大象传媒

This story is taken from a manuscript by Lawrence Travers Dorins, and has been added to the site with his permission by Bruce Logan. The author fully understands the site's terms and conditions.
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KAMIEN
After a short spell at Thorn a group of 16 of us were sent to Kamien, a small town on the line between Konitz (Chojnice) and Zempelberg (Zempolno). We marched from the station, through the town and out to the other side, where we stopped at a building like a village hall with the usual barbed wire fence round it. Next morning the local farmers came to select a prisoner to work on their farm. It was a bit like a slave market; they did not actually feel our muscles but I feel sure that they would have liked to. It was not surprising that I was not selected until near the end. As the farmer told me later, I was chosen more on the grounds that I looked as if I would not cause trouble than for my rippling muscles. For me it was a fortunate choice as I had landed in a friendly environment.

Alosi Daron, a Pole, had married into a German family and into the family farm. The household consisted of the widowed the grandmother, his wife and two small daughters, a women lodger who taught at the Provincial Educational Home, a very elegant young woman who was a close relative, two girls from the home who worked as maids and also on the farm, a young Ukrainian farm worker and me. I went back to the camp at the end of the day.

The farmhouse was on the square in the town, next to the Post Office, and the land was on a road leading out of town, near our camp. When I went to work I turned that led into the farmyard and it was not until my visit in 1997 that I saw the front of the house for the first time. The attitude in the house was very discreetly anti Nazi and I felt that I was accepted while the two German girls from the Home were distrusted. The Ukrainian lad was not really with it. While they were discreet, it was obvious to me how they really felt, even the teacher from Germany. Every day the postmaster came in for the evening meal which was taken in the dining room. He was a fervent Nazi and always arrived with his copy of Mein Kampf under his arm, festooned with paper bookmarks to enable him to bring various Hitlerian gems to their attention. It must have been a difficult time for the family, having to hide their real feelings. Open dissent was very dangerous, especially with a man like him.

I ate in the kitchen with the two servant girls and the Ukrainian. We usually I had Gr眉tze, groats according to the dictionary. A sort of soup or porridge made from I oats or barley. While we were eating this from bowls, a dish of potatoes which had been boiled and then fried, was put on the table and everyone helped themselves as they ate their soup. After a while I decided that I did not like the system so I took what I considered to be my share at the start and put them in my soup. I think they thought it must be a strange old English custom.

The two girls, aged about six and eight, were nice children. They went to school at the Home where the lodger taught and when they came home, they would often repeat something in English which they had learnt like, "Baa, baa, blek ship, hef you any vull?". As well as their boarders the home seemed to provide an ordinary education for local German children. I did not really find out why the boarders were sent to the home. Their ages varied and I think they were sent there by the courts, probably for minor crimes, family and other problems.

At harvest time some of the girls were sent to help. Daron sent me to help one of the girls, stacking sheaves. She could have been any age between fifteen and eighteen, perhaps older. As we worked and talked she asked me if we had any contact with women, obviously sexual. I shook my head. In a friendly and concerned way she said that was very sad and that she would have liked to help but it was impossible. I was quite touched. It was said in the same spirit as someone saying, "Oh dear, you haven't got a scarf. I'll try to get you one."

Dung spreading was not a bad job. I loaded the cart with dung from the cow stall, being careful to leave a depression in the middle of the load. Then I went to the family thunder box in the yard and emptied the contents of the large bucket into the depression in the load. When we got to the field the horse would plod along while I stood on the cart and scattered the load on the field with a pitchfork. A common sight on Polish farms, especially on small farms, was a type of capstan, usually near a barn or a shed. There were four arms on it and the horses were harnessed to one of them and driven round in a circle. As the horses went round the revolving capstan turned a shaft which operated machines like chaff cutters in the barn. Horse power in action. One day we went out to the barn on the land to do some threshing. I was given the job of clearing the straw away from the back of the machine.

I found it very difficult to cope with the output of the machine and the clouds of dust caused by the process and after a while I found it difficult to breathe and had to be excused duty. With the small farmers there was a great deal of co-operation and they often shared machines and labour.

, The relative who helped to run the household had obviously become a German citizen although she was still a Pole at heart. Her brother had been called up and was in the German Army in France and she was delighted when she heard that he was a prisoner in the West. Not long after she disappeared for a while. I remember her going off to the station looking very elegant. When she came back she told Mrs. Daron, while I was there, about some of the terrible things which were going on in Warsaw. This must have been during the. Warsaw rising, 1st. Aug. to 4th. Oct., 1944. I wondered If she had some contact with the Polish Underground. A great number of atrocities were committed during the rising by S.S. units including one composed of Russian defectors and one of released criminals. Hitler had even issued an order for the destruction of the civilian population.

Things were looking grim for the Germans and in October 1944 the order came to form the Volksturm or Home Guard. All males between sixteen and sixty were forced to join. On Sunday morning they used to march past our camp singing, Far from the homeland in enemy land, so far, so far, to the tune of Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag. Many of them had not been much further than the next town. This was another example of the Nazi attempts to save their miserable skins at the expense of these untrained civilians who were pointlessly sacrificed.

There was a sudden order that the local farmers had to deliver a quota of potatoes so we were obliged to take one or two wagon loads of potatoes to the station. Farmers were there from all over the area, waiting to discharge their loads into the railway wagons. I remember talking to a Polish farmer for some time while we were waiting in the queue. He had attended a co-operative conference somewhere before the war and seemed to be quite left wing. He had a very poor opinion of the Catholic Church and its priests who lived very comfortably on the backs of the poor and spent their time drinking and womanising.
No doubt he was destined for success in the regime after the war.
Not long after this it started to snow so we took the horses to the smithy to have spiked shoes fitted and changed the wheels on the carts for runners as the snow would be around for two or three months.

In late summer and autumn we had heard a rumbling sound and saw a rocket shooting up into the sky. The locals said that they were being fired at the Russians. They were in fact V2s. Peenemiinde had been bombed and the project had been transferred to Tuchel, four miles from Kamien.

All the time the Russians were getting closer which gave us great hope and some anxiety. Would we be caught up, unarmed, in the middle of a battle, or perhaps fall victim to angry retreating German troops, including S.S. units who were known to be in the area? For a long time the war reports in the papers had contained phrases like, "In order to straighten a bend in the front line, after inflicting heavy casualties on the enemy, our troops withdrew. We also wondered if the advancing Russians would realize that we were British P.oW.s or mistake us for German ancillaries. We were not the only group with worries. The poor devils who had been drafted into the Volksturm must have been very worried indeed. There had been talk in the town of many refugees on the roads from East Prussia although we had not seen any. This was probably due to the fact that they were moving from the east to the west and our road ran from the north to the south. The news was very upsetting for the local Germans as many of their families had lived here for generations, and now they might have to flee. At least one of our chaps worked for a Bessarabian German farmer. These were Germans who had lived in Rumania, probably for generations. At the time of the Molotov pact with Ribbentrop the Germans had forced the Rumanians to cede the area to the Russians. The Germans living there were brought back to Germany and later given farms or businesses taken from the Poles. The outlook for them was grim indeed. They were not happy in Poland and compared the sandy light soil unfavourably with the rich soil that they had left behind. I think they also felt that they were not fully accepted by the local Germans. The prospect of having to flee to Germany must have been daunting.
I can't remember much about Christmas that year. As the New Year came in everybody was hopeful but also apprehensive.

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