Tom
Germany, February 1945
On a winter’s morning cold enough to freeze the nose off his face, Tom and his cellmates stood shivering in the courtyard of the prison where he was serving his four-year sentence. They were issued with a chunk of black bread and a piece of sausage, but no-one told them where they were going.
Tom looked around at the others, who shrugged or shook their heads. Another journey to an unknown destination. As they set off, he overheard their police escorts saying they had to hurry as the Red Army was on their heels. Tom was elated. He could already sense liberation floating above him like a balloon of hope.
Ever since his trial three months before, he had been languishing in a cold, filthy prison cell, wondering how long he could survive on the watery turnip soup the surly guards doled out twice a day. And if starvation didn’t kill him, tuberculosis probably would.
Now, as they marched out of the prison gate, his pulse quickened at the prospect of the approaching Soviets. Just then, he heard the drone of aeroplanes and looked up.
Above them, a squadron of fighter planes with red stars on their wings sliced through the pale sky and he had to restrain himself from waving and cheering.
But a moment later he heard the crisp stuttering of machine guns followed by the thud of explosions and realised that what promised deliverance also threatened death. Russian bombs and machine guns wouldn’t distinguish between Germans and their prisoners. They might blow him up before they rescued him.
These thoughts weighed on his mind while they trudged along the endless road. Tom’s face smarted from sleet that stung like needles and he could no longer feel his hands and feet.
For hours he stumbled along the road in the fading winter light, yearning for a hot drink and a warm bed. Just as he was wondering how long it would be before frostbite set in, their nervous escorts pushed them into an empty barn for the night.
It was still dark next morning when they set off, and Tom braced himself for another freezing day.
‘Step on it or the Russians will catch up with us,’ their police escorts warned.
‘If only,’ sighed Tom’s cellmate Pascal.
It was agony to keep walking on swollen feet, their clogs little protection against the icy ground, but something on the lonely road in front of them distracted Tom from his misery.
From a distance, it looked as if lumpy bundles of dirty rags had been scattered all over the road, but when they came closer, he realised he was looking at corpses. ‘Mon dieu,’ Pascal kept saying. ‘Mon dieu.’
Tom pressed his numb hands over his mouth as he stared at the ghastly scene before them. In the contorted faces of the dead, unseeing eyes were sunk deep into their sockets, and mouths gaped open as if caught mid-scream. Everything that was human and individual had been stripped from these skeletal bodies covered in skin that resembled old parchment. Without understanding why, Tom forced himself to keep looking, as if it was his duty to commit this gruesome sight to memory.
Pascal pointed to the striped uniforms and wooden clogs. ‘Probably Jews from a concentration camp,’ he said. ‘The SS must have evacuated the camp when the Russians were on their doorstep and then shot them when they were too weak to keep up.’
‘What makes you think they’re Jews?’
Pascal’s dark eyes flashed with anger. ‘Because all over Europe the Krauts rounded them up and deported them to concentration camps. Probably killed most of them in there. That’s what happened to the Jews I knew in Paris. They were loaded onto cattle trucks that went east and never returned.’
He paused when he saw Tom’s astonished expression. ‘You have no idea what went on, do you? What about the island you come from? Weren’t there any Jews there?’
Tom tried to think back. He remembered Mrs Goldman, who had sold him some piano music when he didn’t have enough money to pay for it, and who had looked so worried the last time he saw her. There were also some Jewish people his parents knew in St Saviour, but it all seemed so long ago.
‘There were some,’ he said slowly, ‘but I don’t know what happened to them. I suppose our States would have protected them from the Nazis.’
‘In France that salaud Pétain collaborated with the Germans, and in the occupied zone French collaborators turned the Jews over to the Gestapo,’ Pascal said.
He turned his piercing gaze on Tom, who was frowning as he tried to follow French politics.
‘You know what keeps me going?’ Pascal went on. ‘I can’t wait to get home and expose those Nazi arse-lickers. I’ll make sure they get what’s coming to them.’
Tom nodded. That was something he understood. Revenge was the fuel that had propelled him to survive as well. Revenge on his mother. And Milly too. But it seemed petty to focus on his personal vendetta in a world where, according to Pascal, millions had been slaughtered.
