I like to think about the damage we did; that we must have spoilt loads of cabbages which travelled on their long hot journeys to the storage depots and then on to factories for processing. Let them rot. There was a simple satisfaction in sabotaging the sauerkraut. That sort of act of defiance felt good at the time but sadly it was short-lived.
Feelings of helplessness were never far away. We felt this most at times when we witnessed things completely beyond our understanding and our control. You never felt sorry for yourself after the terrible things you saw.
It was probably a few years later in the war that this happened, when we started to hear more about what was happening to the Jews, the political prisoners and minority groups persecuted by the Germans. We knew there was a concentration camp not far away at Stutthof. I saw something terrible happen and I want you to know about it.
I was in a party of about twenty men and we had been sent again to load cabbages at the railway station. As we were working, another train pulling a load of cattle trucks, like the ones we had travelled in, drew up on the opposite line. A large number of German guards appeared and started unbolting and sliding back the doors. I remembered what it felt like inside, hearing that sound, not knowing what was going on and what you would find when you finally got out.
The trucks were packed with people: men, women and children. They were being pulled out by guards and pushed along the tracks. One guard got impatient and grabbed hold of one woman and started yanking her out. She had a little baby in her arms and he snatched it from her. The baby started crying and he threw it onto the ground and started kicking it like a football along the track. The woman screamed and got down and rushed towards her baby bending down to pick it up. The guard shot her in the back of her head. Just one bullet did it. And that tiny baby was just lying there, no longer crying.
Imagine how that made me feel. What could I do? Absolutely nothing. I could only stand and watch. It was frightening. The violence. There was no reason for it. They were wicked. And I felt such anger and hatred. Hatred towards every German in the land.
There was no time that we prisoners didn’t think or talk about food. I used to say, ‘When I was in civvy street I couldn’t stand mutton stew or tapioca but God give me a bucket of it now.’ Were we able to complain about it to anybody? What do you think?
Every once in a while German officers visited from headquarters. They must have been quite high-ranking from the look of them, in their long black leather coats, with a cane in their hand which they kept click clacking on their coats as if to say, ‘We’re in charge. Watch your step. We’ve got you here.’ They would come and see us working on the farm or visit our billet to check the building and have a look round. I expect they reported back how efficiently run everything was and how well looked after the inmates were. They spoke reasonable English and were able to talk to us or rather address us.
‘Is there anything you men want?’ they asked.
‘Yes, we want more food,’ we said.
‘Grass is good enough for you people,’ they replied.
One of our chaps called Bill (I remember his name because I found out that he lived across the park from me in Barking) had been collecting fleas in a matchbox. Funny what some men do to amuse themselves when they haven’t got much entertainment. I suppose he didn’t want to waste them once he’d spent all that time picking them off himself. Thought they might come in handy or maybe he was keeping them as pets for a bit of company. I know how important that little mouse was to me when he visited me in my prison cell during my spell in solitary confinement.
As the officers were leaving, Bill somehow managed to sneak up behind them and empty the contents of the matchbox onto the collar and back of their coats. We had a laugh later on, thinking about those officers sitting in their fancy car scratching themselves all the way back to their HQ. And then possibly spreading them to the other officers and then so on through the ranks and right across the whole German Army.
You got used to them. Fleas that is, not the Germans. Never got used to the Germans and what they were capable of doing. But fleas on your body and in your clothes, you had to accept them. Even if you managed get rid of them you would catch more from somebody else soon enough. So you were always scratching and searching your clothes for them. A lot of the time you weren’t even aware you were doing it. You would be playing cards or reading a letter from home, pausing to have a good scratch. Sometimes you would pick them off your clothes between your finger nails, squeezing them dead. If it was your turn to have a bath that week you hoped you might drown a load in the water.
There were forty-five of us fighting over one little tin bath – or bowl should I say. We could just about sit in it with our legs dangling over the end. We probably had a bath once a fortnight as it took most of Sunday to get enough hot water from the copper which was always on the go – if we had enough wood for the fire. It was a real palaver when it was Jimmy’s turn as he was tall and had to do a sort of Houdini contortionist’s act to get himself clean. Two of us usually shared the same water, which soon turned grey with our accumulated dirt. Unless you could be bothered to skim off the black specks of drowned fleas before your turn in the water, you shared those too. We all longed to have a proper shower and dreamed about the time we would.
But I always thought about those poor Jews we had seen and wondered what conditions were like for them in the camps they were being transported to. Of course, after the war I heard the full story about the concentration camps and that ‘taking a shower’ had another meaning altogether.
7
Bullseye
I always say that it was the International Red Cross who brought us home. Without the British and Canadian food parcels we received, a lot more people would have died. How would we have survived all those years without those extra rations? We thought of them as luxuries but really they were no more than what any ordinary man should have been getting every day. When those shoe boxes started arriving wrapped in brown paper tied with string it was like Christmas. We already had the snow so we were excited like little kids.
We were unlucky where we were, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, as all the consignments of Red Cross parcels were delivered to Stalag 20B. After sorting, our allocation was meant to be sent out to us but, of course, most did not get sent on to us. We never got our fair share. I suppose you can’t blame the chaps there for taking some of ours for themselves. Most men in the main camp got theirs once a week or fortnightly while we had to wait as long as seven weeks between deliveries. A basic parcel looked like it had everything a man could want although it was never enough and we often had to share a parcel with somebody else. We usually distributed what we had within our own particular group of friends; we five looked after ourselves.
As a rule we got a packet of tea, sugar and milk, either dried or condensed, and butter. There was some kind of meat like corned beef or streaky bacon, which came out of the tin coiled up in a long strip. There were sardines or pilchards and jam and cheese. There were biscuits, known as pilot biscuits, which were hard and didn’t get broken in transit. We had prunes or other dried fruit and always a bar of chocolate, usually Cadbury’s fruit and nut. We got extras like mints and jelly, soap and toothpaste and a sewing kit. And plenty of cigarettes, fifty Player’s in a round tin.