HOW A P.O.W. FEELS WHEN HE "LIVES" AGAIN

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 146, 22 June 1945, Page 8

HOW A P.O.W. FEELS WHEN HE "LIVES" AGAIN

LONDON.. It is quite incredible to see London streets filled with women. Lots of them, and all of them free. Sometimes I think I could walk up to one of these women in the streets and ask the way, and she would answer me, and smile. When you haven't set eyes on a woman for five years you forget about them, ■ and then you come back to Englishwomen, dignified and gentle, and you can speak to them and see them smile. (So writes a liberated British prisoner of war after five long years in a German prisoner of war camp. He tells this story in the Daily Mail.) But those in unirorm are frightening—most of all those in khaki, because I associate khaki with the bad five years. At first it is fearsome and laughable to see women wearing it. Till someone tells you about the girls who manned the searchlights. Then you remember how at Stalag the four searchlights beamed and pointed on a man who tried to escape on a dark night, and you try to imagine how girls could possibly have been on the business end of one with a Jerry plane perhaps diving straight down through it.

Anticipatory Agony The girls in navy blue with the little round hats look jolly. The Wrens are tied up with the sea, and, if you haven't seen the'sea for five years you feel for it. When some of us who escaped first saw the Black Sea we nearly fell on our knees and worshipped it, . and so we are intrigued by the girls in navy blue whose war has been about the sea.

After three weeks in England and among friends I still find my teeth gritting and my hands trembling when people talk international politics. They go on saying what they think, and I wait for the tap on the shoulder, the kick on the shin. Sometimes I have to think hard about something else so that I don't tap any shoulders or kick my shins or shout, "Shut Up!" (When you're in Stalag you never know where Jerry is. . . .)

It is still a shock to the nerves to hear a telephone bell ringing—it is a new noise. I do not remember what it means, but it might mean a new order I have not heard of. The only automatic signal I know it is the automatic buzzer at 6.30 a.m.—the signal for up and out on parade.

Shocked by the Normal All the little normal experiences of daily living are things that shock and shake me. The radio turned on loud makes me jump immediately to turn it very low.

From 1942 onwards we all knew, in every Stalag all over Germany and Prussia, how the war was going because there was a radio in every camp. It was kept under the floor and operated by one man.

French civilians then working in Germany sold us a small radio for ten Red Cross parcels and 4000 cigarettes. At midday and at 5 o'clock the news came over from London in French, and men who spoke French would take their turn at listening-in, then write it out in pencil, making ten copies (from carbons brought to us by British warrant officers working in the German offices), and the broadsheet was passed round the camp.

It was highly dangerous—men caught would come up on a courtmartial and probably be nailed on an espionage charge—which might be a shooting matter. We took great care. No one ever got caught.

When dusk falls, and I know the approach of another night awake in a comfortable bed, I almost wish I were back in Stalag.

Sleeping in sheets on a soft bed after five years on' boards huddled into two grey blankets makes a man feel airborne. There is the silence, too, of sleeping alone. When I wake up in the mornings—always just after six—and there is no scrambling about and grunting, only the silence, I have a second of wonder ing if I'm back in solitary confinement. Watched 15,000 Die We lived in Stalag in tight, cutthroat cliques against the Germans. Every man had his own circle of friends, sometimes 12,. sometimes only six, and life was maintained in these small groups. One man did the cooking, another the scrounging, another the lock-picking of German stores, another the distraction of German guards. The only way to live was in small cliques.

We found that out early on in 1942, when in one winter 15,000 Russian prisoners died of starvation. We watched them die. We could do

-nothing for th-sm, even with our Red Cross parcels. There were too many of them. You could help ten men, but that didn't help you from having to watch the other 14,990 die by hours of such brutal starvation by the Germans that they could not even crawl to the swill bins for the garbage deposited there. Without our Red Cross parcels we could not have lived. German feeding of prisoners of war was 9oz of black bread per day (about 21 slices), a bowl of thin soup at midday, made from cabbage leaves, and £oz of grease one day, ioz turnip jam the next. "Bunker Rats" We used to steal vegetables, carrots, potatoes, turnips, onions from the little gardens the Jerries kept at the back of Stalag. The punishment for this, if caught, was 14 to 21 days' solitary confinement.

All the time there were "bunker rats" (our name for the men Jerrythrew into prison), but they came out in due course, stopped stealing the Jerry vegetables for a bit, and someone else took a turn at it and went inside.

I smoke more than I've ever smoked in my life—though I hesitate every time I light a cigarette and would rather roll my own than buy them in'packets already made up. A smoke was an important thing in Stalag, because cigarettes were currency to us. From foreign workers we could buy a shirt for between 80 and 100 cigarettes, boots at 150, a complete battle-dress for 300. Also, we could buy eggs, butter, an occasional chicken or goose.

We saved our cigarettes against the necessities of living. A man had to work out his design for living for a week or two ahead before he put a match to a cigarette. Most of us rolled our own—it gave you more time to think it over and wonder if it was worth it.

No Lingering Taste for Sweets I have lost the habit of eating sweets. We saw no fruit; we made no puddings. Our sugar was used in the distilling of drink. We had no time for sweets, and now there is no taste in them for me. Cheese, by itself, is a luxury ....

After the drink we distilled for ourselves the whisky at home tastec like water. We had a distilling machine made by a French blacksmith at the price of 200 cigarettes. We used to ferment potato peelings and the currants and raisins in our Red Cross parcels with yeast and sugar.

Then we left it for four or five days and heated it up over a fire made from our bed boards. Many is the night we have sat up distilling alcohol.

The average percentage was between 80 and 90. It was put in bottles obtained from the foreign workers, who would then buy back the full bottles from us for 150 cigarettes.

After this training it would take many hours and much money in England to get an ex-prisoner even slightly lit up.

Beer, after so long, makes you feel dopey and discontented. I can't drink it any longer. Rum is the best drink at home, gin second best, whisky a poor third. There doesn't seem much kick in any of it. The Horrifying Dark In the same.way, there is no kick in organised entertainment. No theatre, and particularly no cinema, is a welcome thought to me. The way we lived is theatre enough for a long time to come. The thought of being shut up for hours in the dark, in one place, revolts my mind completely. To see people standing in queues to get into the shut-up dark is horrifying.

Mostly I just want to loaf, talk a little, walk about. Normal living takes a lot of adjustment. It is ordinary and we haven't lived ordinary lives. The thing I hate most now is untidyness. With 20 people in one hut you had to be tidy. And I hate idle gossip for the sake of talking.