Hitler had been dead for almost a month, and the war in Europe had been over for nine days when a plane carrying most of the Oblates and Sacred Heart Brothers touched down at Stanmore, just outside London. Since they were not soldiers, after being deloused they were sent to Canada House. There, les religieux were given identity papers and money. The Knights of Columbus arranged for rooms at a reasonably priced hotel. Despite years of living dans la langue des anglais, the priests and brothers soon discovered that cockney was for all intents and purposes another language and that its speakers could not understand their pronunciation of “Trafalgar Square,” “Pall Mall” or even “the Thames.” Saddened by the devastation wrought by the Blitz, by the V1s and V2s, one of which destroyed the transept of the Catholic church closest to their hotel, the Oblates and brothers soon had reason to thank Jesus again, for Fathers Goudreau and Bergeron had joined them. By the end of the month, their ranks had grown to 14 with the arrival of Fathers Larivière and Juneau.
Among the last Canadian POWs to leave war-shattered Europe was Kingsley Brown, who along with hundreds of other Allied airmen, including many who had been in Buchenwald, waited with increasing impatience in Luckenwalde. The end of the war did nothing to improve the appalling conditions at Luckenwalde, though the local commander, Major Ledbedev, moved quickly to improve the food situation by making available to the Allied soldiers stores captured a few miles away. The wine the Russian drivers shared with Brown was welcome and, in his inebriated state, the show they put on blasting the empties and then carving their initials into the concrete supports of an overpass with their automatic weapons was impressive. However, what meant more to him was the surplus of beans. For about a week before the Russians drove Brown and the other Allied airmen to a Bailey bridge that spanned the Elbe, and thus the American lines, the airman who had spent years being hungry brought pails of bean soup to a German family that lived in Weinberge, “a little row of charming middle-class homes nestled on a wooded slope overlooking Luckenwalde.”277 At one time the facility held 45,000 men, in a space designed for less than a quarter of that number. Five thousand men died there, including thousands of Russian POWs killed by typhus, and were buried in unmarked mass graves.
By the time Brown and the men with him were feasting on hot white bread, Fathers Desnoyers and Boulanger were already back in Canada, as Carswell and John Harvie soon would be. Within a week, Ian MacDonald walked up the gangplank leading to the RMS Aquitania, still painted battleship grey; before heading across the Irish Sea, the ship berthed in Greenock, Scotland, where Stuart Kettles and most of the survivors of HMCS Athabaskan boarded the ship that had taken 400,000 men to war. Stan Darch walked up the gangplank of SS Ile de France on 8 June. A week later, RMS Scythia, which survived being hit by an aerial torpedo during the invasion of North Africa, steamed into Montreal’s harbour carrying most of the Oblates and Christian brothers; by then the last missing religieux, Father Pellerin, who after being liberated had been sent to Rome, where he met with Pope Pius XII, had made his way to London.
The Canadian government’s decision to repatriate the POWs as quickly as possible, and because they were scattered in different places and reached Britain in a piecemeal manner, meant that men from the same unit were not necessarily on the same ships that steamed into Halifax or Montreal, or the same trains arriving in Montreal from New York. Thus, their welcome back to Canada tended to be a low-key, personal affair. Almost certainly the exception to this occurred just after 8 a.m. on 29 May when the bulk of Athabaskan’s survivors walked out of Montreal’s Windsor Station to find that the band that had serenaded them as they stepped onto the platform was now playing in the street in front of a crowd of 3,000 cheering civilians. Though he welcomed the warmth of their sentiments, mindful of the loss of 120 shipmates and his ship, Stuart Kettles felt that the cheers were misplaced.
Poolton spent these weeks—during which the survivors of SS A.D. Huff, Edward Carter-Edwards and thousands of other Canadian POWs, arrived in Canada—in a hospital, which he had entered shortly after VE Day. He was so thin and sickly looking that his Uncle Bill did not recognize him at a party until he asked Poolton’s brother who his “friend” was. Weeks of being injected with liver did little but damage his extremely thin skin. The infection that affected his ears and throat caused days of delirium and could have killed him had doctors at the No. 19 Canadian General Hospital not turned to the new wonder drug, penicillin. By late July, he too was back in Canada.
