Survivor of the Long March

Kartoffelsalat – potato salad or Kartoffelmehl – potato flour for making dumplings.

We always made the clamps right again so you couldn’t see that they had been disturbed. One night Sid and I decided to go out. I remembered this because I was the one who got caught. I had just gone through the hole in the wire and Sid was passing me one of the baskets when we heard the sound of the officer’s door opening. Sid grabbed back the basket and together with the other one already in his hand made a run for it back to the house. Unfortunately it was a moonlit night so the guard who had gone outside found me standing a few feet from the fence. He was this little fellow who always carried a revolver and we used to joke that it was bigger than he was. He was obviously proud to be boss tonight. I had a bit of German so I could understand what he said.

‘Was macsht du hier?’ – what are you doing here?

I replied ‘Spazierengehen,’ – walking.

He shook his head and said, ‘Verboten’ – forbidden. ‘Nachts nicht’ – not at night. He paused and thought for a bit. ‘Kein Fu?ball’ – no football. ‘Fur zwei Wochen’ – two weeks.

That was a pity. What happened was that some of the guards turned a blind eye to us playing a bit of football in the yard, usually in exchange for a packet of twenty Players from our Red Cross parcels when they eventually arrived. It was good to let off steam like this and also good for morale. So we had to do without football for a while and decided to give the midnight excursions a miss for a bit.

I think it was Jimmy found them and told us about some more potatoes. He came across a huge iron drum in a field where local farm workers had been baking potatoes. When he looked inside among the ashes at the bottom he found some left, charred skins, dirt and all. What were they doing there? Some German and Polish farmers used to give the horses some of the waste potatoes if they were short of normal feed. Times were hard for everybody. I hadn’t heard of that in this country and I handled horses at home. When we got the chance, and there were no guards checking up, some of us would sneak out with a bucket or bowl, (we could use our caps and pockets too) and fill them up and bring them back. We didn’t mind a bit of dirt on our baked potatoes.

None of us liked working for the Germans and helping them in their war effort. Instead of growing crops for the enemy we should have been fighting them and trying to defend our country. Your duty as a prisoner of war is to stop the enemy from getting on with their work as much as you can. So we tried to keep up a spirit of resistance by continuing with small acts of sabotage. While we were picking potatoes for example, and the guard wasn’t watching, for every one we picked we trod one into the ground. Seems silly and insignificant now but it meant something to us at the time. Less a victim, more in control.

Another opportunity arose to disrupt our work that seemed safe from repercussions but might be effective; this one was to do with cabbages. Germans were very fond of their sauerkraut and it was an important part of their diet, so keeping a continuous supply of the white cabbages they needed was important to them. We used to work for hours on end in these enormous fields, row upon row of the beastly things. It was back-breaking and exhausting work. We were bending down pulling cabbages out of the hard ground with one hand and with the other, slicing off the bottom with a curved knife. The outer leaves would just fall off the bottom of the cabbage, leaving us with the white centre. These were thrown into nearby baskets and when they were filled, we carried them to the side of the fields and emptied them into the waiting carts. The farm workers or some of our men drove them off to the railway station.

Later on that day or the next, we would march down to the railway sidings just outside Freystadt where wagons were waiting for the cabbages to be loaded so that they could go off to the processing factories like the potatoes. We unloaded them by hand into the covered wagons. When they were full, railway officials would come along and lock them up. The wagons sometimes stayed there overnight before leaving on their long journeys to their destinations all over the country. We hung around knowing this, and when there was nobody about, some of us would sneak onto the tracks again and walk along the wagons looking for holes and gaps in the wooden sides. When we found one, we undid our flies and aiming very carefully, peed through it onto the cabbages inside. With any luck you could get one big jet in which would spray everything inside.

I like to think about the damage we did; that we must have spoilt loads of cabbages which travelled on their long hot journeys to the storage depots and then on to factories for processing. Let them rot. There was a simple satisfaction in sabotaging the sauerkraut. That sort of act of defiance felt good at the time but sadly it was short- lived.

Feelings of helplessness were never far away. We felt this most at times when we witnessed things completely beyond our understanding and our control. You never felt sorry for yourself after the terrible things you saw.

It was probably a few years later in the war that this happened, when we started to hear more about what was happening to the Jews, the political prisoners and minority groups persecuted by the Germans. We knew there was a concentration camp not far away at Stutthof. I saw something terrible happen and I want you to know about it.

I was in a party of about twenty men and we had been sent again to load cabbages at the railway station. As we were working, another train pulling a load of cattle trucks, like the ones we had travelled in, drew up on the opposite line. A large number of German guards appeared and started unbolting and sliding back the doors. I remembered what it felt like inside, hearing that sound, not knowing what was going on and what you would find when you finally got out.

The trucks were packed with people: men, women and children. They were being pulled out by guards and pushed along the tracks. One guard got impatient and grabbed hold of one woman and started yanking her out. She had a little baby in her arms and he snatched it from her. The baby started crying and he threw it onto the ground and started kicking it like a football along the track. The woman screamed and got down and rushed towards her baby bending down to pick it up. The guard shot her in the back of her head. Just one bullet did it. And that tiny baby was just lying there, no longer crying.

Imagine how that made me feel. What could I do? Absolutely nothing. I could only stand and watch. It was frightening. The violence. There was no reason for it. They were wicked. And I felt such anger and hatred. Hatred towards every German in the land.

* * *

There was no time that we prisoners didn’t think or talk about food. I used to say, ‘When I was in civvy street I couldn’t stand mutton stew or tapioca but God give me a bucket of it now.’ Were we able to complain about it to anybody? What do you think?

Every once in a while German officers visited from headquarters. They must have been quite high-ranking from the look of them, in their long black leather coats, with a cane in their hand which they kept click clacking on their coats as if to say, ‘We’re in charge. Watch your step. We’ve got you here.’ They would come and see us working on the farm or visit our billet to check the building and have a look round. I expect they reported back how efficiently run everything was and how well looked after the inmates were. They spoke reasonable English and were able to talk to us or rather address us.

‘Is there anything you men want?’ they asked.

‘Yes, we want more food,’ we said.

‘Grass is good enough for you people,’ they replied.

One of our chaps called Bill (I remember his name because I found out that he lived across the park from me in Barking) had been collecting fleas in a matchbox. Funny what some men do to amuse themselves when they haven’t got much entertainment. I suppose he didn’t want to waste them once he’d spent all that time picking them off himself. Thought they might come in handy or maybe he was keeping them as pets for a bit of company. I know how important that little mouse was to me when he visited me in my prison cell during my spell in solitary confinement.

As the officers were leaving, Bill somehow managed to sneak up behind them and empty the contents of the matchbox onto the collar and back of their coats. We had a laugh later on, thinking about those officers sitting in their fancy car scratching themselves all the way back to their HQ. And then possibly spreading them to the other officers and then so on through the ranks and right across the whole German Army.

You got used to them. Fleas that is, not the Germans. Never got used to the Germans and what they were capable of doing. But fleas on your body and in your clothes, you had to accept them. Even if you managed get rid of them you would catch more from somebody else soon enough. So you were always scratching and searching