Twenty Days in the Reich (5 page)
We came to the more or less immediate and unanimous conclusion, that unlike the pleasantly
secluded rest camp at Arnsberg, this place, if we were to take it as being our accommodation for the rest of the war, could be considerably improved upon. The number of bomb and blast-shattered buildings that we saw as we passed down the main roadway
en route
to the
Commandant
’s office, in no way served to undermine this first impression.
We need not have worried. We had not been standing outside the
Commandant
’s office more than half a minute before it became plain to us that, once more, we were far from in the right spot. We heard our guard mumbling something about Russians and Croats. From the amount of subsequent dashing in and out, coupled with excited chatter, we gathered that the prison facilities here were certainly not for the likes of us!
It did not occur to us right at that moment, but it soon became obvious that communications, in this part of the Reich, at any rate, must have become, virtually a thing of the past. How otherwise could those in Fredeberg have been so completely ignorant that Arnsberg, as a POW camp for Allied airmen, no longer existed? (The German wardress, we remembered, had been almost enthusiastic when she dwelt on the chances of our soon being among our comrades.) Similarly, how could the officials in Arnsberg (and there were enough of them) be so unaware that the camp at Werl was devoted to only Russian and Croat slave labour? As we were soon to see, the
term POW, as applied to these poor wretches, was merely an unpleasant fiction.
After a few moments hanging around, we were handed over to the care of a huge German corporal, who appeared to own, as his personal bodyguard, a particularly unwholesome and vicious-looking Alsatian dog. I must say, now, that the dog never made any attempt to molest any of us, but then at the same time, we took jolly good care not to give the beast even the semblance of a chance. Civilians, apparently, were subject to even less self discipline than dogs, for as we walked wearily down the main road again, on what we hoped was the last lap for today (it was now around 5 p.m. and we were in sore need of our tea, to say nothing of our dinner and breakfast), a big hulking villain in a blue serge suit came up to us. After hurling a torrent of abuse at nobody in particular, he kicked poor Jack very hard in the seat of his pants. Jack did the right thing in keeping his temper, and making no attempt at retaliation. He told us afterwards that he did not know how he did it. In a few seconds, the corporal had the situation in hand and the man had been sent about his business. I, for may part, was scared out of my wits that it was going to be my turn next!
Our new guard led us down a flight of stone steps into an underground prison that was simply seething with half-naked Russians. Some recognised our uniforms, and greeted us with
friendly smiles. There hardly seemed an inch of room in any of the cells that we passed, each of which was no bigger than the one at Fredeberg, and yet must have contained at least twenty of the poor devils. We had become a little inured to hardship in the past four days, but it came as a big relief when we were taken into the very end cell. As the iron door clanged behind us, it appeared that we stood a very good chance of having it to ourselves.
W
e were left alone for about half an hour, which gave us ample time to take stock of our new quarters. The cell was slightly longer and not quite so wide as the one we had left that morning (how much longer than a mere twelve hours ago it seemed). Practically the entire floor space apart from a narrow passage down the centre was occupied by four bunk beds, providing sleeping accommodation for no fewer than eight unfortunate prisoners. The window was much smaller and higher up, and whilst we could just about see out, at a stretch, it was nothing like as convenient as the one at Fredeberg, especially when it came to having a conversation with anybody outside. The iron bars were practically inaccessible from inside the cell, and there was thus little point in spending time in studying them to the extent we had done in our first prison.
An inspection of the beds revealed that only one of them boasted a straw mattress in addition to the hard wooden plank that formed the base. Jack,
who many times in the days to come proved his ability to sleep on anything, volunteered to sleep on the boards, and I pointed out to Arthur that with a bit of a squash two of us could share the straw bedding. We had more or less agreed upon this distribution, and resigned ourselves to the fact that we were, in any case, going to be infernally cold (there was a little iron fireplace but it was not connected to any chimney, and was quite patently a dead loss) when our corporal guard, still accompanied by his faithful hound, reappeared.
‘
Ein Man
’ he barked with a quick gesture of impatience (we soon decided that his bark was a good deal worse than his bite) and our sketchy knowledge of German brought us to the conclusion that one of us was required to go somewhere. The corporal didn’t give us any time to decide who should go, but at once grabbed Arthur and led him away. Jack and I were left to meditate as to what fate worse than death might be in store for the poor lad, and for us too, for that matter!
