Hitler's British Slaves (35 page)

We walked about 15 miles to the Stalag. It was solid, you couldn’t move for blokes. You went in these big huts and there were thousands of us. It was cold and damp, there was snow everywhere. I remember distinctly, there was a little jazz band in the corner playing the ‘Okey Cokey’. They were dancing, it was ‘ the end of the war is nearly in sight’, and all that bollocks. The Red Cross hut was being emptied so we all dived out to get parcels.
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His mate Ken Wilats remembered: ‘It was frightful, bulging at the seams. Absolutely terrible. We found a space in the washroom and kipped down in there. There was no proper accommodation.’
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As thousands of prisoners tried to get parcels Barber and Wilats decided to try to get extra parcels from another source, the French Red Cross parcel store:

I said to him ‘I’ve got a French overcoat and you’ve got a French hat. And you speak French’ – because he was a chef. I said ‘Let’s go down there, and when they’re throwing them out we’ll get one.’ I was stupid, I told him to shout out in French. They’re throwing them out and everyone was grabbing them, pulling them off each other. All of a sudden I got this big box and I shouted out ‘Ken, I’ve got one!’ I realised what I’d done and I had all these Frenchmen around me, but they were way too slow – I’d gone. I knocked them out of the way. I didn’t get a kicking that time, they weren’t expecting a Brit to be there. Ken said to me afterwards ‘What a prat! Why didn’t you keep your mouth shut?’ Well, I wanted to let him know not to try to catch one. Well he was a nice bloke, he couldn’t have caught a cold.
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Similar scenes were played out in POW camps throughout the region. Rumours flew that the moment for departure had come, only to become outdated as soon as a new one began to do the rounds. Announcements were made by the guards, only to be cancelled or superseded by new instructions. The camps were awash with conflicting reports of departure times. Responding to the confusion some men simply lay down and rested, conserving their energy for the moment it would finally be needed. Others worked frantically – mending clothes, repairing boots, swapping their possessions for food, cooking meat and preparing bundles of firewood. Others squatted on the floor hammering at empty food tins, shaping them into small stoves that could be carried in their haversacks. Some fashioned small sledges and trailers upon which to carry their meagre possessions. A few men took sacks of straw with them, in which to put their legs at night, hoping the straw would insulate them from the cold. Many among the prisoners began sorting through the things they’d acquired over years of captivity, deciding what to take and what had to be left behind. Books that had been read, loaned out, reread and carefully hoarded were burnt on fires. Spare clothes were swapped for food and cigarettes were exchanged for boots. Men without haversacks improvised by sewing up the bottoms of spare shirts, stuffing them full of food and tying the arms around their necks. Others bundled up tins of food inside blankets and swung them over their shoulders. Some were left in tears as they abandoned things that had meant so much to them, others packaged together every last item and attempted to carry them away to safety. For many their lives were changing
just as drastically as they had on the day they had been captured. Once more they were heading out into the chaos of the unknown and, unlike during the long years of captivity, their futures were no longer mapped out for them.

Then after hours or days of waiting came the familiar shout of ‘
Raus
’ and they began their long march towards home. Gordon Barber was among the expectant prisoners at Marienburg, who started their journey by walking across an ominously frozen river:

