germany’s transportation infrastructure had been destroyed, the railway line from Spremberg in the southeastern part of the country to Tarmstedt in the northwest still ran, albeit fitfully. It took the Kriegies from Stalag Luft III three days (2–5 February) to travel the 300 miles to Tarmstedt, from where they were marched first to Westertimke and then to Milag und Marlag Nord. While there was no snow, they had to endure a five-hour wait in the rain as small groups were admitted into the camp and processed. Father Goudreau was sent to a subcamp at Tarmstedt two miles away, where he met Father Raoul Bergeron. Even in the barracks the men could not shake the chill, for the wet wood shavings the Germans provided produced little heat. The arrival of the RAF and RCAF officers necessitated the transfer of the merchant marine prisoners, including the survivors of A.D. Huff and several naval prisoners, including the survivors of HMCS Athabaskan, to a nearby subcamp.

  In eastern Germany above the Sudeten Mountains, chilled, weary legs provided the only means of transportation, which meant that no additional food reached the men in Grogan’s column, who had long since exhausted their Red Cross parcels. Each day the men marched some 30 miles in sub-zero temperatures through the petrified wastes of Germany, and spent nights in frigid barns. Every third day, the German guards handed out a piece of hard black bread and a small amount of cheese and unidentifiable canned meat. The frozen sugar beets Grogan and the others ate to supplement this meagre diet provided belly-filling bulk but hardly paid back the calories needed to dig them out of the cold, hard ground.

  The German killing machine continued to spit out death. The dead from Grogan’s column awaited the next snowfall for their shroud. In words that belie his grade nine education, Grogan recalled another dead man: “We passed a huge wooden crucifix at a wayside shrine; an old Jew had chosen this spot to stop and rest. His body now lay in the snow beneath the cross, a gaping bayonet wound in his chest. The threshing of his feet in his death struggle had sent his wooden shoes and the cloths that had been wrapped about his feet some distance away. His white bare feet stuck up out of the snow, and his glassy eyes were fixed on the wooden image of the crucified Jew on the cross.”

  7 FEBRUARY 1945, STALAG VIII-A, GÖRLITZ, GERMANY

  POOLTON’S SUFFERINGS ON THE ROAD PALE IN COMPARISON TO WHAT HE SEES AT STALAG VIII-A

  Neither Father Desnoyers nor Father Larivière wrote about their forced march to Görlitz. Even for men who had known the cold of both rural Quebec and Ottawa winters, when the temperature can fall to where centigrade and Fahrenheit are the same, -40°, the words of Matthew 24:20 were never far from their minds: “Pray that your flight may not be in the winter.” It’s unknown whether either was aware enough to notice that as the 3,000 marchers neared Görlitz their condition so shocked villagers that, despite all the propaganda (and contrary to the urgings of the Nazis herding the POWs along), they stood and watched the “cortège” with tears in their eyes.

  The sights in Görlitz recalled the Dark Ages. A member of Jack Poolton’s Royal Regiment was “confined in a wire cage.”248 And the Germans had made the imprecation Schweinehund (pig dog) real, as some prisoners were in a sty standing up to their knees in mud.

  EARLY FEBRUARY 1945, NEAR GOTHA, GERMANY

  ROBERT PROUSE TRADES ON THE BLACK MARKET AND TASTES WILD MEAT

  The German was nervous. Trad
ing on the black market risked death. Still, the lure of cocoa was too great. So as planned, when he saw Robert Prouse’s foraging party, the German quickly walked past it. A mile down the road, Prouse followed him into the wood, where they exchanged a tin of cocoa for two loaves of bread, which Prouse stuffed into his tunic. A guard had noticed Prouse’s absence but bought the story that he “had to take a crap” once Prouse handed him a cigarette.249

  Prouse and his buddies ate well that night. On the way back to the camp, he picked up a large Belgian hare that had been killed by a truck. After cutting off the hare’s head, the cook threw the carcass into a pot and boiled it with potatoes. Removing the fur required repeated effort but was worth it, for the excellent “soup that had grease bubbles with the distinct taste of meat” was something that had not passed their lips in months.

