Down on the vale of death, with dismal cries,
The fated victims shuddering cast their eyes
In wild despair; while yet another stroke
With strong convulsion rends the solid oak:
Ah, Heaven!—behold her crashing rib divide!
She loosens, parts, and spreads in ruin o’er the tide.
— WILLIAM FALCONER, THE SHIPWRECK
FATHER GOUDREAU’S PERSONAL REASON TO PRAY FOR THE SOULS OF THE EXECUTED GREAT ESCAPERS
In the days following the escape, Father Goudreau’s Roman collar did not exempt him from the extra hours standing on Appell as the Kriegies were counted, recounted and counted again. Anxiety for those still on the run and the captured (none of whom had yet been returned to the general camp population) combined with the heightened religious emotion of the last days of Lent in his prayers for the men, some having taken communion from his own hand.
Only those members of the Escape Committee who had not shimmied their way through the narrow tunnel knew that, as he knelt in his chapel and prayed for the 86 men, the priest from the tiny village of Saint-Pierre-Baptiste de Mégantic, Quebec, had a very personal reason to thank Jesus. To better their chances of blending in with workers and farmers, escapers wore the best approximations of civilian clothes they could tailor. Alone among the thousands of men in the compound, Goudreau wore civilian clothes; indeed, the camp’s thespians often borrowed his slacks and shoes so that the guards attending the performances would not see their tailoring skills or that the leg portion of their flying boots had been cut away, leaving a fair approximation of civilian shoes. For that reason and because of the length of time Goudreau had been a POW, he was offered the chance to escape. As Father Larivière had three years earlier when the Polish underground arranged for him to escape, Goudreau turned down the offer because it would have meant abandoning his flock in the camp. Like Father Boulanger, who in late 1943 had been offered the chance to be repatriated, Larivière and Goudreau (and les autres religieux) were now called to be not only witnesses for Christ in the fallen world but témoins de l’histoire.
Goudreau’s prayers on the evening of 6 April, the third to last day of Lent, were different. Now, he prayed for the souls of 41 as yet unidentified men whom the camp’s new Kommandant, Oberstleutnant Erich Cordes, told the Senior British Officer, RAF Group Captain Herbert Massey, “were shot while resisting arrest or in their endeavors to escape again after having been rearrested.”180
FATHER LARIVIèRE SAYS NOTHING ABOUT SURVIVING A BOMBING RAID
Two weeks earlier, Father Desnoyers wrote Father Cyr Roy, “It seems as you talked too much: ten lines [of your letter] were blacked out and are illegible.” Now it was Father Larivière’s turn to wonder what Father Antoni Toupin had said in the nine lines the Germans removed from his 3 January letter. As Toupin accepted the admonition to remain “en garde!” he welcomed the news that on Easter Sunday Larivière presided over three masses and, knowing of Larivière’s love of music, that two were sung.
Larivière could not spell out the implications of the decision that, come the end of the war, the Oblates and Sacred Heart Brothers would be repatriated as “interned Canadian civilians and not military chaplains of British troops.” His years’ long effort to have the priests and brothers brevetted into the Royal Navy had failed, and thus in order to buy supplies needed to conduct mass, the Oblates would remain dependent on both German goodwill to pay them a stipend and on their fellow prisoners, who gave them a portion of their pay.
Used to Larivière’s formal tone, Toupin would have been struck by the emotion and psychological insight in the last part of the letter: “My flock are almost all old prisoners (i.e. soon four years). The duratio dura (!) [hard times] of their captivity, the longer it is, becomes all that much harder on the nervous system. It’s not an additive factor but, rather, is multiplied by the length. It’s time for it to end, otherwise, neuroses will multiply.” Larivière was unable, of course, to tell his friend in Ottawa that these anguished words stemmed not from an outbreak of barbed-wire psychosis but from the terrifying experience on the Easter Sunday that had just passed.
