´óÏó´«Ã½

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.
====

NEUE BLUMENAU
After leaving Long, I think I must have returned to Stalag XXA at Thorn for a few days, because I did not know any of the people in my next camp which was at Neue Blumenau. At Thorn I was in a place called the balloon hangar. It was a vast shed which was once probably used for balloons, perhaps in the days of the Zeppelins, but was now filled with rows of three storey bunks. I vaguely remember a young man with a clean towel folded over his arm and a small bowl of water in his hand, who spoke to no one. He was known as the sun worshipper and was thought to be trying to work his ticket home on the grounds of insanity.

Neue Blumenau was more a scattered collection of small farms than a village and there was no centre. It was not far from the large town of Graudenz on the Vistula and the nearest town was Lessen. We were billeted in a small farm cottage with one room for the twelve of us and one for the guard. In our room there were six double bunks and two of the bunks were under a beam which only cleared the chest of the man on the top bunk by a few inches.
Each of us was allocated to a small farmer and I went to the Lipski family. -Although the name sounds Polish they were a German family but had been Polish citizens between 1918 and 1939. The famjly consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Lipski, the two children, Norbert and his sister, and Grandma, Mr. Lipski's mother. Mr.Lipski was fair but reserved, a man of few words and many talents. Farmer, builder and mechanic, there were not many jobs that he could not tackle. Granny treated me very well. She was very patient when I worked with her, hoeing the weeds, and she told me my first German joke. A young man told his sweetheart that for her he would go through fire and water but if it rained he would not come to see her that evening. I got it the second time round. I hope that when they had to flee in 1945, all went well with them and that Granny spent her last days in peace and comfort. Mrs. Lipski was a well built woman who worked hard. Like all the farms in that part of the world, they were used to supplying most of their needs. Even the sheep's wool was collected from the barbed wire fences and spun and knitted into strong and durable socks and gloves. As well as the family there was a Polish farm worker with a crippled leg named Karminski who lived with his wife and baby in a cottage near the farm. There was also a Polish maid of all work who lodged with the Karminskis. I remember her as looking very thin and ill.

Our N.C.O. was a regular soldier, Sgt. Tim Crawley, who came from Aldershot. He was a very lively character and always good for a laugh. The Germans gave us a weekly paper in English called The Camp which we read with considerable scepticism. In one issue there was an article extolling the merits of Gen. Rommel. One sentence read, "At the dreaded name of Rommel pious Catholics have been known to cross themselves." Tim would come into the room and shout the name of Rommel and collapse into a gibbering heap, crossing himself fervently to roars of laughter from the rest of us. He used to tell of being called out by the guards at his last camp in the middle of the night to fight a fire. He dreamed of heroically rescuing women and children and being sent home by a grateful German government as a reward. His dream was shattered when he was handed a shovel and marched to the local gasworks where a pile of coke was on fire. It was mid winter, and very cold, and in the end they were shovelling the coke back on to the fire to keep warm. Such homespun humour and the laughter it brought must have had a beneficial effect on all of us.

One day several of us were sent by our farmers to the Burgermeister to help with the annual repair of the roads. There were no metalled roads in Neue Blumenau, only sandy farm tracks which became deeply rutted by the wheels of the farm carts. The repairs consisted of levelling the hump in the centre and filling the ruts. For this we had a plough and two horses, men with shovels, and a roller. In a few days all the roads had been done and would not need attention until next year.
The farm next to the Lipskis was owned by a friendly German farmer who had put a wagon wheel on the roof of his barn in the hope that the storks would build a nest there and they had obliged him. This was often done as it was thought to be a sign of good luck if the storks built a nest on your property. At the back our of farm there was a pond and I often watched the storks moving around on their long thin legs as they hunted for frogs.
Lipski's cousin had a bigger farm not far away and he had been appointed the District Farm Leader under the new regime. He was a very self important man who liked to make everyone aware of his position and power. One day I was sent to his farm to help harvest root crops and fell foul of him. Many local Germans continued to get on well with their Polish neighbours, although the position was now reversed, but some threw their weight about and sometimes tried to settle old scores.

