The countryside we drove through didn’t look that different from Northern France except for the sheer scale of it: immense stretches of open empty land with town and hamlets much further apart. There were fields lying fallow, others planted with row upon row of crops as far as the eye could see, broken up by the occasional wooded area of conifers and derelict farm buildings. We were driving in a region known as Kreis Rosenberg and we passed near a town called Freystadt.
We finally arrived at a rundown farmhouse. A rough-looking man came out and talked to the driver who hitched the reins to a post and got down, followed by the two guards. In a mixture of German and Polish from the sound of it, the guards exchanged words with the farmer who then came over to take a look at us. He returned to the guards and as he talked started pointing to various buildings around. We got down from the cart and, with a rifle nudging us in the back, walked towards the farmhouse.
I thought for a moment that we were going inside to meet the farmer’s wife and have a drink, perhaps. Instead the farmer took us round the back to a large wooden building and pointed to the door at one end. The guard shouted, ‘Hinein,’ – go inside. Oh God what on earth was going on? ‘Hier schlafen,’ – sleep here, said the farmer. It was a cowshed. Welcome to our new home. From cattle truck to cattle shed.
It was dark and very smelly inside. Much worse than the stables behind Grandma’s house which I used to clean out for my brothers, Alf and Reg. The shed was divided in two by a wall which came to about six inches from the roof. There was a herd of twenty-five to thirty cows one end and fourteen men at the other. Wooden boards had been put down on the floor, which was better than the cobbles the animals had next door. You could hear their hooves all the time as they moved about. The straw in their stalls didn’t seem to dampen the sound much. There were seven bunk beds crammed in, barely room to move between them. There were a few thick glass bricks high up but hardly any light came through the dirt and grime on them.
We found out later how dark it really was and stifling too, when the double doors were shut and the bar put across outside to lock us in at night. Middle of summer, of course, and no ventilation and the cows next door giving off a terrific heat as well as. So one night, when everybody was asleep, we knocked out a couple of the glass bricks to get in some fresh air. Boy, did you need fresh air with that lot next door.
I managed to get a top bunk which was lucky as I knew about rats on farms and didn’t want to give any of those big buggers a chance to nibble my toes as my feet hung over the end of my bed. Fortunately the rats stayed away preferring the livestock next door. If you opened the doors to the cowshed and clapped your hands, dozens of rats, some the size of a cat, mothers and little babies, shot out from under the straw from every corner. The disadvantage of being on the top was that you were nearer the roof and could see the mice running along the gap at the top of the wall. Mice didn’t bother me.
Although the stench from the cows was horrible, we were grateful later on in winter for the heat generated by the animals next door. To be honest you were so exhausted all the time that nothing much disturbed you once your head hit the straw mattress. There was a wood burning stove which was out of action most of the time we were there, so it was no use for heating the shed. We didn’t have any fuel anyway except what we could find and bring back in dry weather.
We managed, very occasionally, to have a hot (well, warm) bath, taking water from the outside tap in a bucket and heating it up on the stove if we’d managed to get it going. The farmer’s wife had left us an old tin bath which was hanging on a nail outside. It was a real palaver but worth it, even for a scoop or two of dirty, grey lukewarm water over you. I used to share the water with Tommy Harrington, one of the fellows I made friends with, and we scrubbed each other’s backs. Goodness, what dirt that came off us! It wasn’t surprising that we got filthy dirty, considering where we were sent to work. I suppose the sound of blasting in the distance should have given us a clue as to what was going on nearby and why we’d been sent there.
As soon as we had seen our quarters, we were led out of the farm and marched about 5km away. The next shock after our sleeping quarters was that we were not going to work on the farm as we thought but going to a stone quarry. We were sent to work immediately. No training was needed, no special equipment just a hammer and a pair of strong hands for breaking up the rocks.
Once the blasters had done their job with the dynamite on the rock face, we were called in to break up the boulders into pieces and load the stones into railway trucks, which then went off to be used in construction work and repairing roads and railways. We worked in pairs smashing the rocks up with 7lb sledgehammers and then when we had a load, we scooped them up into these large, heavy, wooden boxes. They had handles at each end so we had to carry them together down a slope to the railway trucks which were waiting on the tracks below.
Each truck was numbered with a white card which had 10T, 15T, 20T or whatever tonnage it was, printed on it, and we had to tip the stones out in to the trucks. We kept on doing this for hours on end, every muscle hurting, our hands cracked and bleeding – no shovels or gloves for this work. Was this what I was going to be doing for the rest of the war, however long that might be? Twelve hours a day, seven days a week. Was this better than being shot in the head? Over and done with quickly. No more fear, pain, suffering or humiliation like this.
Every day was much the same: up at 6am exhausted, wash under the tap, coffee, walk to quarry, work, lunch, more work until 6 or 7pm, walk back, supper, go to bed exhausted. The guards changed about four times during the day and we had about half an hour’s break for lunch. We were lucky if we got a piece of bread as normally it was just a serving of soup brought up by cart in a milk churn from the farm. It was always rubbish anyway.
In the evening we got our bread, which was supplied by the Germans, and a bit of margarine or sometimes, instead, a piece of leberwurst, liver sausage. We got a little bit more of that because I think it was cheap as the locals liked this sort of sausage. Every little bit extra helped to fill us up but, of course, it was never enough. We knew what the rations should have been: 500gms of bread and piece of margarine about the size of a match box, but we never had that.
We only got to hear about other POWs and how they were being treated later on when we moved about more and mixed with chaps from other camps further away. At least we weren’t down the mines which were really dangerous places to be. Filthy air, gas explosions and tunnel collapses. We were stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with no news coming our way and we had no idea what was happening in the war. All we knew was our own little world; a world of slavery to our German masters. We were doing their dirty work and helping them instead of helping our own men and our own country. That was a dreadful feeling. We couldn’t take pride in anything we were doing. We were the lowest of the low.
We talked a lot about this among ourselves and someone came up with the idea of a bit of sabotage. To do something to make us feel less like victims. Something which would hinder the work but not get us into trouble. Nothing worth getting shot for. Most of the time we only had a couple of guards hanging around while we were working and they weren’t watching us all the time. They got bored and went off for a smoke or eat the bread and cheese they had brought with them. They were meant to supervise what we did and check the loading of the trucks but they didn’t.