Despite what he wrote, Larivière did not conduct three Easter masses, presumably dissembling because the censors knew he had previously written of such plans. As he and his guard were making their way through the picturesque streets of the city to the work commando site ten miles from Posen, where Larivière was to say the third mass, the steady drone of aircraft engines triggered the wail of air-raid sirens. When Larivière turned to join the throng heading for an air-raid shelter, his guard pulled his gun to stop the priest. [Larivière later learned that the guard had lost his family when a bomb hit a shelter and that he had spent four days living in rubble.] The guard led the priest to the Posen-East train station, a mile away. A second wave of American bombers heading for the Telefunken and Focke-Wulf factories, near the city’s beautiful medieval core, passed overhead, their bomb bay doors open.181 The two men scarcely had time to take shelter at the foot of one of the station’s concrete walls before the roar of the blast wave washed over them and the earth began trembling. When they looked up, they saw grey plumes of smoke and pulverized stone and brick rise up into the sky above the town square.
TOMMY THOMPSON WONDERS, “DID ONE OF THESE MEN DIE IN MY PLACE?”
The sullen mood that had fallen over Stalag Luft III after the Kriegies learned that 41 men had been executed dissipated slightly around midday on the 15th when some of the captured escapers returned to the compound. For Father Goudreau, who reckoned time by both the Julian and ecclesiastical calendars, their return seemed the fulfillment of the previous day’s offertory prayer that recalled the Israelites’ deliverance from bondage in Egypt.
Whatever joy the POWs felt drained away a short time before dusk when a Kriegie stopped to read a notice pinned to the bulletin board. Too many men gathered round after he called out that it was a list of names for them all to see it, so he read it out. The names of Canadians George McGill, Pat Langford, Hank Birkland and George Wiley were among them. Dead too was Roger Bushell. “That’s not forty-one—it’s forty-seven!” called a man who counted what amounted to a dirge.182
More than a month later, while the Kriegies were building a memorial for the murdered men, which still stands in the German military cemetery, another paper was posted in the compound bearing another three names of men executed by the Gestapo. According to Tommy Thompson’s grandson, Jesse Beauchamp, for the rest of his life, Thompson was haunted by the fact that to execute 50 men, another man died in his stead.
ANDREW CARSWELL AND MAC ESCAPE
Andrew Carswell was at it again under his old identity as Private Dennis Reeves; as his new partner, Mac, was Private Joe Parsons. Once they had escaped from the Arbeitskommando at Eikhammer, each “became” a Czech electrician, with papers authorizing them to report to the work bureau in the port city of Stettin, from where they hoped to board a freighter bound for Sweden. The German guard at the farmhouse near Eikhammer where they were billeted accepted their papers. By contrast, the British corporal who served as the interpreter at the Arbeitskommando and to whom Carson introduced himself as a veteran of Dunkirk was less accepting. “Captured at Dunkirk, my fucking arse! … You’re a fucking Yank, me lad. What are ye doing in that British uniform?”183
Catching the Irish lilt in the officer’s voice, Carson responded in kind. “Well, actually, I’m not a ‘fucking Yank,’ if you must know, I’m a ‘fucking Canydian,’ and we’re both swapovers from the RAF. We’re hoping that you’ll help us escape.” As they had been a year earlier, these last words were met with stony silence, which prompted Carswell to remind the British soldiers that it was their duty to escape. Like the Kriegies at the brewery and graphite mine, these men had every reason not to rock the boat; their wood-cutting quota was set so low that each day’s work was finished before lunch. Carswell’s argument, backed up by Mac’s (and his British accent), won the day, though the British corporal made it clear that their escape would have to be managed so that the Germans would not take it out on the men who remained in the Arbeitskommando.
HMCS ATHABASKAN IS SUNK
As did the men behind the guns on a thousand other ships and boats, those aboard HMCS Athabaskan and HMCS Haida called it “fucking around off the coast of France.” They were referring to part of the preparation for the long-awaited assault on Festung Europa. Just after 3 a.m. on 29 April, the two Tribal-class destroyers were ordered to leave the motor patrol boats laying mines that they had been keeping watch on, in order to intercept two German destroyers. At 3:49 a.m., Athabaskan’s radar picked up the two German ships and a moment later Haida’s gunners opened fire, while Athabaskan’s forward gun fired star shell that dissolved the dark night under a garish light of burning phosphorous, revealing the German ships. “Enemy Shipping Ahead. Stand By,” called out one of Athabaskan’s officers. As Captain John Stubbs’s gunners awaited the order to fire, the helmsmen aboard both ships steered toward T24 and T27, a manoeuvre designed to put them between the German torpedoes they assumed were racing toward them at some 20 knots.
