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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SYPNIEWO WILKENWALDE
After leaving Neue Blumenau we went back to Fort 15 in Stalag XXA.. About a week later I was put on a working party to work on an estate at Wilkenwalde. There were about forty of us including four or five of us who had been at Neue Blumenau. The Polish name for the village was Sypniewo but it had been changed to Wilken's Woods after the German baron who owned the estate. The family had probably been there before 1870 and had been there while the Polish Government had ruled. The estate had 3,000 acres of arable land and 8,000 of forest.

We were billeted in an old pub which had recently been vacated by Russian prisoners.
As soon as we moved in there was an outcry, the place was alive with fleas and the straw bedding was soiled and stinking. It was not the Russian's fault. They were suffering from dysentery and had been badly treated. We were very fortunate to have the protection of the Geneva Convention. I also think some Germans were sensitive about their image and how we regarded them. They wanted be thought of as very civilized people. As a result we sometimes got away with murder. The problem with the billet was dealt with and when we moved in it had been cleaned.

As we marched up the cobbled road to the farmyard we passed a memorial in a triangle of ground. It was a mass grave from a past outbreak of cholera. I had noticed that Poles sometimes used sackrif cholera as a swearword. When we reached the gates of the farmyard we gave a gasp. It was big enough for two football pitches with various buildings, large and small, scattered about in it. There were sheds for cows, horses, sheep, pigs and oxen. Also, a granary and a distillery. In the middle was a low building which contained a smithy and a carpentry and wheelwrights shop.

The manager was a Herr. Meyer and the foreman Herr. Benke. At first we worked in large groups, half prisoners and half Polish women and girls, but later some prisoners were given individual jobs like working with horses or other animals.
Sometimes I worked with horses or oxen, ploughing or rolling potatoes. My friend from Norfolk, Ginger Wilson, worked with horses all the time.

The farm also possessed three tractors and the chief tractor driver was an able young Polish man named Franz. He had become a German citizen and was expecting to be called up. I don't think he was really very pro German but disillusioned with the former Polish regime and the way they had treated the working class. For him they were not worth fighting for. I know that pre-war Poland was not a rich country and looking around there was plenty of evidence that considerable inequality and poverty had existed there. Large families were raised in poor accommodation with primitive sanitation and water supply.

One of the jobs where we worked in a large group was threshing. It was a very dusty job and cold, as it was mostly done in winter, and partly done in the barn where the sheaves were stored and partly outside. Another task which we all hated was stone picking. Trudging over ploughed fields with two men taking turns to carry a large box with handles at each end which was filled with stones by the others. In the sandy Polish Corridor there was no shortage of stones on the fields. We also had to make long piles of potatoes and cover them with straw and earth to store them during the winter. It was this that brought about the downfall of Herr. Meyer. They had to be kept at the right temperature or they would go rotten and this happened.

Meyer, who sometimes rode about on his horse, wearing the black uniform of the S.S. was sacked and called up and sent, not to the Waffen SS, but to the Army. Not very long afterwards we heard that he had been wounded and discharged. A survivor, I heard that he visited Sypniewo at eighty from the D.D.R. where he seems to have prospered, accompanied by his fourth wife.

The same technique which was used to preserve the potatoes was used to keep ice from melting. In the winter we were taken to a nearby lake and ice, a foot thick, was sawn from the lake and broken into pieces, loaded into a wagon and taken back to the farm. Here it was laid on straw and piled up in a line, two or three yards long, near the dairy. It was then covered with straw and earth and in the summer ice could be taken from it for use in the dairy.

One of the men in our party was called Darky Churchill. His letters often
arrived with coffins drawn on them, the work of the German censor. One of the chaps liked to impress the Polish girls if he got the opportunity and one of his chat up lines was to tell them, in very mangled German, about his life in England. He would explain that he had no need to work, he just went to his office once a week and signed a paper and came away with money. A somewhat bizarre description of drawing the dole.

The shepherd on the farm was a rather mad character who, if you gave him a roll of tobacco, would roll it in newspaper and light up, claiming that the newspaper greatly improved the flavour. For the first time I saw sheep which had become bloated with gas from feeding too long on rich new grass. The shepherd was having real problems and had resorted to putting a rope girdle round their swollen bellies, but without success. Finally he made a cut with a penknife to let the gas out and that did the trick. He was a very relieved man.

One Sunday we were called out for an emergency job and Behnke, the foreman, turned up to supervise. The atmosphere was already strained and when he arrived in his Sunday best, looking very Edwardian with a straw boater, five button jacket and drain pipe trousers the lads just fell about laughing. Things got worse and some of the lads objected to the job and refused to move. Behnke demanded action from the guards which put them under pressure and we found ourselves looking down the barrels of rifles. Fortunately we backed down and lived to tell the tale and the guards looked very relieved as well.

Our camp was on a crossroads and we were able to watch people coming past on their way to church on Sunday. Their clothes, mostly black, were of the sort that have to last a lifetime, especially the men鈥檚 clothes. A suit bought for the wedding might still be available for the wake.

One of our fellow prisoners was a Scots Canadian, a man with a lucky streak, he was run over by a horse drawn wagon loaded with potatoes. Due to a combination of rubber tyres and a soft sandy track he escaped without injury. On another occasion he was seen, but only by prisoners, walking boldly across the farmyard with the heads of two chicken which he had just killed swinging merrily below the bottom of his greatcoat. This was a serious offence and he was lucky that his mates were able to warn him.

I don't remember ever seeing the Baron but I quite often saw the Baroness when I was working in the farmyard. She frequently came past the pig unit where I worked, on her way from the manor house to the farm office. From my observation and the accounts of other prisoners, she never spoke to any of us but walked past as if we did not exist. We all thought that she was very hostile but she may have just been very careful. In the Third Reich everyone had to watch their back, especially if they had a farm manager who was a member of the S.S.

One day a teenage crippled girl arrived to stay with the von Wilkens family.
She was either a relation or a friend and appeared to have important connections.
During her stay a Fiesler Storch appeared every day over the farm, dipped its wings in salute and flew off. These were the planes which were used to ferry top military and civilian personal around and the rumour was that it was her father, a general, who came to visit. Some months later I was working at the pig unit when an attractive young woman came along and started to talk to me. I think that she was the crippled girl's sister and was also staying at the manor house. She spoke very good English and was very pleasant, telling me about her experiences in one of the German help organizations, scrubbing floors etc. and looking after sick and old people. We had one or two chats but one day the Baroness came past and later the girl came along and told me that the Baroness had told her that she ought not to speak to prisoners. This was not unreasonable as contact with prisoners was strictly forbidden, except for those with an official reason. An informer could have made life difficult. After we left Wilkenwalde I heard a rumour that some of Wilkens' relations had been interrogated about the attempt on Hitler's life by the generals. Some time before we suddenly had a change of commandant, a smartly turned out and apparently well educated young man.

For some reason I had the idea that he was a lawyer. He seemed more like an officer than an N.C.O. After a few weeks he was replaced and I sometimes wonder, after reading about it since, if he might have been an anti Nazi officer who needed to be "lost" for a while. He was certainly very different from one young guard, a Nazi, who used to say to us, "Why do you speak to the Poles? They are vermin." Of course, if they became German citizens, that transformed them.

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