He looked back at the corpses on the road. ‘We have to remember this,’ he muttered. As they trudged on, he hardly noticed his throbbing hands and shivering body. Muscles could lose their elasticity, joints could swell, flesh could rot and bones could snap, but he thought of Harry and sensed the existence of something intangible that was stronger than the body’s fragile frame.
Despite all his suffering, Harry had died with grace, while Tom continued to cling to life with a desperation that almost embarrassed him. Was it shameful to claw at life at all costs?
They spent that night in an open field and marched on the following day. Their food was gone, and they lived on mouthfuls of snow, walking like automatons, dragging one swollen foot after the other, unsure if they were alive or dead.
‘If the Russians are so close, where are they?’ Tom rasped through swollen lips.
Pascal sighed. ‘They must have missed us.’
On the third day of their march, with all hope of rescue gone, Tom felt he had come to the end of his endurance. They had been staggering for several hours when they came to a prison. As they walked through the gate, Tom felt like a parched wanderer in the desert who had found an oasis. Prison meant sleeping inside a cell instead of endless walking through sleet and frost, frozen to the bone. It meant having a hot drink for the first time in three days.
But his relief didn’t last long. For the next few weeks, shivering inside his cold cell, he listened in vain for Russian bombardments that might presage the end of the war, but instead of coming closer, they seemed to recede. By some evil twist of fate, the Russians had bypassed them. He would die in this prison near the German–Polish border. He would never be liberated.
March passed, and April, and Tom was slumped in his cell staring at the wall when he was startled by a guard who ordered him to go and see Johannes Webber, the prison warden. Tom was apprehensive. It was probably bad news.
Inside his small office, the warden looked at Tom and there was a strange expression on his usually impassive face.
‘I called you in here because you speak German, and I have something important to say,’ he began in a sepulchral voice. ‘The war is over. Germany is kaput. The Red Army has surrounded Berlin, and our brave Führer is dead. I heard he died at the head of his troops defending the Fatherland.’
Tom heard the words but it took a while to take them in. He waited.
‘Because we have been defeated, I have decided to set you all free,’ Johannes Webber was saying. ‘Please tell the others. Tomorrow I will open the prison gate and you can leave. But I advise you to keep away from the Soviets and the SS.’
When Tom finally found his voice, it sounded thin and uncertain. ‘What is the date today, sir?’
‘May 8, 1945,’ the warden sighed, and passed a weary hand over his eyes. ‘I don’t suppose either of us will ever forget it.’
Back in his cell, Tom discussed this startling information with the others. Like him, they were dubious and subdued. Could this really be true?
They had visualised being liberated by a brigade of triumphant Russians who would burst into the prison like the revolutionary forces storming the Bastille, tearing down swastikas and portraits of Hitler and arresting all the Germans. They had imagined an atmosphere of jubilation and euphoria, with Soviet soldiers exulting at defeating the enemy.
The warden’s depressed announcement came as an anticlimax.
It didn’t seem real until the next morning as they watched the warden unbolt the heavy iron gate. The prisoners started streaming through, jostling each other in their haste to get away before the warden changed his mind, but Tom couldn’t move. Perhaps it was a trick after all, and SS were lurking nearby armed with clubs and pistols, waiting to murder them. But when the gate was fully open, the warden shook his hand, wished him luck, and walked slowly inside, his head bowed and his shoulders slumped.
Tom ventured through the gate on unsteady legs. He kept telling himself he was actually free, free after two years that had felt like a lifetime, yet the longed-for word sounded empty. What did it really mean? Where should he go?
He looked around for his French and Luxembourger comrades. They might know how to get to the Allies. But he couldn’t see any of them and realised that while he’d been standing there, paralysed, they must have gone. After all the hardships they had suffered together, all the support they had given each other, they hadn’t waited for him.
Standing outside the prison gates, he felt like a child whose mother had forgotten to pick him up after school. Abandoned and alone. There was no-one in charge, no-one he could ask for advice. No-one to tell him where to go or what to do. For two years he had dreamed of freedom, and now that it had finally come, it felt too sudden and bewildering.
He straightened his shoulders. He had to stand on his own two feet and find a way to reach the Allies by himself. Flagging down a German army truck, he asked the driver the way.
