大象传媒

The 4th October has been given as the actual date upon which we had all been transported from Italy to Germany. The rail journey had taken about 2.5 days. About a fortnight in 1Vb some of us were to go to work in a sugar beet factory, whilst the rest of us were to go over the border into the Sudetenland area of Czechoslovakia - the very area which Hitler had grabbed from the Czechs in 1938. En route to our final Camp 1Vc at Maltheuren, near Brux, we passed some immense works, having three big chimneys and noticed that they were known as the Hermann Goering Works. we later found that they produced 26 diffeerent products from the soft brown coal mined around them. I can only quote a few - benzine, lipstick, soap, margarine. It was said that it would take about 7 tons of that coal to be the equivalent of but 1 ton of Welsh anthracite!
Upon arriving at our new camp, we were greeted by the Lagerfuhrer, who told us that if we played ball with him, he would play ball with us! There were some 1,800 men there, including South Africans. There was a very good interpreter amongst us, but it seemed that he was a Jew, he was very soon taken away, some said to a stone quarry. We were told thgat no British would be sent down the pits, but only 10 days or so later
that is precisely where we landed up. On the very first night, I really thought that the bottom had dropped from the floor of the cage, because it descended at break-neck speed! A few years previously, 11 miners were killed when the cage plummeted down to the bottom, although one could see ratchets down the sides as we descended, I would imagine a sudded stop at such speed could prove to be equally as fatal. The pit bore the same name as our camp, Kolumbus, but was not very deep and underground were a series of passages, no crawling on ones bellies. There would be a massive place in which the coal was hewn, known as a theatre. One night, a Czech miner was very badly injured by a fall of coal in such a place and the Germans had him on the ground for quite a while in the main passageway, apparently deciding whether he should be left to die, or to evacuate him to the surface for treatment! Apparently it was decided that he was too good a worker to lose.
One night we witnessed some Ukrainians, who had no International Red Crescent to support them were seen being lashed across their backsides with a long whip and the wealds on their backs were horrific to see The stench from those underground 'toilets' was sickening to say the least, especially when we were having our kohlrabi soup which had been conveyed by rail and everyone had to dip his mug into a container. The Steigers (Foremen) persistently shouted 'Immer arbeit' (Keep working) and even though we had but menial tasks, I was somewhat concerned that I could not even lift a light shovel! At first we were working 8 hour shifts, but these were increased to 10 hours later on. It was said that we were paid the equivalent of 9d per day. At the end of a shift we deposited our miner's lamps and had a shower, before returning on foot to camp about 3 miles away in all manner of weather conditions. Strangely enough, there was a pit called Columbus directly opposite our camp!

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