MASSIVE SLAVES

Auckland Star, Volume LXXV, Issue 266, 9 November 1944, Page 8

MASSIVE SLAVES

FORMIDABLE WOMEN

RUSSIAN GIRLS IN FRANCE (By IRA WOLFBRT) PARIS. On the road here we passed some Russian women walking. They were the most massive women I have ever seen anywhere In my life. Some of them were bigger and more powerful looking than heavyweight wrestlers. They were not fat. They were just formidably massive. They were not flat chested and manly faced like some American women athletes. They looked like women all right, both fore and aft, only they had arms on them like hams and had shoulders you could pack a piano on and when they shook hands with you it was like a leathery vise cracking your knuckles fit to make your toes tingle. Yes, indeed, each one of them was plenty of woman.

They were out of a German prison camp. Originally, they said, there had been two thousand of them, shipped down from Leningrad area to work on the roads and railroads. They had been arrested as militant anti-Nazis, some on denunciation from their Russian neighbours. Hustled Into Freight Trains Others were tricked into giving themselves away by agents and provocateurs. Still others were just arresi ed, they're not sure why. A good proportion of the camp was not innocent of activities against the Germans. They either worked with the Partisans or acted as liaison between the Partisans and the regular Red Army, but others are still mystified by the fate that overook them and whether innocent or guilty none had any trial or hearing, but were just picked out of their homes and thrown into a concentration camp and then hustled into freight trains, and driven on down here to Le Mans. At Le Mans the party was split up into various work groups, 250 of them being sent to the village of St. Mars La Briere to take up residence in barracks behind barbed wire. That was four months ago.

The remarkable thing about this camp is that although the Germans seem to have tried none ,of the women has been broken in spirit The routine was very hard from the first day—work from six in the morning until six or six-thirty at night. Then, when our pre-invasion bombings began tearing up the rails and bridges, the women were awakened at all hours of the night to do rush repairs and were allowed to sleep only in snatches.

Their Spirit Undaunted

But. they seemed not to have let anything dismay them. Some of the more ardent ones who had formed surreptitious friendships in the village used to slip out of camp at, night when everybody else was sleeping to enjoy a visit with their friends.

Incidentally one of the girls was killed as an indirect result of our bombings. We hit an ammunition train one night and the explosion blew land mines all over the landscape. The women were set to work picking up the mines and throwing them into a ravine. One of the mines went off as this girl picked it up.

Eleven babies among the women stirred a protracted row between the Germans and the women, which the women seemed to have won. The women, in their last months of pregnancy when they arrived at the camp refused at first to work. Some lieutenant happened along and told the women harshly that German women worked up to the day their babies were born, so they would have to, too. This they did. Then, after the babies were born the camp commander became irritated because the women took, time off from their work six or seven times a day to feed their babies. He said that after the first month a baby need not be fed more than three times a day. "I'd Much Rather Face Jerries" The women stuck to their guns at this point. They were in mortal fear that the Germans would confiscate their babies, but before the Germans did more than threaten this they felt the hot breath of the Americans and high-tailed out of there, leaving the women behind. The commander, incidentally, now a prisoner of ours—a fact the women chuckle over endlessly.

One of the first Americans to arrive was Lieutenant Seymour Pinchefsky, former New York City cop. He said that all the women asked him to get guns for them so that they could form an -infantry company and kill Germans. One, an intellectual and a former office worker in Leningrad, told him, he said, "A gun is the only true" God. It's all there is to believe in now." She has lost her husband and only child to the Nazis. The lieutenant looks at these formidable women with a very respectful eye. "It might not be a bad idea to turn them loose on the Jerries," he said. "I'd much rather face Jerries than these

girls."—Auckland Star and N.A.N.A.