Athabaskan’s leading writer, Stuart Kettles, recalled the moment the torpedo exploded as a kaleidoscope of a muffled roar, a dull red flash and then the dropping away of the 377-foot-long ship from beneath his feet, an aftereffect of the blast wave that lifted the 2,500-ton ship partway out of the water. The blast destroyed Athabaskan’s aft port quarter, killing almost every man there and causing heavy bunker oil to flow into the sea. As Haida, still firing on one of the destroyers, made smoke to cover her stricken sister and Able Seaman Harry Liznick reached the Oerlikon guns amidships, Kettles heard Stubbs call out, “Stand by to abandon ship. BUT DON’T ABANDON YET!” Liznick must not have heard Stubbs’s order, for when the aft fuel bunkers exploded a few minutes later, he was still at the gun.
The blast blew Liznick against a bulkhead, stunning him, and sent sheets of flame more than 40 feet high. “Boiling hot oil, red-hot pieces of [metal turned into] shrapnel, flying timbers and anything that had been torn lose by the explosion filled the air,” recalled Kettles, who had crouched on the open deck and covered the back of his neck with his arm. As shells in the magazine began exploding, Harry Hurwitz, Liznick, Kettles and more than 120 other ratings and officers shed their steel helmets and joined the “Paratroop Battalion.” The light from their burning ship showed clearly the oil-covered water and, worse, the absence of even one of Athabaskan’s lifeboats or Carley floats, all of which had been destroyed by the explosions.
STUART KETTLES SURVIVES ATHABASKAN’S SINKING OFF THE COAST OF FRANCE
For a moment, Stuart Kettles thought Able Seaman Lester McKeeman, who was wiping heavy bunker oil from Kettles’s mouth, nose and ears, was joking when he said, “On a German destroyer. They picked us up about nine o’clock this morning.” Soon, however, McKeeman had rubbed enough oil from Kettles’s eyes so that he could see the German eagle on the uniforms of ratings with Sten guns and rifles at the ready.
Kettles couldn’t remember how he ended up aboard a German destroyer. He recalled jumping, the drop to the sea and, after bobbing back to the surface, “wiping the oil out of my eyes, and spitting the English Channel back where it belonged.” He remembered the slow rollers that threw George Parson onto his face and his own attempts to wrap his legs around Parson so that he could hold him in place long enough to turn on Parson’s life jacket’s light. He also remembered the transformation of a “ghost like form” into Haida, his swim toward her, the sailor yelling to swim toward her fo’c’sle, which didn’t register for a few vital moments. By the time Kettles began swimming toward Haida’s bow, the false dawn of nautical twilight made it too dangerous for the ship to remain stationary to pick up survivors. To signal to the men in the water that he was about to leave, Captain Harry De Wolf ordered his engine room to briefly engage the ship’s screws in reverse. The wash generated by the ten-foot, six-inch screws pushed Kettles a half mile away.
In the minutes that followed, despite there being 84 other men in the same waters, Kettles found himself alone. Soon his legs and arms grew numb in the cold water near where Admiral Nelson destroyed Napoleon’s fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar. The slow-rolling waves of the ebb tide were even more dangerous, for they rocked Kettles like a baby in a cradle. “It wasn’t long before this motion made me very sleepy,” he recalled, and with no one to speak to, Kettles knew he could not stay awake much longer. He likely saved his life by pulling up the headrest of his life jacket just before losing consciousness.
Not far away, Harry Liznick and a number of other men who had made their way to a Carley float thrown into the water from Haida were taken aboard a German ship. Liznick was tormented both by the large blisters caused by splotches of burning oil that fell on his face and arms, and the memory of Lieutenant Clark, who died of exposure as they swam toward a float. Led at gunpoint into a hold, Liznick saw some of his shipmates trying to shower off the thick oil. Just when he’d given up doing so because the hot water had run out, a German sailor came into the hold and motioned for Liznick and another man to follow him back onto deck, where the German naval rating pointed to the body of Able Seaman Charles Pothier, who had just died of exposure. The naked and oily men were ordered to move the body out of the way.