We had a very good guard named Alfred Schitzstahler. He came from Essen and had worked for Krupps before he was called up. We had a good relationship with him and he treated us very well. He was the only guard so there had to be some mutual trust. One Sunday afternoon he said that we could all go out for a walk on our own. We were all very surprised, this was unprecedented and we hoped that Alfred was not sticking his neck out too far. It was true that we went to and fro to work on our own but this was different. We all went out and made for a deep hollow with a large pond in it, some distance from the camp. Soon after our arrival lots of young Polish men and girls turned up. It was nice to see them and have a chat in our limited German but we became very uneasy because contact with civilians, except for work, was strictly forbidden.
More people appeared and the bumptious District Leader's farm was not far away and he would probably enjoy making trouble for Alfred. We needed to get rid of our Polish friends without giving offence. Someone came up with a bright idea; we started to sing the forbidden Polish national anthem and the crowd melted away. We had not let Alfred down and we hoped that the Poles had taken it as a friendly, if unwise gesture. Alfred's punishment would probably have been severe. As prisoners we knew that a good guard was worth keeping.

Occasionally the Germans took photographs of us which we could buy with our camp money. One of me, wearing clogs, caused my mother to think that I had lost a foot so she wrote to the Red Cross and I had to see the British M.O. on my return to Stalag.
On Sunday mornings Wilfred, John and I had a fried breakfast with items from our Red Cross parcels, supplemented by eggs which we stole from our farms. It was depriving the enemy so it was not wrong, we all agreed. Translated into stealing from a family, it was a very different matter and I would have felt very ashamed if I had been caught. On my farm it was very difficult to find any eggs so Wilfred, who had high standards of behaviour, took me to task for failing in my duty to the group. Although normally it is wrong to steal, in this case it was wrong not to steal enough.
One of the hardest jobs on the farm was harvesting potatoes, especially if the field was fairly short. Each person was allocated a section and then the farmer would drive the horses with the spinner up the field and before you could pick them up he had turned at the top and was coming down the other side, keeping you under constant pressure.

I usually had my midday meal in the kitchen and sometimes the radio was on and there would be a Special Report, preceded by a choir singing, “When we drive against England “ and telling of some success. Often they played popular songs and the one that I liked best was, "Es geht alles vorüber ,es geht alles vorbei." It meant that everything passes, after December comes May. Bad times don't last for ever.

One day a worker from a larger farm came to look at one of the cows and Karminski told me that he was Swiss which surprised me as I was sure that he was a Pole. Later I found out that around 1870 many Swiss younger sons who had no hope of inheriting the family dairy farm had emigrated to N.E. Prussia and Lithuania where there was dairy farming land available. They developed the dairy business and version of the Emmenthaler which they named after the nearby town of Tilsit. This cheese is now made all over Europe but I doubt if many people know where it originally came from. It became the custom in Prussia to refer to anyone working with dairy cows as a Swiss.

When the weather was too bad for work on the fields I was given odd jobs around the faro1, sorting potatoes in the cellar or working in the barn or the cowshed. One afternoon the farmer sent me to the loft above the cowshed to help his wife with the ironing. It sounded like an easy afternoon but I was due for a shock. There was a large wooden machine with a tray, about five feet by three, full of heavy stones. The washing was wrapped around a roller and placed under the tray and I had to pull the tray to and fro. By the end of the afternoon I was exhausted. Mrs. Lipski was always quite pleasant but did not talk to me very often. One day I told her that I had met a man from New Zealand when we took some potatoes to the station. She was really surprised when I assured her that he was not black but white like me. Some time later she asked me if I thought that England could win the war and when I confidently said that we would she was quite shaken. Things had gone so well for the Germans in the early days of the war and now clouds were appearing on the horizon. The position of the Germans in the east was giving many cause for thought. The good luck promise of the storks might never be fulfilled. Not long after this we were recalled to Stalag.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.