On the journey north from Toronto, Poolton, like many other former Kriegies, rehearsed what he would say to his mother and wondered if he would simply smile or cry. To his surprise, his mother and siblings boarded the train at Moonbeam, the stop before Kapuskasing, so that they’d have a little private time before the train arrived in what everyone involved called “Kap,” where some 200 people were waiting under a huge sign that read “Welcome home, Jack.” Poolton found himself as if in a dream unable to say even hello and, more ominously, unable to say how he felt. Perhaps after years of dreaming of it, his first night home could only be a disappointment. An uninvited couple plied him with questions about being a POW, when all he wanted to do was sit at the kitchen table and thank his family for the parcels they’d sent him.
In 1945, nothing was known about what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder; indeed, the Red Cross went so far as to advise families not to talk about the war, and to rapidly change the subject if it came up. On Poolton’s second night home, his father, acting as he might have had the war never occurred, took his son to see the film Drums. The scenes of a Scottish regiment being destroyed in India’s North-West frontier left the survivor of Dieppe traumatized. Like Stan Darch and other Kriegies, he had had nightmares while being a prisoner, but now they came more often. “I’d had a few nightmares in the camps, but once I got home they became more common. I’d be back on the beaches of Dieppe and men would be dying and crying out around me. I’d scream out in the middle of the night and scare the hell out of my mother,” says Darch, who also remembers being wound up so tight that for about a year the sound of a roofer’s construction gun caused him to flatten himself by a building and the sight of an airplane doing stunts over his backyard caused him to dive to the ground in expectation of a strafing run.
Wracked by survivor’s guilt and separated by a gulf from the victorious soldiers now coming home, Poolton’s thoughts turned darker. The horrible memories of the battle he had been in, the humiliation of being shackled, the pain of the Hunger March combined now in a different way than they had in the POW camp, where, no matter how hungry, cold and lousy they were, the POW’s urge to survive was paramount. In the safety of northern Ontario, where his mother’s home cooking was before him three times a day, he started to consider suicide.
As Poolton struggled, reproaching himself for every promise he had made in Germany but now found himself unable to keep, les religieux fulfilled a promise they had made to themselves and the Virgin. On 15 August, after having spent a few weeks with their families, they gathered at the Oblate basilica at Cap-de-la-Madeleine, near Quebec City, for a mass of thanksgiving. As he had so often behind the barbed wire, Father Pâquet led the priests and brothers: “We come to say ‘Thank You,’ kind Mother, in the joy of our liberation and the profound happiness of our return. We thank you for having kept us alive when so many of our companions of exile and captivity have died, and by doing so, you have spared inexpressible sorrow to those we love.”278
Religion too helped Ian MacDonald, who met his first cousin on the ship that brought him home. Their fathers picked them up at the train station in Truro, Nova Scotia. As MacDonald walked into his kitchen in Lourdes, his mother said, “My prayers have brought him home,” recalls Rita MacDonald, Ian’s sister. He drank a bottle of milk, with cream floating on the top, afterward explaining to his mother that the only milk he had had since leaving home had been bluish and burned your stomach.
“When I came home, I had some nightmares and for a while the summer thunderstorms
brought back memories of air raids. But, as I had during the war when I’d had those scrapes with eternity in France and Germany, I had faith in my Maker, who had brought me home,” says MacDonald. Hours later, after catching up on the news of his family, he knelt beside the bed he had slept in the night before going to war and said his prayers with the same rosary the SS officer had insulted two years earlier.
Faith and the strong Jewish community in Montreal helped ease Harry Hurwitz’s way back to civilian life. Not long after walking into the family’s apartment in an area Mordecai Richler would later make famous, Hurwitz heard how every morning for five or six months his sister would go down the stairs as soon as the mail had been delivered to check for a letter from him. As his father looked on, his sister told of the arrival of the letter in which Harry informed his family that he was a prisoner in Germany. She ran to the synagogue where her father was praying. Although females were supposed to stay to one side, she approached her father anyway, and as the elder Hurwitz davened, she said, “Papa, Harry’s alive.” He finished his prayer, then took the letter to the rabbi, who announced that their prayers had been answered.