A short time later, the Germans gave Liznick and each of his comrades a blanket and a cup with which to scoop out a measure of warm gruel.
RCN ABLE SEAMAN HARRY HURWITZ DROPS THE “Z” FROM HIS NAME
Since fishing him from the sea, the Germans had been softening up Harry Hurwitz. The psych-ops had started even before they were landed in Brest, France, when the German sailors pointed to and praised the fortifications of the Atlantic Wall. Once ashore, the Germans divided the RCN men into two groups and then put them into small single-man cells in austere barracks. The monotonous food, which was never quite enough to fill their stomachs, and the foul ersatz tea were calibrated to weaken the Canadians’ resolve. The Germans’ most important psychological tools, however, were the denial of cigarettes (which the men got around by rolling mattress straw in old paper and smoking it) and the Sten gun–enforced ban on speaking to each other.
“Du bist ein Yid?”
As the black-uniformed Gestapo officer looked down intently at him, Hurwitz fought to keep a poker face. “No, I’m not Jewish,” he said, wondering if his attempt to hide his origin—by dropping the z from his name when he was first interrogated—had failed. The German, speaking English with only the slightest of accents, then asked where Hurwitz’s parents came from. Hurwitz knew that Geneva required he give only his name, rank and service number. But the Gestapo officer’s question prompted the 21-year-old, who knew that before the war his parents had lost contact with family in Germany, to try to hide his Jewishness. “My mother’s family is from Lithuania, but both she and my father were born in London.”
The Gestapo officer leaned over and with a thin, unnerving smile repeated, “Du bist ein Yid!” Hurwitz tried again to argue but was waved off with “You’re Jewish and from Montreal.”
Seeing no way out and knowing that his life now depended on an officer in one of the most Nazified services of the Third Reich honouring Germany’s signature on the Geneva Convention, Hurwitz asked, “How do you know?”
The officer smiled and said, “Before the war, I worked at the General Electric plant on 1st Avenue and LaSalle Street in Saint-Henri in Montreal [a Jewish neighbourhood], and I used to see you walk past the plant on your way to and from school.” As the officer spoke, Hurwitz’s hands grew clammy and his stomach tightened in panic. Would the thin metal of the identity disks around his neck protect him from Germany’s rage against the Jews, he wondered. Choosing to ignore the Reich’s regulation, which violated Geneva, that Jewish prisoners of war were to be segregated from other POWs, the Gestapo officer said, “Your secret is safe with me.”184
THE DIRECTOR OF MILITARY INTELLIGENCE’S REPORT ON POWS
Canadian officials in Ottawa knew that the Germans were not complying with Geneva’s requirement to provide the same rations to POWs as to garrisoned troops. Citing the amount of food contained in the Red Cross parcels, at Oflag VII-B, in Eichstätt, Bavaria, the Kommandant cut the POWs’ rations by 30 per cent. A month later, on the same page as the banner headlines announcing the invasion of Normandy, the Globe and Mail reported the docking of the SS Gripsholm, carrying several hundred repatriated wounded and sick POWs, 36 of whom were Canadian and from whom Ottawa learned how POWs supplemented their meagre rations. A guard in the guard tower would lower a basket with a chicken, eggs and bread, and haul it back up with cigarettes, cocoa and a couple of chocolate bars. Information also came from letters, including one by MacDonald written from a POW camp in Heydekrug, Lithuania; in it he wrote: “The boys were catching sparrows and eating them. They say sparrow stew tastes very good.”
Nevertheless, Ottawa knew, morale remained high. So did the Canadians’ allegiance to their Allied comrades. When camp officials at both Stalag Luft III and Oflag VII-B, responding to reports by repatriated Germans of how well they had been treated in Canada, offered the Canadian officers special preferences, such as an extra letter home a month or more parole walks, the “Canadian Club” refused them unless they were extended to all British officers.
The drought was almost over; in two days, Ian MacDonald would receive two letters from his parents. Some weeks earlier, frantic over the possibility that, since he had not heard from them, they had not received any of his letters or postcards, MacDonald wrote a short note on a Red Cross form reserved for POWs who had not received mail for three months.