We did not have to worry very long, for corporal, dog and ‘
ein Man
’ were soon back. Arthur carried what looked quite promisingly like
essen
in the shape of a big white tureen full of a porridge-like mixture, and an enormous metal jug of black coffee. From the outer regions our guard, with Arthur’s help, quickly produced a small wooden table, a couple of stools and three
plates, mugs and spoons. I remarked to the others that there seemed to be every chance that we might be going to enjoy a hot sit-down meal for the first time for nearly five days. Whilst not exactly desirous of mixing the subject with that of food, we realised the necessity of catching our man whilst we had him, and tried him with the single word ‘latrine’. He brought us in a canister arrangement not unlike an English milk churn. It was superior to the Fredeberg effort in that it did have a heavy lid to it. Encouraged, we pointed to ‘
ein
mattress’ and indicated that two more would be useful, but in reply the man uttered the single word ‘
essen
’, and dog at heels, departed.
‘Maybe he’ll fix it after tea,’ I said hopefully, ‘come on let’s pile in!’
And so we ‘piled in’. The contents of the tureen seemed to be barley, and whilst it was sweetened with what would almost surely be saccharin, the taste was rather sickly. Moreover, by this time, the food was nearly cold. The hot coffee was quite welcome, and served to warm us up a bit, but there was a terrific quantity. When we had each drank two cups, there was enough left in the jug to provide drink ‘for half the
Luftwaffe
’!
‘If we had a razor,’ said Jack facetiously, ‘we could shave in this – if we had a shaving brush!’
We had barely finished eating when the corporal returned, once more with his bellowed demand for ‘
ein Man
’. It seemed that he wanted Arthur to wash up, under a tap just outside the door. In fact,
whenever he called for ‘
ein Man
’ afterwards, it was Arthur who was the one required. I think this must have been because he knew Jack and I were officers, and in the
Luftwaffe
they seemed to make a very big social distinction between their commissioned and other ranks.
Anyway, Arthur was left to wash up, and Jack and I were led away out of the prison, and down into another 100 yards away This, again, was packed with with poor hot, unhappy-looking Russians. Our guard gave an order that sent two of them away to return with two straw mattresses and three dirty threadbare blankets. It was by no means without compunction that we realised that it was necessary to rob these unfortunate slaves in order to secure our bedding. However, we reflected, that even if we had wanted to, it would not have been very wise to have refused.
We carted the stuff back to our cell, Arthur brought in the clean eating utensils, and we were left to settle down for the night. It was growing dusk, and appreciably colder. It was obvious that after the nights in the almost too hot cell back at Fredeberg, we were going to experience uncommon difficulty in securing some measure of warmth for our long-suffering bodies. We had yet to experience to the full, the very great difference in the day- and night-time temperatures on the continent, especially during a prolonged spell of fine weather such as this. If we had known what we knew afterwards about German climatic
conditions, I suppose we should have been even more apprehensive.
However, we settled down. Jack was soon snoring peacefully, but both Arthur and I are prepared to swear that we were so cold that we never slept a wink! We must have dozed off a little, I suppose, or otherwise the night would have seemed longer than it did, but in any event it appeared plenty long enough. It was a big relief when dawn, at last, showed its first grey threads through the tiny window. Not that there was anything for us to do then, or any method of getting warm, for there was not even the business of stoking the fire, that we had had to attend to before.
It was a different guard that looked in on us at what seemed to be around 8 a.m. that morning. (We could see a clock on a distant building, but the view of the figures seven up to eleven was blocked by an intervening chimney and so our telling of the time was subject to some limitations.) All he did was to stick his head around the door and withdraw. Our next visitors were three or four Russians, who came to see us for a few moments several times afterwards, but although we were naturally very curious, we never did find out how they got in. It is possible that when he was around outside, the guard merely hooked the padlock into the hasp in a manner that rendered it impossible to open the door from inside, although anyone could get in easily from without. The Russians, on
the other hand, may have got themselves fixed up with a master key – slaves though they undoubtedly were, they never struck us as being without brains. Any little things they could organise for their own benefit or to the discomfiture of their enemies, they always appeared to have well in hand.
I accepted from one of them the offer of a piece of raw potato, which I thought might assist in cleansing my teeth, about which I was beginning to get a little worried. We also got fixed up with an old razor, which bent and twisted though it was, provided all of us with more than one shave in the days to come. By then, though, I was long past caring about the uncouth appearance that my five days’ growth must have presented. One particularly friendly Russian who spoke a little English, then handed us a pack of German cards. We had just settled down to one of our old favourite games back in the Mess at home (modified somewhat because there were only thirty-two cards in the pack), when the door opened once more to admit several German officers – and Diffy.
Poor Diffy – I was the first to spot him, as I was sitting facing the door. I whispered excitedly to the others ‘an American!’
The Germans soon left him, and although he wasn’t able to tell us much then, it must have been a tremendous relief for him to hear once more friendly English-speaking voices. The poor chap had been beaten up to a terrible extent – his
left arm was in a sling, and his other one was bandaged, as were his nose, part of his face and the top of his head. He was obviously in far too bad a way to talk then, but we did learn that the damage had been done by civilians. We made him as comfortable as we could on one of the beds, using all three of the blankets to give him as much warmth as possible.
