大象传媒

One nasty memory I have as a child was walking home, back from the Grande Maison classroom past a Prisoner of War camp which was at the bottom of the Rue Sauvage, in what is now the Palm Grove Estate. This field was surrounded by barbed wire and there were Russian and Polish prisoners of war. People who had been brought over to build defences, the forts and the wall at L鈥橝ncresse and all the various gun emplacements.

I remember as a young child passing this camp, and seeing all these prisoners of war who were dressed in rags, and very thin and very weak, and they were being lined up for some reason, probably to be checked or counted. I remember one of them was obviously so weak that he couldn鈥檛 stand and he crouched down. Supervising these people were a group of people called the O.Ts. We called them O.Ts. They wore a khaki uniform as distinct from the normal greenish uniform of the German soldier, and they had a pretty cruel reputation. When this chap crouched down I remember seeing this O.T. shouting abuse at him and in fact he kicked him in the face and knocked him over. I鈥檓 afraid I didn鈥檛 stay around, I just ran home as quickly as I could.
BRIAN LE CONTE

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