PRISONERS OF NAZIS

Waikato Times, Volume 126, Issue 21082, 8 April 1940, Page 8

PRISONERS OF NAZIS

ENGLISH WOMEN’S ORDEAL IN CELL WITH 40 CRIMINALS (Times Air Mail Service) AMSTERDAM, March 7 Three more British women arrived here today after six months of hardship in German-occupied territory. They were taken to Rotterdam, and will leave for London. They were Miss Edith Bagot-Harte, 84, from Munich, who claims to be of royal French blood; Miss Lucy Baker, 71, formerly a teacher in Poland; Miss Dorothy Hughes, 19, of London. Miss Hughes, with her fiance and another man, arrived in Vienna on holiday four days before war broke out. On September 8 both men were arrested and sent to an internment camp at Nuremberg, where they are still. The girl was taken to a prison in Vienna and put with 40 women criminals in a cell eight yards by six. Conditions were appalling. Prisoners had to get up at 3 a.m., were allowed no exercise, no papers to read, no needles nor books. The German doctor in attendance paid them little attention. No Heating There was no heating, and they had to sleep on mattresses on a stone floor throughout the coldest period of the winter. After three weeks Miss Hughes was taken to Salzburg and thence to Berlin, where the Alexander Platz prison seemed in comparison to be a palace. Miss Baker, who was 32 years in Poland as an English teacher, saw the attack on Bromberg. During the first five days of the attack there was continuous sniping from German flats in the town. “I myself was twice fired at when I went shopping at nine o’clock in the morning,” she said. “Opposite a Red Cross first aid station was a German house. Though the station was clearly marked with the Red Cross, the Germans fired ma-chine-guns at everybody trying to get in or out.”