  16 FEBRUARY 1945, STALAG LUFT III, SAGAN, POLAND

  FATHER GéRARD BOULANGER IS LIBERATED BY THE RUSSIANS AND BEGINS HIS TRIP HOME VIA ODESSA

  Had Marshal Zhukov’s long-range forces not destroyed the railway line linking the POW camp near Tost, in the southeast corner of Poland, then Father Gérard Boulanger and several hundred other POWs would not have found themselves tramping through the same cold and snow that had tormented the POWs who marched away from Stalag Luft III. The men in Boulanger’s column fought not only for purchase on the icy roads but also to tamp down the fear generated by the “orchestra of cannons,” the most ominous notes being the screaming sounds of the Katyusha rockets, the so-called Stalin’s organ. The Russians kept the approaches to the bridge under such heavy fire that, despite the Germans guards’ desperate desire to put the river between themselves and what they considered to be the barbarian hordes, their will failed them and they led the shivering men to a nearby POW camp at Cosel.

  A few days later, the Germans found an old steam engine and some cattle cars. Since crossing the Oder was impossible, the train chugged its way northeast. Boulanger later described the trip in cattle cars as torture. Because of the open spaces between the slats, frigid air and snow poured in. It does not appear that the men were fed any hot food or given anything hot to drink. On 3 February, the train stopped a few miles outside Sagan, and Boulanger marched with the other men to Stalag Luft III, unbeknownst to him, to the same compound where Father Goudreau and the other Canadians had been held.

  Thirteen days later, the German guards fled and the Red Army took possession of the camp, making Boulanger the first of the Zamzamers to be liberated.

  LATE FEBRUARY 1945, ON A ROAD NEAR WEIMAR, GERMANY

  FATHER DESNOYERS SEES A SENIOR BRITISH OFFICER FACE DOWN THE MARCH FüHRER

  Görlitz itself was now a memory; so too was the companionship of Father Larivière—he had been ordered to remain behind to work in the camp’s hospital when, just a few days after arriving in Görlitz, the 4,000 POWs from Lamsdorf, including Desnoyers, were once again struggling—at gunpoint—through the numbing cold and snowdrifts in a march toward Weimar, 175 miles further east. If lucky, they slept in drafty barns, perhaps with a little straw to throw under or over them to keep in some body heat. Father Desnoyers could not miss the irony. He had devoted his life to preaching the word of the babe born in a manger, and now he had sought what shelter the barns of Saxony and Thuringia could give.

  Later the priest discovered that words could not describe the horrors of the march. Men desperate for the warmth of food starved. Dysentery took some, despair others. None could be buried in the frozen earth of Germany. Despite the snow, water was scarce, and the Canadians knew the dangers of taking a mouthful of snow, which sucked out more heat from the body than what it returned in water. The priest’s heart ached when he heard that during a thaw, a soldier was so driven by thirst that, despite the protests of his comrades, he put his head down and drank dirty stagnant water saying, “I would like better to die having had a drink than die thirsty.”250

  Day after day, step by step, under unforgiving skies and cruel winds, they shuffled across that tormented land. Men who in the camps had striven to keep themselves mentally fit became little more than automatons, somehow putting one numbed foot in front of the other. Hunger that did not kill drove men into snow-covered vegetable patches, and into chicken coops and cow stalls, where they dug up cabbages, stole chickens or eggs and surreptitiously milked cows. The Germans punished some POWs who had stolen cabbages by tying their hands behind their backs and hanging cabbages around their necks.

  Worried about how reports of this pilfering would look on his record, the Hauptmann commanding the march summoned the officers before him. “I have always believed that the English army was well disciplined. I must, unhappily, change my opinion,” he yelled.251

  Desnoyers watched as the hungry English major struck back. “Captain, six months in one of your concentration camps is enough for a soldier to lose all sense of discipline, and most of our men have been detained for four or five years…. what you call ‘theft’ is not. Our men are starving to death because you do not give them a quarter of the food that they need.” Both officers knew the end of the war was coming soon, so the English major took a legalistic tone: “You should know in any case, that since the beginning of this forced march, absolutely everything has been noted, from the amount of food given to the way our men have been treated, and this report will count”—his next words echoing both the New Testament and the prophet Jeremiah—“in the day of judgment that will come.” The white-faced Hauptmann found the will only to dismiss the officers.