‘There are Polish troops in the next town,’ the man said. ‘You’ll be safer with them than with the Reds.’
While the driver was speaking, Tom noticed that he’d torn the Nazi insignia off his jacket. No wonder he was scared of the Russians, but being British, Tom knew he had nothing to fear from his allies.
It was a clear May morning, and, feeling more confident, Tom headed towards the town. Occasionally he rested against the mottled trunk of a birch tree to listen to a sound he hadn’t heard for a long time: birds chirping in branches covered in pale green leaves. There was a freshness in the air, a feeling of renewal, and strengthened by the beauty around him, he walked on with a spring in his step.
By evening, tired and hungry, he reached a neat little village where every immaculate house had scarlet geraniums in window boxes. He wanted to ask someone where to get some food, but there was no-one in the street.
He looked up and saw movement behind the upstairs window of a house across the road. A stout woman in a kerchief was peering through the net curtain.
But when he knocked on the door, no-one answered. He had almost given up when the door opened a fraction and the woman gave him a suspicious look.
‘I’m British, I was a prisoner and they’ve just released me,’ he explained.
The woman nodded, and opened the door just wide enough to let him in, and quickly closed it behind him. In her kitchen, Frau Strauss explained that the Russians had descended on the village several days before and she was afraid they’d soon return.
‘They are depraved beasts,’ she said. ‘They raped every woman they could find. Not even old women were safe. I ran and hid in the forest with my daughter. Luckily they didn’t find us. When they weren’t raping they were looting and shooting. They shot people they accused of being spies or fascists.’
Tom found this hard to believe. Throughout his imprisonment, he and his fellow inmates had regarded the Russians as heroes, but from what the truck driver and this woman said, they sounded lawless and dangerous. Yet they had fought with the Allies against the Nazis. It was too confusing and he was too exhausted to figure it out.
Next morning, while he was devouring the eggs Frau Strauss put in front of him, he glanced out of the window and saw a Russian officer in a brown leather jacket sitting astride a motorcycle in the empty street. Unlike the villagers, he had no reason to fear the Russians.
Running outside, he started telling the officer who he was, but before he could ask him how to get back home, the Russian took out his pistol and with a peremptory gesture motioned for him to get on the motorcycle. They roared off at breakneck speed with Tom gripping the seat.
After a hair-raising ride that lasted about half an hour, they stopped at a Russian encampment. Inside a large tent, an officer in a belted khaki jacket with epaulettes sat with his black-booted legs stretched out under a roughly hewn oak table.
He regarded Tom with a disdainful expression and cut short his explanations.
‘Dokumienty,’ he barked. ‘Papers.’
Uncertain which language to use, from habit Tom started speaking in German. ‘I don’t have any papers. I’m English and I was a prisoner’.
The officer dismissed his explanations with an impatient gesture. ‘You talk German,’ he said. ‘You not British. You German.’
Tom’s heart was knocking against his ribs. ‘I’m not,’ he said in English. ‘I’m from Jersey.’ He gestured at his ragged prison uniform. ‘I’ve been in Nazi jails.’
Giving him a disbelieving look, the officer spoke to two offsiders who addressed him as Captain Rostov. They all looked at Tom with suspicious eyes. It was obvious they had no idea where Jersey was.
‘Jersey in the Channel Islands,’ Tom said.
That didn’t help. ‘You German spy,’ Captain Rostov shouted and the finality in his voice made Tom’s blood run cold. During his trial, German judges had charged him with being a British spy. And now that he was free, the Russians, who were supposed to be his allies, were accusing him of being a German spy. But he didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on the surreal nature of the situation. From what Frau Strauss had said, that accusation could have him shot.
‘So where you learn German?’ the captain demanded. When Tom insisted that he learned it at school, the Russian shouted, ‘Nyet! Not school. You collaborate with Nazis in prison. You spy.’
Furious, Tom yelled back, ‘That’s a lie. You’re supposed to be our allies but you’re no better than the Gestapo!’
At this, the captain leaped up from his desk and pointed his pistol at him. He was restrained by his lieutenant, the motorcycle rider in the leather jacket.
In desperation, Tom played his last card. Stripping off all his clothes with feverish hands, he displayed his emaciated body to the startled Russians. ‘German prison,’ he kept repeating.