He also wrote a regular aerogram, the bulk of which explains the instructions he had given the Air Ministry vis-à-vis his pay and insurance. In the 15 months since he last heard from them, MacDonald had grown more concerned about his family’s finances and instructed the Air Ministry to send his parents the maximum amount possible. Sensitive to the implication that his proud father was unable to provide for his wife and three children still at home, MacDonald wrote, “Use whatever you need regardless of how much it is.”
Knowing that the German censors would not allow him to explain why he was now in a POW camp in Lithuania, MacDonald did not bother trying to find a way to slip past the censors the fact that he had been moved from Dulag Luft because bombing raids had devastated the area.
RCAF WARRANT OFFICER NORMAN REID TOUCHES THE LIPS OF A DEAD FRIEND
The pre-flight ritual prior to his 41st, and what was to be his final, mission over Occupied Europe did not include urinating on their Wellington bomber’s tail wheel. “As romantic as this image is,” says Norman Reid, who in 1944 was an RCAF navigator, “our engineering officer made it damned clear that peeing on the wheels was dumb because the uric acid ate into the wheels’ bearings’ housing and the synthetic rubber tires, thus increasing the chances of an accident on takeoff or landing.” Preparation at the aerodrome in Foggia, Italy, included careful study of the location of the 300-foot-long, double-span steel bridge over the Jiu River near Filişia, and the optimal altitude for dropping the 4,000-pound armoured “cookie bomb.” As well, since they were going to be flying close to Yugoslavia, which the Germans did not fully control and thus was a better place to bail out, if necessary, than over Occupied Romania, Reid’s crew was briefed on the complicated politics of the kingdom established after the First World War; although they did not know it, just weeks earlier, Churchill had shifted his support from the monarchist general, Draža Mihailovic, to the Communist leader of the partisans, Tito.
“We were the only plane on this mission, and the hope was that the Germans might take us for a photographic mission and not send up any interceptors,” recalls Reid, who when the bridge did not come into view as expected did some quick calculations, which revealed that a wind shift had pushed them off course and they would have to circle back some 50 miles to the town of Turnu Severin (present-day Drobeta-Turnu Severin), Reid’s navigation point, and then fly east again. After locating the bridge, Tom Bradshaw pitched his plane toward it, though they were not yet closing in for the kill. Destroying a bridge cannot be done by flying over it perpendicularly because the bridge’s span would flash too quickly under the bomb sight. Instead, a plane must track along the bridge. “To ensure this, our captain steered a dummy run over the bridge at 1,500 feet,” explains Reid. “We’d been told that the bridge was undefended; still, even though I’d been on 40 other missions and shot at many times, and shot down once, in the minutes between the dive, the run and when we began to climb again, I had to remember to take a breath.”
After circling around, the plane flew between 100 and 150 feet above the train tracks leading to the bridge. Seconds from it, a flak train’s 20-mm rapid-fire guns opened up. “Even above the noise of the four Bristol Hercules engines,” recalls Reid, “I could hear the explosions of the shells that formed flashes in the darkness around us. Almost at the same time, the plane began to shake, and I heard our bomb aimer, Ibar ‘Mac’ McKenna, yell through my headset in a pained voice that said he’d been hit and that he’d released the bomb. Relieved of 4,000 pounds, the plane lurched up about 100 feet and out of the line of fire.” The plume of fuel streaming from its starboard tank turned to fire that trailed hundreds of feet behind the plane. The two-ton armour-piercing bomb severely damaged the bridge, which trains had used in carrying important petrochemical products to Germany.
The 20-mm shells badly damaged the plane’s engines. A starboard one was losing power, while a port engine, its constant-speed unit damaged, raced, causing the plane to veer to starboard. “We didn’t have a co-pilot on this trip,” recounts Reid. “So, as Bradshaw struggled to control the plane, I jumped into the co-pilot’s seat; it took both of our strength to right the rudder and ailerons.” Reid’s precise words, reflecting a lifetime as an engineer, hardly convey the scene. As they fought to control the plane, he was breathing through a mask, the plane that was elegant in flight was shuddering and the steady throb of its engines had been replaced by the roar of the out-of-control port engine.
