Survivor of the Long March

Those poor people in their ill-fitting wooden clogs, walking along that rough road out to their place of death. It made me feel how fortunate I was to be alive and still able to feel the sun on my face and hear the birds singing.

We eventually reached the village and arrived at the dentist’s house. My tooth was still hurting but my neck and back were hurting even more. The guard took us into the waiting room where some patients were sitting, and he stood us up against a wall to wait. A women popped her head round a door and called out ‘Der Nachste, bitte,’ – next, please, and the guard pushed us all in to the room ahead of those waiting. Nobody protested. A funny little man, who was as wide as he was tall, was standing by the dentist’s chair. The woman sat me down, stood in front of me and held both my ears. Strange thing to do, I thought. What was going on? The dentist came round the back and leaned over me.

I hardly had time to open my mouth before the dentist had his pliers inside and had yanked out the rotten tooth. No warning, no anaesthetic, nothing. I screamed. Goodness, the shock of it! I just flipped right out of the chair. When I had recovered enough to stand upright, the woman jammed a piece of lint into my mouth and I held it in place, as blood slowly seeped through onto my hand. I returned to stand by my two very nervous friends for a moment before the guard took me outside.

Poor Laurie and Sid were waiting there, saying to themselves, ‘How can I get out of here?’ and ‘There’s nothing wrong with my teeth.’ Truth be told, there was something wrong with everybody’s teeth. We all had problems as the years passed, with abscesses, gum disease and rotten teeth. No wonder with our poor diet. My teeth (the ones I had left) gradually fell out one by one in the months that followed my return home after the war. I treated myself to a nice pair of dentures. So the dentist did find some rotten teeth to take out. There were no screams coming from Laurie and Sid when it was their turn. They were lucky enough to be given an anaesthetic. My mouth was sore for a while after but I was glad to be rid of that tooth; I could eat properly once again.

Bacon and eggs. Fish and chips. Cheese on toast. What we wouldn’t have done to eat just one decent meal like that during our days as POWs. Not eating properly affected us all in different ways and I think it contributed to my erratic behaviour sometimes. My brain and my body were being starved to death. The Germans knew what they were doing when they restricted our food and made us work twelve hours day. Another form of torture. Take away a man’s freedom, his dignity and then take away his plate of food.

You do stupid things when you are deprived of the ordinary basic needs of life: sleep, warmth and food. It wasn’t just my temper which got me in to trouble. I was mad with hunger, as well as with the unfairness of it all, when I threw down the soup in the farmyard; when I spat at the guard, because of the injustice and cruelty towards those Jews. How else could I make a protest? But it was stupid as I only really punished myself in the end. And it was dangerous. I had not got this far to throw it all away, surely, in a moment of madness?

We knew things would never change and nobody else was going to help us (except the Red Cross), so it was up to us to look after ourselves, keep body and soul together as best as we could. Think of ourselves first, our pals next, family and loved ones after that. We were always talking about home and who we had left behind. Some of the chaps had wives and girlfriends but out of my four pals, I was the only one serious about a girl. This made me even more determined to survive.

Apart from coughs, colds and bouts of diarrhoea, we were lucky not to get seriously ill, even though we never had any medical care or checkups. I do remember, however, on one occasion, that we went out of the camp for some jabs, inoculation against something or other. A group of us were marched to one of the forts a distance away which looked like a pill box with a tower attached where mainly Polish prisoners were kept. We had a long walk down a slope leading underground and then along dark and damp corridors inside this sort of bunker. We lined up in a room and the doctor told us that we were going to receive an injection against TB to be given directly into the chest.

I remember when I awoke next morning I felt as though I had an elephant sitting on my chest. None of us felt like getting up, let alone going out to work. Jimmy was up early as usual and urged us to get moving. We knew the guards could get nasty if you didn’t follow orders.

One of the fellows stayed in bed one morning and a guard came in screaming ‘Raus, raus,’ – out, out, but he didn’t move. Then another guard came in and the two of them pulled him out of the bunk and made him get dressed and marched him outside. The chap was so furious he grabbed a spade, and holding it above his head, went over to one of the guards. Fortunately he saw sense and dropped it. He was lucky not to be put on a charge but was punished by the loss of his bread ration for a week.