That night, his first back home, the prayers said before dinner, which Harry had said hundreds of times in a Jewish version of a messe blanche, dated back millennia and linked him to his bar mitz-vah when, in the eyes of the Jewish community, he became a man.
In the fall, MacDonald headed off to St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, to study first-year science (a year later he entered the pharmacy program), Hurwitz got a job with the Lionel company, makers of model trains, and Darch went to trade school to study to become a machinist. Poolton struggled, working first laying hardwood floors and roofing, and then in a paper mill. During the early fall, he pinned his hopes on a three-ton Ford pickup truck that friends persuaded him to buy so he could fulfill his promise of working for himself. By mid-fall, he had decided to enroll in a mechanics course sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Since wartime production restrictions had not yet been fully lifted, the truck did not arrive at the Ford dealership until January 1946. By then, Poolton was halfway through the course and “starting to get on with my life.”279
Still in a state of shock from what he’d been through in Buchenwald and on the Hunger March, Carter-Edwards cried when his mother and brother picked him up at the train station in downtown Hamilton and took him home to the low bungalow, a stone’s throw from the railway tracks that still run past the Dofasco plant, which during the war stamped out millions of armour plates used in ships, tanks and armoured personnel carriers. And he knows he cried when he saw his sick father. Much else of those early months home is still buried, save for the nightmares and the pain of being disbelieved.
The nightmares, Carter-Edwards recalls, were all so similar. There was a building made of red brick. It was filled with people standing almost shoulder to shoulder but, like on the Appellplatz at Buchenwald, there was enough room for them to collapse. “I didn’t see them on the ground, but I knew they were dead,” he says. At times the nightmares were of a woman in tattered clothes holding a baby. “It was obviously her child,” Carter-Edwards says. “And as I watched, its eyes would slowly close.” They were being gassed, and when the baby’s eyes closed, they were all dead. “I knew what the smoke from the crematorium would look and smell like.” For months he would escape by going on late-night walks on the streets of Hamilton with his mother.
His parents, and later Lois, whom he married in 1946, believed the stories of his experiences. But many others, including well-meaning friends, did not. “I’d tell people I’d been in Buchenwald. Some responded by saying I had a severe problem, that I’d mixed up being a POW and being in Buchenwald. They’d ask, ‘Are you Jewish?’ or ‘Do you have a number tattooed on your arm?’ They were right that I was in psychological trouble, but they were wrong that I’d made anything up”—Carter-Edwards’s tone as he says these last words registering the still-present pain of conversations he had with young men now long dead. What was more painful and, Carter-Edwards believes, more damaging were those who pretended to believe him but behind his back expressed their doubts. “My circle in Hamilton wasn’t large, and I soon heard what people were saying about me. Despite the pain and rage in me, the things people were saying kept my emotions frozen, and I kept silent.”
In the early 1950s, Carter-Edwards, who had returned to his job at Westinghouse, joined an amateur theatre troop. “I’d always liked plays, and I joined for fun. I had no idea that learning to become a character, learning his emotions, acting on stage and even singing would begin to free up my emotions,” he says. “I still could not remember much of what happened, but at least I no longer felt emotionally dead about those years. My wife’s warm family also helped, and gradually I began to feel normal again.”
Like so many others veterans of the war, for decades Carter-Edwards did not speak out about his experiences. “It was a strange phenomenon,” says MacDonald. “As we got on with our lives, none of us wanted to talk about our past. Even early on, when I was studying to be a pharmacist, I knew other men who had been in the air force, and we didn’t speak about our experiences. Later I even met men who I knew were POWs, but they didn’t know I had been one, and it wasn’t ever brought up.” In the late 1980s as the 50th anniversary of the end of the war approached, a renewed interest in the veterans and their experiences prompted many to break their silence. Carter-Edwards can date the recovery of his voice almost to the day.