We just wanted to get home. We were fit – well we were when we started. We started on about 3 January and finished on 12 April. That’s a long time walking. We stayed in barns, in stations – there were thousands of us. It was cold, it was snowing, and they had to give us stops at the side of the road every four or five hours. Food was non existent, ’cause the Germans were fleeing as well.
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Thousands of the men in the columns that snaked through the snow were the very same men who had walked out of France back in the summer of 1940. Then their enemy had been the scorching sun and their desperate thirst. Now it was cold and hunger that threatened them. Back in 1940 they had been relatively fit, now many of the marchers had been existing on watery stews for many months. However, the marchers of 1945 had one advantage. Five years earlier they were marching into the unknown – at least now they knew they were heading home. All knew well the extremes of the Polish weather, indeed for many this was their fifth winter of captivity. Most had shovelled the deep snow from blocked roads or chipped ice from frozen railway lines. Thousands among them had spent the early part of winter in the fields, pulling up sugar beet from the frosty ground, their fingers numb
with cold, their backs aching from stooping for hours on end. Some had stood on the frozen rivers and sawed blocks of ice, others had walked the beaches along the Baltic building paths as the icy wind bit through their clothing. Yet this was something new. Now the cold was relentless. There were no barracks to return to at night. No stoves to huddle around and no blankets to wrap around their thin bodies as they settled into their bunks for the night. Now there was just cold – for day upon day, week after week. As the prisoners marched their whole world was reduced to a vision of whiteness. They trudged along roads that seemed to have no end, the horizon disappearing between the snowy ground and the white of the sky. Their vision was limited to the whiteness to either side of the column or the hunched brown figures shuffling along in front of them.

Often alongside columns of civilians also fleeing from the Russians, the POWs marched, and marched, and marched. Some among the prisoners witnessed chilling scenes that served to remind them just how fragile was their hold on life. Those who marched out of the work camps of Auschwitz walked through hundreds of frozen corpses of the inmates of the concentration camp. Most had died from starvation and exhaustion, but there were plenty who had clearly been executed. The dirty grey sky above them offered no comfort and a bitterly cold wind bit through their thin uniforms, burning their skin and bringing tears to their eyes. They hunched their shoulders, dug their hands deep into their pockets and lowered their heads to avoid the icy blasts. Such were the extremes of temperature that men found their eyelids freezing together, leaving them to rub their faces vigorously to restore their sight. Nothing in life could have prepared them for this – not the terror of the battlefield nor the unrelenting work camps. Even those wearing layer upon layer of clothing
became numb with cold. It started with the extremities. Their feet were the first things to feel the strain. Thousands were shod in worn out boots or clogs, with laces made from the string that had once held together their Red Cross parcels. Some had slip-on clogs that meant they could hardly lift their feet from the icy roads. There were men without socks whose feet were wrapped in rags. Others were hit by the opposite problem. Upon evacuation stores of clothing had been opened and some men began the journey in brand new British army boots. The stiff leather was too much for their feet, blistering the skin and cutting into their ankles. Worse still, the metal studs on the soles were treacherous on the ice of the frozen roads, leaving the men slipping and sliding as they tried to march.

Then the icy cold struck their hands. Fingertips became numb as their gloves fought to preserve circulation. For many their gloves were threadbare, worn out during years of tilling the soil or wielding pick axes. Others had simply cut out pocket linings from inside their greatcoats and fashioned basic mittens. To prevent frostbite they wrapped their faces in scarves and towels, using their hats to hold the thin coverings in place. Collars were turned up and hands forced deep into pockets. Thin blankets were wrapped around their shoulders and heads like stinking grey shawls, with only their eyes shining from the shadows. They were eyes that did not shine for long.

Yet for all their precautions, still they froze. Some men recorded icicles hanging from their bearded chins and one man later wrote:

Agony is almost unbearable now. We marched until 2 a.m. They told us it was 20 below freezing, and made us wait for two hours on the road. We froze to the marrow, not used to this at all. When almost asleep on our feet, were taken into a large barn. Shivered all through the rest of the night, … no interest in anything at all.
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Thousands of men crowded into barns where they desperately attempted to seek shelter from the elements, snuggling down into the straw, ignoring the insects that bit them and the rats that scurried among them. Men raced to reach the upper levels of the barn, knowing that those on the ground floor might be soaked during the night since those upstairs, afraid of losing their sleeping place, would simply urinate down through the floor. When no more space was left others were left outside in the snow to spend the nights in agony. Such was the cold that some men elected to sleep in dung piles in order to keep warm. Even inside farm buildings men awoke to find frost on their clothing. Those who had removed their boots to rest their aching feet found the leather frozen stiff. Unable to put them on they simply bound their feet in rags and continued on their journey, hoping their boots would defrost before frostbite struck their feet and toes.