It’s my opinion that Laurie, Sid, Heb and I owed a lot to Jimmy for the way he kept us going, and saw to it that we didn’t starve, both during our years in the camp and on The Long March. There we were surrounded by fields of vegetables, herds of cows and farmyards full of chickens, providing food for Germany’s dinner table. How unfair was that? OK, we managed to get a few spuds and mangel-wurzels but that was just cattle fodder.

It was Jimmy who went out on his own at night from time to time and came back with half a bucket of milk for us. I think he must have waited for a particularly moonlit night in order to see what he was doing and not get caught. He knew his way around the farm and where the cows were kept, and somehow he managed to sneak in a shed and coax some milk from them as they stood there. Perhaps the cows weren’t even aware of what was going on. We shared that milk among the five of us, enjoying the taste of the warm, frothy milk, a very different taste from the dried KLIM we got in the Red Cross parcels. Wonderful. I would like to say that we saved some for the other chaps but I’m sorry, when you’re as hungry as we were, you look after yourself, and there wasn’t that much to go around anyway.

Then there were the eggs, another of Jimmy’s ideas. We had quite a few over the years, I imagine, enough to share around the whole camp and even a few left for bartering with the locals we had contract with. I suppose it was the nearest thing we had to a cottage industry, our own Heimindustrie. Like everything else, this had to be done surreptitiously and carefully. I wouldn’t call it stealing exactly as, in a way, we earned those eggs because we put in the work planning it and training the chickens to lay them for us. Because of that, we knew exactly where they were, which made it a lot easier for collecting.

There were chickens running around everywhere, laying perfect organic, free-range eggs. It was a very big farm and there were stables, outhouses and three or four large barns, so the chickens had quite a choice of nesting sites. We weren’t free to wander around the farm, looking for likely nesting spots and then just put a few in our pockets and caps to take back home. When we weren’t working, we were behind wire fences. However, Jimmy proposed that we trained the chickens to lay eggs in places which would be easy and safe for us to collect. This might be somewhere near where we were working or we passed on our way back from work, or somewhere we could get to easily on a night time excursion through the wire.

One day Jimmy found a smooth, egg-shaped pebble which he thought would make a good fake egg. As a game-keeper, he must have done things like this with the grouse and pheasants in his care on the Highland estate. The plan was to place the pebble in a suitable location to encourage the hens to nest and lay their eggs there. A well-known trick, Jimmy said, as he told us how it worked. Once the hens got used to that place, they would keep returning to lay their eggs there. It worked and they started laying for us.

Somebody would go out every week or so to this secret nesting place and collect the eggs. After a while, we would try another spot and start again, somewhere else handy for us. Keep moving around, don’t stick to one place. Don’t get complacent and get caught. I don’t know if the farmer noticed any reduction in his egg production but we certainly felt the benefit of a bit more protein.

Another opportunity arose, or so we thought, to supplement our meagre rations. It was September and twenty of us had been lent out to another farm some distance away to do some work. We were taken there with two or three guards on horse-drawn carts. As we went along, we were looking at the scenery and talking about where we were going and what we might get for lunch. Food was always a popular subject. The guards weren’t taking any notice of us; they didn’t understand what we were saying as they never really learned any English. They were more interested in finishing the bread and boiled eggs they had brought with them.

We had travelled quite a long way and were slowing down as we neared our destination. One of our chaps said, ‘There’s an orchard over there. Looks like loads of smashing plums.’ We all turned to look and watched the rows of fruit trees pass by. If only we could get to those trees. Late in the afternoon, after work, we returned to our temporary billet, which was on the second floor of a farm building. The guards couldn’t lock us in so three of us decided to go out later when it was dark and try and find these splendid-looking plums. When things were quiet and we thought everybody was asleep, we sneaked downstairs and out, trying not to make the floorboards creak as we went.