大象传媒

As my papers had been lost, I was treated as a slave worker and not as Geneva protected personnel. Because of that one of my first jobs as a slave worker was in a sugar factory. I was made to work 12 hours a day and 18 hours on the weekends in order to change from the day to the night shifts. The job consisted of opening up the filter machines when they were full of debris extracted from the sugar beat. Another job was on a little railway. My job was to service the trucks on the railway.

I was at a place called Tieganhof working at the Klienbahnhof and feeling particularly fed up. Danny Shields and I decided to take a little walk. Not having much confidence in our ability to get home after three days without food we had grown very hungry and desperate. On the third day we came across a woman planting potatoes in a field. We hid in the woods until night fell and went into the field to dig up a couple of potatoes, which we ate raw then fell asleep. Unfortunately, we had been spotted and as dawn rose we found ourselves surrounded by a very well armed group of German soldiers. After a brief spell in the local police station we were transferred back to Marienburge. We found it hard to believe, but we were soon informed that we were to be court marshalled for sabotaging the potato field! Fortunately, we were given the services of an astute Swiss lawyer, who persuaded the German鈥檚 that it was ridiculous to consider us to be guilty of sabotage by stealing a few spuds.
The German court agreed and sent us back to the Prison Stallag xxb. Where the commandant gave us 28 days in the cooler.

The cooler consisted of a brick wall with 8 single rooms inside.
The contents of a room was a wooden bench for a bed, a blanket and a block Ersatzes Siefe, which was basically imitation soap, which was no good for washing, but great for drawing markings, as we later found.

Danny and I were put into single cells and could only communicate by shouting to one another. Believe it or not Danny attempted to teach me chess this way, bear in mind that I had never seen a chessboard in my life.
On his instructions I marked out a chessboard on the blanket. Every other square was marked with a W to represent the white squares on the board.
With initialled white pieces of paper, supplied by a few sympathetic German guards, with the relevant chess piece names. After 28 days in the cooler I considered my self to be a decent chess player.
After our release from the cooler we carried on with our makeshift chessboard until one day a consignment of games and including, Ludo and Snakes & Ladders arrived from the international Red Cross. Among the games was a chess board and chess pieces supplied by readers of the Daily Sketch. I got hold of the chessboard and still have it to this day, despite very difficult circumstances.
Danny and I played chess for many, many hours. It was a way of relieving our boredom, fits of depression and giving us the opportunity to forget the many hours of my life, that I would rather forget. In fact, I can honestly say that I owe my very existence, if not my sanity to that board.

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