A few moments later, the wireless operator made his way back into the cockpit. “Mac’s had it,” he said. Reid, who had flown with Mac more than 30 times, told Bradshaw that he had to check for himself and unbuckled his belt while the pilot continued to battle for control of the stricken plane. As the burning aircraft slipped over the Yugoslav border, “I managed to snake my hand under Mac’s flying tunic, which was covered by his Mae West and parachute harness, and felt no signs of his heart beating or breathing,” says Reid. “Then I ripped off his mask and put my lips to his in the hopes of detecting any sign of breathing. I did not and went back to the cockpit and told Bradshaw that, indeed, Mac was dead.”
AN ARROGANT GERMAN BENDS HIS KNEE
Alerted that the Germans were going to search his chapel for a radio, Father Pâquet was already there when a guard named Shöfe, backed by five other guards with bayonet-tipped rifles, arrived. After Shöfe said that he was sure Pâquet would not object to the search, the priest appealed to Shöfe’s sense of honour, insisting that the search be conducted with dignity.
When Shöfe approached the table on which bread and wine became the body and blood of Christ, Pâquet politely asked the German to go no further. With a sneer, Shöfe said, “I trust you, Father, but wouldn’t that sacred table be a perfect place in which to hide a radio?” After the “arrogant Nazi” dismissed Pâquet’s plea for the sanctity of the altar, the priest played his last card.185
“Okay. But, I have to open the tabernacle myself and since you are here in a Catholic church, you have to conform to our ways: you will have to be on your knees before the Blessed Sacrament.” Then, as the Germans stood watching, the Oblate lit two candles, put on his surplice, opened the tabernacle and genuflected, leaving enough room for Shöfe to shine his flashlight in for a moment. Then, to Pâquet’s surprise, the fanatical Gestapo officer was on his knees before the altar.
Though Pâquet was not hiding a radio (it was in Charles Fisher’s sick bay), the Kommandant was right to suspect that, despite their holy orders, the Oblates were not above being involved with smuggling and hiding radios. As noted earlier, Father Goudreau hid a radio in his room, and Father Charbonneau helped a British Kriegie smuggle radio tubes into camp in a cast after he feigned a broken leg on a work commando site.
REID WONDERS, “HOW THE HELL DID MRS. REID’S BOY GET INTO THIS MESS?”
They were not in uniform, but the bandoliers of ammunition slung over their shoulders, the automatic weapons they carried and the lack of coal shovel helmets told Reid they were Resistance fighters. Still, the 20-year-old from Edmonton watched and waited. He had been alone since parachuting out of his burning Wellington bomber—and experiencing, for a few seconds, the inertia-generated sensation of not so much falling as moving forward in tandem with the aircraft, surrounded by the din of the plane’s engines. Given that his landing was so hard it knocked the wind out him, it was a good thing that he had pulled the rip cord after counting to five, rather than waiting until ten.
“How the hell did Mrs. Reid’s boy get into this mess?” he thought as he unclipped his parachute so he could bury it. “It’s difficult to compress silk, and the hole I’d dug wasn’t deep enough. So I threw dirt and leaves and twigs on it,” recounts Reid. He then took stock of what was in his escape kit. A six-inch square of chocolate, some malted milk tablets, a tablet to purify water, two Benzedrine tablets, a hacksaw and 48 American dollars would not go far.
When the four men he took to be Chetniks (Yugoslav partisans) neared his hiding place, he stood up and, despite the pain of a rapidly swelling sprained right ankle, jumped up and down with his hands raised. “They noticed me and soon I was looking down the wrong end of their automatic rifles,” says Reid, who hoped that “they did not shoot first and ask questions later.” Asking and answering questions, however, was all but impossible, since the men did not speak English and Reid did not speak Serbian. Worse, although he’d managed to make his story of being shot down understood, he knew that they were skeptical, since the Germans attempted to infiltrate underground Resistance units; skeptical, that is, until he took them to see his ill-buried parachute.