In the early 1950s, the Canadian government recognized via a sentence on his service record and his disability pension that he had indeed been in Buchenwald. In late April 1988, Carter-Edwards received a letter from the International Tracing Service, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. The letter confirmed that, according to German records, Carter-Edwards was committed to Concentration Camp Buchenwald by the Paris office of the SS (the order, presumably, also committed the Allied airmen in Fresnes Prison to Buchenwald). The letter, the Red Cross emblem stamped on its upper-left-hand corner now faded, goes on to say that “prisoner number 78361 was treated several times in the infirmary of Concentration Camp Buchenwald in the period from 11th of September 1944 to 14th of October 1944 (diagnosis pneumonia BTS) and from 15 October 1944 to 9th of November 1944 (diagnosis, pneumonia BTS, grippe, bronchitis) [and] was transferred to Stalag [Luft III] Sagan on 28th November 1944.”280
EPILOGUE
Over the course of 40 bombing missions, Norman Reid’s training in astral navigation and map reading had served his crews well. On their 28th mission, the sum total of the triangles and lines he drew ensured that when they had to bail out of their Wellington bomber after being hit while bombing German positions north of Anzio, they were close enough to the Allied lines to walk to safety. These same skills ensured that they’d find the bridge at Turnu Severin and, later, allow him to radio his coordinates to Allied forces in Italy. In between, when judging whether to reveal himself to the four rough-looking men, knowing how to use a sextant and about sines and cosines was useless. In a strange and foreign land, peopled by figures that even then seemed to him as coming from a B-grade western, Reid relied on gut instincts. His escape from the maize field seemed the kind of story he’d read in Boy’s Own Annual.
At Dieppe, six hours of battle exhausted everything learned in two years of training, which included neither how to suborn guards with cigarettes nor the art of jumping from a moving train. The Fusiliers Mont-Royal who jumped from the trains destined for POW camps in Germany trusted that their mother tongue would ease their way through Occupied France. Neither the reading of civilians nor the intrepid confidence needed to reveal themselves to those who would have been handsomely paid to betray them was taught in the drill halls of Montreal or the training camps of Britain.
Ian MacDonald’s high school French helped, but, as Edward Carter-Edwards’s story shows, it alone doesn’t explain how an evader could survive for weeks on the run. Nor
does what the Air Ministry called Escape and Evasion training, which consisted mainly of being told how to put on a parachute and count to ten before pulling the rip cord, and of an explanation of the contents of the Escape and Evasion kit. Evading the Gestapo required the dauntlessness that, perhaps, only men still in or barely out of their teens can have. It also required a sixth sense, luck, and the imagination to see one’s self as a latter day Scarlet Pimpernel, the era’s James Bond, whom they knew from the film starring Raymond Massey.
Not even years of garrison duty in England could prepare men like Stan Darch—who in the moments before raising his arms in surrender experienced the exhilaration and terror of battle—for the sheer boredom of life in a POW camp. Coming to terms with the humiliation of being defeated, the degradation of being kept filthy, hunger and the enforced idleness vexed Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Merritt, who earned Victoria Cross before being captured at Dieppe, to the point that after being liberated he spat that being a POW “cannot be translated into virtue.”281 And yet, as shown by his own career, which included an escape attempt that earned him assignment to the forbidding Colditz Castle, being a POW—or better, surviving being a POW—required its own type of mettle. For men like John Grogan and Andrew Cox, that mettle included the sang-froid to swap over.
None of the members of the Escape Committee at Stalag Luft III could have known that the Great Escape would tie up some 70,000 men or that the Germans would murder 50 escapers in cold blood. But, like similar committees in other camps, they knew that escapes cost the Germans something and that trying to thwart them was also a drain on the Reich’s resources. Wally Floody and his comrades had no doubt that even had they never been used, the digging of tunnels and the making of compasses and other escape gear maintained morale, and thus acted like a thumb in the eye of the goons. Despite their shock and humiliation, the survivors of Dieppe did what they could to mock the Germans for shackling them and so reaffirmed their status as free men, something the German guards were not.
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