The captain stopped yelling, and they all stared at Tom. Motioning for him to get dressed, the captain sent an orderly to the field kitchen to fetch some food.
The greasy soup with pieces of beetroot and cabbage floating in it made Tom nauseous, but as he spooned it into his mouth, he congratulated himself on finally convincing the officers that he wasn’t a spy.
As he ate, it struck him that without an ID, he’d be in danger whenever he encountered Russian officers, who seemed paranoid about espionage.
‘Could you please issue me with a document so I can prove I’m a British prisoner of war just released from a German prison?’ he asked.
Tearing a scrap of headed paper from a notepad, Captain Rostov scrawled something and handed it to him.
‘Go back to village and stay. I move unit there tomorrow and talk to you again,’ he said.
Clutching his document, Tom climbed onto the lieutenant’s motorcycle and they roared down country roads until they reached the village. Tom was about to dismount when the lieutenant spoke to him in German.
‘If I were you, I wouldn’t hang around. Captain Rostov doesn’t believe a word you said. He thinks your German is too good for an Englishman and he’ll probably have you tried for espionage. If you’re lucky, you’ll end up in Siberia.’
Tom couldn’t believe his ears. He’d been fooled, and without the lieutenant’s warning, he might have ended up in a Soviet labour camp or dead. He had never imagined that the freedom he had longed for could be so fraught with danger.
He had to get away from there as soon as possible. As soon as he dismounted from the motorcycle, he started walking towards the town where Polish troops were stationed.
He hadn’t walked very far when a farmer in a horsedrawn cart loaded with turnips offered to take him there. As they bumped along on a road streaming with refugees, cars, trucks and buses, all heading east, Tom examined the paper Captain Rostov had given him. It didn’t look official, and for all he knew, it might describe him as a spy who should be detained. He would have to avoid Russian checkpoints and stop speaking German.
In the small Silesian town of Legnica, he found the Polish military office. Hearing his story, the officers slapped him on the back, produced a bottle of vodka, and toasted Britain and Churchill. As they had never heard of Jersey, he drew them a map which inspired another toast, one to the Channel Islands. They explained that to reach England he would have to travel to Cottbus by train, and gave him a railway pass.
Once inside the train compartment, dressed in the civilian clothes the Polish officers had given him, Tom breathed out. He was finally on his way home. But as soon as he stepped outside the railway station at Cottbus, he saw Russian soldiers in the street and ducked into the doorway of a tailor’s shop.
While pretending to study the jacket in the window he overheard the tailor and his customer talking about a prisoner exchange point in the neighbouring town.
Avoiding the main highways that were choked with Russian army trucks going one way, and German buses and cars heading in the opposite direction, Tom walked for most of the day on side roads until he reached the town.
The exchange point was the bridge over the river. Crouching in the bushes to avoid being seen, Tom tried to figure out what was going on. The Russian authorities were located at one end of the bridge and the Americans at the other. The problem was that to reach the American side, he would have to get past the Russian checkpoint, which was set up in front of the official Russian tent.
Observing the exchange procedure, Tom saw American trucks on the other side of the river disgorging Soviet prisoners of war who marched in formation across the bridge. They stood at attention while the Soviet military band played a stirring tune that Tom assumed was their national anthem. While this was playing, the Russian and American guards on either side of the bridge presented arms. This procedure was repeated when British and American soldiers were exchanged.
Tom assessed his chances of getting across. They weren’t good. He didn’t want to risk showing the Russians a slip of paper that might incriminate him. If only he could get past the tent …
Before he had formulated a plan, he was on his feet, sprinting the way he used to race during school athletic carnivals, with only one thing on his mind, the finishing line. Somewhere behind him he heard Russian voices yelling for him to stop but he quickened his pace. A shot rang out but he kept running. Only a few more yards to the bridge. Only a couple of feet. He waved Captain Rostov’s scribbles at the startled sentry, mumbled a few words in what he thought was Russian and didn’t stop until he fell into the arms of the British sentry at the other end, and gasped, ‘I’m Tom Gaskell from Jersey.’
‘Bloody hell, he’s one of ours!’ were the last words he heard before he collapsed on the ground.