  LATE FEBRUARY 1945, HALBERSTADT, GERMANY

  CARSWELL STARES DEATH IN THE FACE

  The spasm of vomiting that woke Carswell told him he was sicker than he had been when he was struck with dysentery. Nevertheless, his gaunt face and the yellowed whites of his eyes broken by brownish-orange veins that he saw in the metal mirror shocked him. Yet he had to march, so he changed his wet socks for his dry ones (remembering to put the wet ones against his stomach to dry) and joined the column. Soon, his strength gave out, and he sat, soaked, in the slush by the side of the road with other played-out men. A German NCO told them that if they could make just three more miles, he would do what he could to get them on a railcar. How the 200 sick men made it, Carswell did not know, though he recalled stopping repeatedly to vomit or void himself. The next day, as the train slowly chugged to the northwest, he managed to keep some food down.

  Near 2 p.m., shortly after the train stopped at Halberstadt, 150 miles southwest of Berlin, an air-raid siren began to wail. “Sick or not, none of us wanted to be on that train, on an open siding, during an air raid. We dived for the door, and in seconds the car was cleared.”252 Then six RAF Mustangs swooped down, firing their cannon at the train. The locomotive blew up, showering the POWs with shards of white-hot steel. Other shells and bullets hit more pitiful targets, POWs, killing about two dozen men.

  Even in his weakened state, Carswell owed it to the quick (though wounded) and the dead to help gather them in. In the field adjacent to the siding, he saw a body and walked toward it. He was stunned by “his sightless eyes staring unblinkingly at the sun now emerging from behind the clouds; his face the yellow, drained colour of death; a jagged hole in his belly the size of a bowling ball; that familiar, unmistakable smell of death.” Carswell knew the face well, for it had once been that of “Andrew Carswell.” And once he had been that man. The living Carswell’s face showed the first tears for the dead man, the Canadian’s first swapover partner, who was buried under his own name, Dennis Reeves.

  MARCH 1945, MILAG UND MARLAG NORD, NEAR BREMEN, GERMANY

  ROBERT BUCKHAM NOTES HOW HUNGER LEADS TO INFLATION

  The lack of food—the bread ration now being one-seventh and not one-fifth of a small loaf per man per day—competed with the damp cold to make life in Milag Nord miserable. The margarine ration was also cut and “the sausage ration,” Buckham noted in his diary, “will only cover one slice of bread every ten days.”253 Chilled by 48 hours of snow and rain and now a deep freeze, not
even the report that 50,000 food parcels had arrived in nearby Lübeck lifted the men’s spirits; though, once again, the inexorable laws of economics could not be denied as the price of a chocolate bar jumped from 65 cigarettes to 101 on the black market. What did make the men feel better—as they seemingly turned the screws on themselves by recalling favourite meals and dishes—was the decision to raid their almost-depleted Red Cross supplies to produce a treat: two biscuits covered with a mixture of Klim and “goon jam.”

  EARLY MARCH 1945, MELLINGEN, NEAR WEIMAR, GERMANY

  FATHER DESNOYERS ACCOMPANIES SICK MEN TO A LAZARETTO

  Even before Hitler became chancellor of Germany in 1933, the people of Mellingen made Heinrich Berndl, a card-carrying Nazi, their Bürgermeister. On an early March day, however, their actions were not defined by their fidelity to the Nazi Party, still less by any memory that, four centuries earlier, Christoph Schappeler, the village’s pastor, and Sebastian Lotzer, a furrier, drafted one of the first human rights documents in history.254 Rather, what seized them was the fear that the ragged, stinking column of emaciated men—some, with sunken eyes and pallid skin, obviously sick—harboured the plague of cholera, which killed almost 9,000 people in Hamburg in 1892. As they would have for lepers in the Middle Ages, the people of Mellingen refused to provide refuge for these desperate men.