After that, we did not have a lot more enthusiasm for our cards. The American dozed, the time passing very slowly while we waited for him to wake up so that we might hear his story. At length he sat up, we introduced ourselves and he told us that his parents were of German extraction, so that he was blessed with a quite unpronounceable German-sounding name which boiled down very nicely to ‘Diffy’. He was a captain in the US Air Corps, the equivalent to our flight lieutenant, and had been the pilot of a P47, or Thunderbolt, attacking a target not very far from here. Funnily enough, like ourselves, he had not been forced to bale out by any action of the enemy. His single engine had apparently ‘packed up’ without any warning.
He had come down in what he thought was the important railway town of Soest about ten miles east of Werl, and had at once been set upon by civilians armed with sticks and spades. He had been kicked and harried down the entire length of one street. He had taken the whole beating without attempt at retaliation, which definitely was the
only thing to do if he wished to live to tell the tale. Eventually, he had been rescued by some soldiers, and had been taken to a doctor to be patched up in what looked to be an extraordinarily unskilful manner. Diffy thought that his nose was definitely broken, and his hand too, although he was not sure about that. To our minds there seemed little doubt that he ought to be in hospital.
When he had finished his story, the captain sank back wearily on to the bed and asked if we ever got anything to eat round these parts. This gave us the chance to tell him briefly of our own adventures to date, and to explain that the feeding over the past two days had been, to say the least, a little irregular.
It must have been around 3 p.m. before our boredom was relieved at last by the appearance of the Alsatian dog, followed by his lanky master. He seemed rather surprised to learn that we had not eaten, and this time he detailed me to go with Arthur to fetch the food. The meal was similar to that of the night before, with the addition of a hunk of black bread and margarine. Poor old Diffy, despite his obvious hunger, was not able to eat very much. We had our fill but there was still a good deal over, which the corporal, when he returned, handed over to the Russians. The eager greed with which these poor fellows ate up our remains told its own story of hunger and deprivation.
Shortly after this, we were all led out of the prison and taken up for an interview with the
Commandant
. We actually only saw an officer who
would be the equivalent of our English adjutant. The entire proceedings seemed to be a formality, because what questions he asked us, in broken English, were not answerable, and he gave us the impression that he did not care whether we answered them or not.
As soon as we got back to the cell, the corporal indicated that it was time for tea, thus proving to Diffy our statement about the irregularity of the meals, for it was only about an hour and a half since we had had dinner. To give this fellow his due, he did seem quite anxious to look after us. It was quite possible that he had issued instructions that we were to be fed during the morning, and that someone had just been careless. He also told us that at 2 a.m. the following day we would be leaving by train for Frankfurt.
The bread and margarine was washed down by a drink of actual tea, prepared by a Russian cook. We were very much surprised, because we had already formed the conclusion that nobody drank anything but coffee in the Fatherland. Whilst Arthur was fetching the tea, Jack and I had been busy collecting an issue of rations for the journey, these consisted of three loaves of bread, about half a pound of margarine and a similar quantity of cheese of the kind that comes in oblong slabs.
‘Must be going to be a long trip.’ I reflected, little guessing what truth lay behind my words.
About 6 p.m., we had a visitor in the form of a
Luftwaffe
pilot, who said in quite reasonable
English that he had heard we were here, and wanted to have a few words with us. He told us of how he had been a student at Oxford, and how the war, of which he was utterly tired, had interrupted his studies which he was anxious to resume as soon as possible. It was all very touching, and not without interest, but I personally felt convinced from the manner in which he popped in an occasional pert question (such as ‘How many were there in your crew?) that he had been sent along to see if we were at all inclined to talk if off our guard.
We took the chance, before he left, of asking if extra bedding could be provided for our American friend. When this had been duly done we finally settled down in the cold once more to snatch what sleep we could ere the bewitching hour of 2 a.m. arrived.
I think I must have slept more soundly that night because it didn’t seem anything like as far advanced as 2 a.m. when I awoke to find the room filled with about half a dozen
Luftwaffe
officers, one or two of whom spoke English. We gathered that there was a little celebration going on in their Mess, and that they would be very glad if we could join them for a drink and a chat – not, of course, on military matters! Well, we had been warned about this dodge, too, and after a brief discussion among ourselves, Jack and I said we would be pleased to go along. Arthur, not being an officer, didn’t think he ought and Diffy said he was by no means in a fit state to go.
We were led across part of the airfield towards what looked like flying control. We noticed that an armed guard followed at a respectable distance – they were not taking any chances! The Mess proved to be a cosy little room, below ground level. We were given seats, and Cognac and cigars were laid on. It was patent that no effort was spared to make us become aware of what good fellows they thought we were.