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.
====

LONG AUTUMN 1942

The camp at Long was in an old mill with several huts beside it and lay beside the main road leading to East Prussia, Danzig and Gdynia. On the other side of the camp was a railway line. The road had been upgraded with the cobbles having been removed and concrete laid down. It was our job to landscape the sides with earth which had been excavated from the road bed. One group was working on the rebuilding of a railway bridge. This was on a single track line which had been built to carry coal from the industrial area in the south, near the Czech border, up to Danzig. There were about two hundred men in the camp and the English NCO in charge was a very bellicose Tyneside Scottish sergeant major who was continually at war with the German commandant through his long suffering interpreter, an Irish sergeant named Jerome O'Connor. The Sgt. Maj. thought he had our best interests at heart but we often suffered, standing out in the cold while he ordered Jerry to shower insults on the commandant who had his orders and was not to be moved. I am sure that his remarks were diplomatically toned down by Jerry.
I was fortunate to be billeted in one of the huts which was much more comfortable than the mill. Each hut had a tortoise stove and as we were in a more confined space, it was warmer than in the mill.

The weather was becoming colder as winter approached and we found our job very uncomfortable, especially when the wind was blowing from the E. or NE. One of the worst things I remember about being a prisoner is being out working in the cold and even worse, standing for long periods in the cold. Very occasionally a search team would suddenly descend on a camp and turn the prisoners outside to wait in the cold until they had finished. In large camps one could wait for a half an hour, an hour or longer in the cold if they could not get the roll call numbers right. Standing waiting for a little watery soup, a piece of bread, the order to move, the end of the war. How I hated it. I used to work with a Mancunian who was a regular, a nurse in the R.A.M.C. who had spent several years in India and had not long returned before he was captured. He felt the cold dreadfully. The guard would move up and down the line, stirring us into activity. It was a case of," They also serve who only stand and wait."

In camp each hut had a stove and there were stoves in the mill. The problem was fuel. Boards from beds had to be sacrificed and in the mill the banisters had been so expertly removed that an inspecting German officer at first refused to believe that they had ever existed. When anyone had some fuel and lit a fire shouts would go up from those who wanted to cook, "One up on the fire. Two up on the fire, etc." The bottom floor of the mill was one large room and one night some of the lads put on an American gangster play. The killer was caught and the cop said, "You're gonna burn, Caselli," and a voice from the audience shouted, "One up on the fire."

Our latrine was a hut with rectangular tank, surrounded by an eighteen inch high wall and covered by a large sheet of plywood with ten holes cut in it. No privacy there. As the frosts became harder the surface in the tank froze over and deposits began to pile up until, in places, they protruded above the holes. The inspecting officer sent for hammers and ordered the demolition of the stalagmites. Paying a visit in the winter required courage. Constipation was not unknown.

The railway line which ran behind the camp was often very busy, carrying traffic to and from the Russian front and we were keen observers of that traffic. It gave us some idea of how the war was going. The trains which came rumbling past, heading for the east, were sometimes full of troops returning from leave or moving to new areas or units. There were flat wagons loaded with tanks or guns, motor cycle combinations, civilian cars which we heard were being commandeered from all over Europe, given a coat of camouflage paint and given to the German forces. The trains going back into Germany also carried troops and often there were long trains with damaged tanks and armoured cars, parts of planes and all sorts of damaged military equipment. There were also long hospital trains full of wounded. All these things cheered us up as it was an indication that things were no longer going so well for the Germans. We had had two and a half years of almost continual gloom. Our country being bombed, our troops and friends defeated, our ships sunk and the Germans occupying country after country and with it their industrial resources. It really raised our spirits when we heard that Field Marshal von Paulus had been captured at Stalingrad on the 30th. Jan., 1943 and the Sixth Army surrendered two days later. We probably got the information in dribs and drabs a little later. I expect we thought of how cold we were and then of how it must be for the men on both sides, but especially the vanquished, in the conditions in the winter on the Russian front. After the war I read several books about the war in Russia and especially Stalingrad. The Nazis inflicted great suffering on many people including many ordinary Germans.

In my hut there was quite a lot of political discussion which was quite new to me. In my teens all the talk had been about God and the Bible and it had been about a very narrow concept of Christianity. In our little group even the local vicar had been suspected of being too worldly. One or two in the hut were communists and I had not, to my knowledge, met one before. I found them quite impressive. There was a guard who told us that he had been a member of the communist party before the war. He worked as a baker and one day he was reported to the police because he had said that Ernst Roehm, the leader of the Nazi S.A. was homosexual. It was a Friday afternoon and the police locked him up in one of the cells pending further enquiries. It was not any old Friday, it was Friday the 29th. of June, 1934, and that was the weekend of the Long Knives when Hitler ordered that Roehm and many others should be shot. On Monday morning our guard was released without charge or explanation. He was a very lucky man indeed.

I think we all very much admired the Red Army and their fighting ability. This was before the second front and they were the only army at that time who looked as if they might change our situation. Before the war, and in its early stages, they were thought of as being as bad as Hitler and now they were the good guys. The Germans had raised the case of the Katyn massacre and we did not want to believe that the Russians were responsible but they were. It seems that all states lie to their people if convenient. Even for many of the brave Russian troops we now know there was no choice, if they went forward they would be shot and if they went back they were shot by the N.K.V.D. troops who were there to keep them in the line.

The winter began to yield to spring and our job was coming to an end. We were told that a gang of Polish women had done three quarters of the work on the road to our one quarter ,but of course, they were not protected by the Geneva Convention. Not long after this we were moved on.

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