Mangel-wurzels. Huge, ugly blighters. They didn’t taste very nice but they were food and if we were out working and digging them up, we would pocket a few as we went along. We sneaked them into the front of our tunic tops but we couldn’t carry many as they bulged and that gave the game away. We took them back, sliced them up, put them on a stick and toasted them in the fire of the wood stove. That is if we were able to get the wretched thing going.
Once the load of logs had gone, which the local farmer supplied to our cooks, we had to do without unless we got some wood ourselves. Hell of a job keeping a fire going if the bits of the twigs and branches we brought back were not dry. The guards weren’t bothered what we did; they expected us to find our own fuel if we could. Always on the lookout, not just for food but for anything which might be useful to us. Later on the five of us were on a two months’ work detachment in a local forest. Plenty of wood there.
Of course, potatoes were always a favourite. We couldn’t get away from them anyway as they were a staple crop. Planting, growing, digging them up and storing them took up a lot of our time. And if we sneaked some back, so much the better although a handful each wasn’t much, particularly if you were going to share it with others. So going out on night-time raids for potatoes and other food was another way to supplement our diet. I suppose it was also a bit of an adventure and one-up on our German guards if we were successful.
We found a way of getting out of the camp at night. It all had to be planned carefully. The beauty of it was that we knew if there was anybody about because we could hear the guards’ big boots outside or making the floor boards creak if they were nosing around inside. They rarely were; they preferred staying snug inside their quarters. We waited until midnight or one o’clock in the morning when it was all quiet. We were always locked in at night which is why the guards thought we were all safely tucked up in bed. Our house had a set of double doors and the front ones had bolts, which weren’t always put across. The inner ones were just locked with a key. If we were lucky we only had one door to deal with and somebody would pick the lock and let out whoever was going out that night.
We decided that it was best if we went out in pairs for safety reasons although, come to think of it now, Jimmy did go off on his own midnight raids. So we sneaked out round the back of our building and through part of the wire fencing we had cut, enough for a man to get through. We folded it back, squeezed through and then folded it back again so nobody could see where the hole was. Favourite places we went to were the storage clamps to get potatoes, which were easy to find because we had built them.
There were four or five clamps in different parts of a field not too far away. What we did to build them was to dig down about 6" and clear an area about 8" x 12" then spread a layer of straw down followed by a layer of potatoes, then more straw and so on. We kept building it up into a big mound and then finally covered it all with earth. The potatoes could be stored for a long time like that. When they were ready to move we dismantled the clamp, digging out the potatoes with special forks with wide prongs, so we didn’t spike any and spoil them. We put the potatoes in large baskets which we had brought with us from the farm, carried them to the edge of the field and tipped them into the farm carts. Next day a crowd of us would be sent down to Freystadt railway station where we shovelled them into railway trucks. They then went to factories to make Kartoffelsalat – potato salad or Kartoffelmehl – potato flour for making dumplings.
We always made the clamps right again so you couldn’t see that they had been disturbed. One night Sid and I decided to go out. I remembered this because I was the one who got caught. I had just gone through the hole in the wire and Sid was passing me one of the baskets when we heard the sound of the officer’s door opening. Sid grabbed back the basket and together with the other one already in his hand made a run for it back to the house. Unfortunately it was a moonlit night so the guard who had gone outside found me standing a few feet from the fence. He was this little fellow who always carried a revolver and we used to joke that it was bigger than he was. He was obviously proud to be boss tonight. I had a bit of German so I could understand what he said.
‘Was macsht du hier?’ – what are you doing here?
I replied ‘Spazierengehen,’ – walking.
He shook his head and said, ‘Verboten’ – forbidden. ‘Nachts nicht’ – not at night. He paused and thought for a bit. ‘Kein Fußball’ – no football. ‘Für zwei Wochen’ – two weeks.
That was a pity. What happened was that some of the guards turned a blind eye to us playing a bit of football in the yard, usually in exchange for a packet of twenty Players from our Red Cross parcels when they eventually arrived. It was good to let off steam like this and also good for morale. So we had to do without football for a while and decided to give the midnight excursions a miss for a bit.
I think it was Jimmy found them and told us about some more potatoes. He came across a huge iron drum in a field where local farm workers had been baking potatoes. When he looked inside among the ashes at the bottom he found some left, charred skins, dirt and all. What were they doing there? Some German and Polish farmers used to give the horses some of the waste potatoes if they were short of normal feed. Times were hard for everybody. I hadn’t heard of that in this country and I handled horses at home. When we got the chance, and there were no guards checking up, some of us would sneak out with a bucket or bowl, (we could use our caps and pockets too) and fill them up and bring them back. We didn’t mind a bit of dirt on our baked potatoes.
None of us liked working for the Germans and helping them in their war effort. Instead of growing crops for the enemy we should have been fighting them and trying to defend our country. Your duty as a prisoner of war is to stop the enemy from getting on with their work as much as you can. So we tried to keep up a spirit of resistance by continuing with small acts of sabotage. While we were picking potatoes for example, and the guard wasn’t watching, for every one we picked we trod one into the ground. Seems silly and insignificant now but it meant something to us at the time. Less a victim, more in control.
Another opportunity arose to disrupt our work that seemed safe from repercussions but might be effective; this one was to do with cabbages. Germans were very fond of their sauerkraut and it was an important part of their diet, so keeping a continuous supply of the white cabbages they needed was important to them. We used to work for hours on end in these enormous fields, row upon row of the beastly things. It was back-breaking and exhausting work. We were bending down pulling cabbages out of the hard ground with one hand and with the other, slicing off the bottom with a curved knife. The outer leaves would just fall off the bottom of the cabbage, leaving us with the white centre. These were thrown into nearby baskets and when they were filled, we carried them to the side of the fields and emptied them into the waiting carts. The farm workers or some of our men drove them off to the railway station.
Later on that day or the next, we would march down to the railway sidings just outside Freystadt where wagons were waiting for the cabbages to be loaded so that they could go off to the processing factories like the potatoes. We unloaded them by hand into the covered wagons. When they were full, railway officials would come along and lock them up. The wagons sometimes stayed there overnight before leaving on their long journeys to their destinations all over the country. We hung around knowing this, and when there was nobody about, some of us would sneak onto the tracks again and walk along the wagons looking for holes and gaps in the wooden sides. When we found one, we undid our flies and aiming very carefully, peed through it onto the cabbages inside. With any luck you could get one big jet in which would spray everything inside.