The Chetniks then led him to a peasant’s hut. A few hours later, another peasant brought them honey, feta-like cheese and unleavened corn bread. When, upon deciding it was time to move on, they saw that Reid’s ankle was too swollen for him to walk, they put him in a cart filled with maize and being pulled by two oxen directed by an elderly Serbian woman dressed in warm peasant clothing, a scarf wound round her head; to hide and keep him warm in the high altitude, the Chetniks covered him with the maize stalks. Reid spent his first full night in Yugoslavia in a hut “made of a pile of stones that were held together with some kind of mortar on top of which was a roof, with a hole in the middle for smoke, made of woven twigs.”
LIZNICK KNOWS MORE ABOUT GERMANY THAN HIS INQUISITOR COULD GUESS
During his interrogation, the Germans provided some unintended entertainment. The 70-year-old interrogator feigned believing that “AB” (standing for “able seaman,” Liznick’s rank) signified “AA” (anti-aircraft gunner) and that Liznick had fired on the Germans who had abandoned the torpedo boat that HMCS Haida shot up. After Liznick set him straight, the interrogator changed tack and said that he thought the Allies would win the war. He seized on Liznick’s quick agreement to ask, “Why, did you see something?” Liznick was not, of course, going to say anything about the buildup of Allied forces he’d seen in England, so he took shelter in the anodyne comment: “No, I just feel it. We know it in our hearts.”186
The 19-year-old Kriegie may have been raised in the postage stamp–sized village of Iroquois Falls, Ontario, but he knew more about German history than his interrogator guessed. Liznick’s parents had lived through the German occupation of the Ukraine during the First World War and had watched Hitler’s rise to power with dismay. Liznick had to stifle a laugh when the Gestapo officer told him the Jews caused the war because they were trying to corner German women.
JACK POOLTON BECOMES A SABOTEUR
The argument the POWs raised against unloading tanks damaged on the Russian Front from a train was as much about what the Geneva Convention meant by “war work” as it was about giving a short and thin Kriegie time to crawl into a tank and steal a headset that was later used as part of a radio set. Equally frustrating for the guards was the day Jack Poolton broke three shovels—and, since every member of the work party admitted to being the miscreant, the guards had to forgo punishing anyone, lest the bomb-damaged rails remain unrepaired.
Emboldened, Poolton and a British soldier risked death a few days later when they removed the rubber seals between airbrake hoses, which rendered the train’s brakes useless. Other times they removed the packing that lubricated the axles of the freight cars—some loaded with Hungarian Jews being transported to Auschwitz—and replaced them with crushed stone.187
FATHER PÂQUET’S PENTECOST IS INTERRUPTED BY A BOMBING
While les religieux were proud of Stella Maris, the small wooden chapel at Milag und Marlag Nord, it took only a glance upward to see the rough wooden beams and thin ceiling of a German POW barracks. The floor on which they knelt, too, told the truth of where they were, for it was not marble but unvarnished wood, recalling the room in which the Pentecost occurred 50 days after the Resurrection more than it did the marble or closely fitted and highly polished wood of the churches that generations of the faithful had built in Quebec. From a distance, the chalice on the left side of the altar, itself a rough-hewn table covered with a white tablecloth, was similar to the simple silver ones used in churches like those in Saint-Ludger de Beauce, the village where Father Gérard Boulanger had grown up, or Missisquoi, Quebec, where Father Bernard Desnoyers had first learned the catechism. Up close, the chalice’s lustre was less intense and the hammer marks became visible, as did the blobs of solder that cemented the reshaped Klim can to the stem and the stem to the stand.
In the middle of the Pentecost service, Luke’s 2,000-year-old words never seemed more appropriate. For just as Father Pâquet finished reading “And suddenly from the heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting,” hundreds of anti-aircraft guns opened up on the hundreds of American bombers flying near the camp. The explosions drowned out Pâquet as he started to read from the Acts of the Apostles: “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared, among them, and a tongue rested on each of them…. [as they] began to speak in other languages” (2:2–4).
The guns being situated so close to Milag Nord—the reverberations of the exploding propellant and the shells above shaking the barracks so severely that Pâquet broke out into a sweat—was in violation of the Geneva Convention. Fear, and faith in what lay beyond the Pentecost ceremony, ensured that no matter how frightening the explosions, no one left the chapel.