Survivor of the Long March

paper across the table to me along with a pen. I was trembling and my palms were sweating. What was this? Didn’t I get the chance to speak? I bent down to pick the pen up and I looked at the paper. Of course it was all in German. No idea what it said. So I put the pen down and pushed the piece of paper back to him.

‘Ich verstehe nicht.’ – I don’t understand, I said.

‘Egal, ‘ – doesn’t matter, was the reply and he pushed the paper back to me.

I pushed it away again. ‘Ich verstehe nicht.’ As scared as I was, I was not going to sign that piece of paper. I could have been signing my death warrant for all I knew. So I didn’t sign and left it on the table and stood to attention.

The officers looked at each other and started talking; they consulted Red Cross Lady who nodded and left the room. A moment later, she returned with a middle-aged chap in uniform who told me, in broken English, that he had been a prisoner of war in England at the end of the last war. So with his bit of English and my bit of German I learned that the charge of ‘Incitement to Mutiny’ had been dropped and changed to a lesser one of ‘Sabotage, wasting food and damaging army property’. I was so relieved that I nearly cried with relief. Although I was still frightened about what would happen next.

My guard was called back in and off we went again. Jan was still pulling me by my epaulette, taking the same way back. Across the squares, through the gates, on to the road to the station, on to a train, and so on, back to camp. It was dark when I got in and my pals were there, pleased to see me.

Jimmy patted me on the back and said something like, ‘A wee break like that does you the world o’ good.’ Sid gave me bit of bread and butter that he had kept back from supper. Laurie lit me up a cigarette and Heb said, ‘Good to see you in one piece.’

And that was it. I didn’t hear any more about it. It sort of fizzled out. I got away with it, or so I thought.

A week passed before I heard anything more; I really thought they had forgotten about it. Jan was still around on duty but he never came out on any job I was on. It was Friday after work and the guards had got us lined up outside. The Unteroffizier arrived and called out my name again. I stepped forward. He held two cards and handed me one typed in English and read out the other in German. I was to be taken to Stalag 20B to do ten days’ solitary confinement. And I was scared all over again.

I went to collect my things, my greatcoat and bundle. My pals rallied round. ‘Don’t worry, could have been worse,’ and collected what biscuits they had saved from their last Red Cross parcels. ‘You’ll be all right.’ I had three or four biscuits of my own and they added some more until I had about a dozen in the end, wrapped in a scrap of paper. A real feast. ‘Got to save ’em. Don’t know when you’ll eat again,’ they said to me.

Two guards escorted me this time, a similar route it seemed, except we were going to the main camp at Marienburg. You never knew where you were half the time. There were so many camps and forts which formed the overall Stalag 20B and there were prisoners coming and going out on work detachments all over the area. There were few signs or landmarks to get a sense of place. Any names I saw meant very little to me in relation to anywhere else.

I was standing on my own again in a train, the two guards sitting together in the middle. One took out a packet from inside his jacket, unwrapped it and started to eat. It looked to me as though he’d got a boiled egg and some bread and butter. Oh well, I thought, I’ll eat something too as I missed breakfast. I bent down and put my hand inside my kit bag and felt for the paper packet of biscuits and managed to draw one out.

‘Essen verboten!’ – no eating, the guard shouted and I jumped and nearly dropped my bit of food. He got back to eating and I put the biscuit in a pocket. It was going to get all smashed up which was a shame. It would just be crumbs by the time I got there. So I stood and watched the guard munching, and the empty countryside going by while thinking about my biscuits.

The main camp was in the middle of the town surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. I looked up at one of the watchtowers as we went through the main gates. We had the usual ritual of checking papers, opening and closing gates. The guards took me across a square, up some wooden steps into a building and down some dark and dismal corridors. No idea where I was or what was ahead. One of them opened a door, pushed me in and shut the door behind me.

There was an assortment of different furniture. A chair, made up of odd bits of wood nailed together, one of those folding card tables with a rather tatty green felt top and a wall cupboard, locked with a padlock. There was a single iron bed with a palliasse and three folded blankets on it. I prodded the straw mattress which rustled nicely and felt and smelt freshly filled. Not bad. I felt the blankets, and I gave them a sniff too. Quite clean and not too rough.

‘This isn’t too bad. I could stick this for ten days,’ I said to myself. Better settle in, so I took off my overcoat and laid it on the bed; put my bundle, which contained my bowl and spoon, toothbrush, piece of rag, which acted as a flannel, on the table and sat down and waited to see what would happen next.

10 Birthday Party

‘What the bloody hell have you been doing to land up here?’

A British Army officer stood in the doorway shouting at me. I jumped up and stood to attention. I did know that much, even though I hadn’t saluted anybody since being captured. I was too shocked to speak. I didn’t like the sound of this. Why was he shouting at me?

‘All right, Private, at ease. You can sit down,’ he said. ‘What’s been going on then to land up here?’ So I told him everything that had happened, leading up to that point.

‘Bloody stupid, eh? Could have got yourself shot.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. I didn’t need him to remind me.

‘You’re here now, still in one piece. Right. We’ll have to see what’s what, won’t we?’ He went over to the cupboard, undid the padlock, opened the door and took out a stethoscope.

What an idiot I was! Of course, he was the camp doctor come to check me over before I started my sentence. Then I knew that this was his cupboard, his table and his bed. If this was his room where was I going to be sleeping?

‘So, do you think you can do this?’ asked the doctor as he unravelled the stethoscope.

I wasn’t sure what he meant. My last medical had been on my call up. I was classified ‘A’ then, I was probably ‘Z’ now.

‘Take your shirt off, man. Do you think you can take the solitary?’

I started to undo the buttons of my tunic but my fingers didn’t seem to work properly and I fumbled with them. Do solitary? Was I fit enough? You can’t say no, can you? Can’t be a whinger. I was as fit as any man, I thought, who’d been in a POW camp for years, forced to work outside all year, come rain or shine, twelve hours a day, six days a week. I took a deep breath and said, ‘Yes. I can do it.’ I still didn’t know what was going to happen to me.

The doctor listened to my chest and did the same to my back. ‘Deep breaths. Cough. OK.’ He looked into my eyes and mouth and checked my pulse. He told me to put my shirt back on and he returned his stethoscope to the little cupboard. ‘Not in bad shape considering. You’re going to be on half rations, you know. Think you can make it?’ I nodded. Half of nothing much, thinking of what we normally got.

‘Now you know talking isn’t allowed. Mustn’t speak, not to anyone. Not even the guards, all the time you’re in here. Or in the yard when you exercise or when you have a wash. Keep your mouth shut.’ His eyes caught sight of my bundle. ‘What’ve you got in there?’

‘Just the usual, sir. Washing things. Bowl and spoon.’ I opened it up to show him and he peered inside.

‘What’s that?’ The doctor pointed at my little pack of biscuits and started to fold back the paper to have a look. ‘Right, you got biscuits. You can’t take them in. Not allowed to take in any food. Didn’t they tell you?’

I didn’t think he wanted me to reply or to hear that nobody had told me anything. I continued standing in silence, watching him as he took out my precious biscuits and stacked them neatly in a pile on a shelf in his cupboard.

That’s a shame, I thought, they would have come in handy. No breakfast that day and only a meagre piece of bread and bit of sausage the previous night. I was dying for something to eat and drink. My heart sank when I