As the days passed even the fittest among them grew exhausted. Some nights were spent indoors, others were passed in the open with the prisoners remaining on their feet for fear of freezing to death on the ground. As frostbite hit the pain turned to agony and as they lost circulation in their extremities the real dangers set in. The unfortunate men began to lose all feeling in their toes, fingers and ears and then they turned black. Eventually they faced the inevitable conclusion. Joseph Healey, captured in Norway in 1940 was one of the victims. After 14 days marching without medical treatment his big toe was finally lost.

With the increasingly weak men struggling to move through the snow they abandoned all surplus weight from
their packs in the knowledge that survival was all that mattered. Musical instruments and books were the first to go, along with treasured possessions and souvenirs constructed or collected during captivity. And so it continued until all they carried in their haversacks were the remains of their Red Cross parcels. Only a few were able to retain mementoes of their time in captivity. All thoughts of the past were obliterated from their memories – food, heat and rest were the only things that mattered now. When they asked the guards how much further they received no definite answer, maybe a shrug of the shoulders or an uncertain, unknown destination always a few more kilometres away.

Their stomachs tormented by hunger, the miserable prisoners ate whatever was available and cooked it by burning any fuel they could find. Books and bibles, diaries and letters from home, lovingly preserved for years, were consumed by the flames of fires lit in desperate attempts to banish the cold. Some days there were issues of food, sometimes a little bread, maybe a weak unidentifiable stew or soup, maybe just a scoop of sauerkraut. If they thought they had been hungry in the camps they realised they had never known real hunger until now. Some men received tinned meat that resembled dog food, which they ate with the fervour of the starving. Others considered themselves blessed to receive soup powder and dehydrated meat.

Such rations may have seemed a godsend but it was seldom enough to stave off starvation. Some cursed as they marched past SS columns moving towards the eastern front openly carrying cartloads of stolen Red Cross parcels. Others who had been forbidden to empty the parcel stores within their camps watched in desperate envy as their guards devoured their contents. In desperation many of those shuffling through the snow decided to risk the wrath of their guards and scour the
towns and villages for food. Even when they were given hot drinks by sympathetic civilians their guards often knocked them out of their hands. Finding grain husks and molasses, one group of men bribed a farmer’s wife to bake the concoction for them – anything to stave off the pangs of hunger. Other men jumped into pigsties and kicked the animals away in order to reach the food that had been left for them. Some searched farmhouses, regardless of who was at home:

I sneaked off a couple of times and went into farmhouses. I went into a shop, but it didn’t sell anything edible. In one house I found a big bowl of stuff that looked edible. I thought ‘I’ll have that’. When we started eating someone said ‘This is chicken feed, you prat!’ We threw it away, it was bloody horrible. Anything you could see that was edible, you’d eat. I remember going into a house and a kid was sitting there eating some food. That went – we had that. That was the worst thing I’d done.
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With just an average of little over six hundred calories a day being consumed it was little wonder many among them fell victim to exhaustion. Gordon Barber and his team of ‘muckers’ became aware of the problem early on in the march:

I remember this night, the snow was really coming down and the five of us were sitting there. Then we got up to go on. We’d not got very far when we looked round and I said ‘Where’s Ken?’ Stevie said ‘He was getting ever so tired. But from what I remember he was leaning against a tree.’ We were all getting tired. So I gave Lofty the haversack and told him to take it easy. Then me and Stevie went back to find him. He was by the tree. We got hold of him, he was fucking cold. His teeth were chattering. I said ‘You’ll die if you stop there. You won’t be tired anymore.’ So we put our arms round his shoulders and off we went and caught the others up. We were lucky that night we found a barn to sleep in. I said ‘Put Ken between us, he’s really cold. I think he’s got something wrong with him.’ The next morning it was sunny. I went out and found a horsedrawn wagon the Germans were carrying the sick on. Ken was just frozen so we got him on this wagon and they went. I never saw him again until we got home. That was one of the worst things that happened.
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