We have to fight this battle not only with guns in daylight, but alone in the night, communing with our souls, strengthening our faith that in common men everywhere there is a spring of innocent aspiration and good will that cannot be sealed.
—JOSEPH PRIESTLY
EDWARD CARTER-EDWARDS SURVIVES IN THE INFIRMARY
The memories are indistinct, which makes them so different from what Edward Carter-Edwards remembers of the last moments aboard his plane: the explosion of the shell, the burning port wing and his crawl to the escape hatch in the Halifax Mk III’s nose cone. His memories of being in the infirmary are of voices too far away to hear, hazy faces and hands that he knows helped but that he could never shake—memories so different from those of landing and of running down the moonlit path and of taking the right at the fork in the road, or of the British woman (herself trapped in Occupied France) who brought him food while he hid in a barn for a week.223 He can remember the second safe house, where a Resistance leader said he’d be shot if he couldn’t prove he was a downed Canadian airman, and, some weeks later, the moment of betrayal when he and three other Allied airmen were pulled from a car in Paris and beaten by jackbooted Gestapo agents. The memories of Fresnes Prison, where he had so little food he passed blood, where fleas and lice infested his clothes, and the sounds of other prisoners being beaten and shot there are also clear. He sees the bed changes in the night in Buchenwald’s infirmary, the Doktor barking out orders that barely registered in his feverish brain, as through a glass darkly.
Few who entered Buchenwald’s infirmary lived. The guttural order that hovers still in Carter-Edwards’s consciousness came from the Doktor, who followed the principle laid down by the camp’s first Kommandant, Karl-Otto Koch: “There are no sick men in my camp. They are either well or dead!”224 The word Krematorium that the Doktor pronounced on his daily rounds meant “kill this one”—usually with an injection of carbolic acid, followed by a fiery end.
Carter-Edwards survived for two reasons. First, at night the orderlies “submerged” the Canadian delirious with fever; that is, they moved him from bed to bed so that the Doktor would not recall him from the day before and order his death. The orderlies, who belonged to the Communist underground, took this risk because they saw Carter-Edwards and the other Allied airmen as military leaders for their planned uprising. The second reason he survived was that one night he heard a voice that he not only understood but for some reason trusted, telling him to stand. When he did, Professor Alfred Balachowsky, whose work at the Pasteur Institute interested the SS enough to ignore the fact that he was Jewish and to assign him the laboratories at Buchenwald, stuck a large needle in Carter-Edwards’s back and into his infected lung. As he pulled back on the syringe’s plunger, he drew into the needle many cc’s worth of infected fluid, saving Carter-Edwards’s life.
GEORGE SHAKER LEARNS THE DETAILS OF D-DAY
It was, all in all, a good day.
Toward evening, a lecture by a Royal Marines commando captured in Normandy thrilled George Shaker and the other men from the A.D. Huff. Lieutenant Hart whet their appetite with stories of training in Scotland. Then he told of D-Day—of tens of thousands of men marching into hundreds of ships, of hundreds of planes towing gliders, of the parachutists, of the huge naval guns and of the landings on the beaches the Kriegies now learned were named Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah. He told them of his dash across the beach, of capturing two villages and of being captured in a third. Not even hearing of the men who died terrible deaths dampened their mood. For Hart’s words fleshed out the BBC reports and what the flights of hundreds of Allied planes above heralded.
And that morning, Shaker and some of his shipmates received personal parcels. The cold and rainy weather that had set in early (and which would soon both bog down the Western Allies and slow the Russian juggernaut) made the warm clothes all the more welcome. The thousands of cigarettes, sent in packages of 500 from the T. Eaton and Hudson’s Bay companies, too cheered the men, even as their arrival triggered one of the inexorable laws of economics. On the black market, the price of 100 cigarettes fell by more than half, to between 30 and 35 reichsmarks.
JOHN HARVIE WATCHES IN HORROR AS MILITARY DISCIPLINE FRAYS
The morale and nutritional boost provided by the arrival of some 2,000 Danish policemen could not have come at a better time. For weeks the Allied airmen had subsisted on tasteless, dry sawdust-enhanced Brot, made somewhat more palatable by rubbing garlic on it, and an intermittent ration of “sausage” paste that even dogs ran from. Near starvation had caused ribs to appear and bodies to retreat further into the amorphous clothes that provided no protection against the cold winds blowing through the wide avenues of Buchenwald. Military discipline, which Squadron Leader Phil Lamason (the Senior British Officer in the camp) moved on their first day in Buchenwald to enforce, produced, the airmen believed, a pool of mental strength necessary for them to survive. On 5 October, the bonds of discipline frayed when, after the midday soup did not even approach sating his hunger, a flyer “broke ranks and ran to the food tubs which were about to be carted back to the kitchen.”225
All knew the hopelessness of finding anything in a tub, for as disgusting as the slop was, the men who ladled it out made sure nothing went to waste, any amount that wasn’t divided by the ladle’s own justice being distributed by way of a lottery. The flyer’s hunger they knew too. More frighteningly, each step he took toward the food tubs measured the distance each of them was from violating his own oath, the man’s footsteps marking the path from being “an officer and gentleman” to the final collapse into the Hobbesian world, where those whose strength was not completed wasted stole food from the weak.
Divided among the more than 80,000 souls in Buchenwald, the Danes’ food could have supplied only a few calories or grams of fat or protein per person. Although committed to a concentration camp, the Danish police thought of themselves as prisoners of war and so gravitated toward the Allied airmen, with whom they generously shared their food. Even this largesse would not last long, but for a few days, John Harvie and the other Allied airmen tasted sweetness or the unctuousness of fat, which lifted spirits and, if not filling bellies, held off the inner beast for a while.
SHAKER’S DIARY RECORDS THE QUICKENING TEMPO OF THE WAR
Shaker’s diary records the ferrets’ discovery of the tunnel that had been in use for two months and the stately progress of fleets of bombers, the dull thud of their bombs exploding somewhere near Bremen providing the bass line. The war news seemingly spills forth so fast that on 8 October, Shaker resorts to bullet points:
• American 1st army made small breakthrough around Achen
• Canadians have a hard struggle in Holland
• Russians staring heavy offensives and wiping up back territory
• Landing on Greece progressing favourably
• Largest air-raid over Germany yesterday
A day later, his diary tells of the capture in Holland of four Canadian soldiers, who arrived at the POW camp ragged and torn, and in need of medical attention. He knew of the impending liberation of Budapest by the Red Army. Shaker errs by thinking the glowing night sky meant that the important naval base at Wilhelmshaven had been bombed; the 1,000-plane RAF raid was, in fact, against Brunswick and caused a firestorm that killed hundreds and destroyed much of the city.
GEORGE REID IS BEATEN
The foreman at the Arbeitskommando did nothing when, on his first day in the salt mine, George Reid insulted the Reich by saying, “Ah, in Canada nicht Schaufel [not shovels]. All is machine.”226 The German got his revenge a few days later when, after accusing Reid of spitting at him, he beat the Canadian. The trigger for two further beatings, one with a pick handle, was the foreman’s frustration at not being able to finger who was sabotaging the mine’s electrical system; Reid, as it happens, was not responsible.
After an altercation with another guard, Reid served an official sentence that, like the beatings, violated Geneva. He was locked for an entire shift in a room that was so filled with salt dust that the Germans did not let prisoners work in it for more than two hours at a time. After ten hours, his “throat felt like someone had run a wire brush down it” and he coughed up blood.227 The salt burned his eyes, making them so sore that opening or closing them was a struggle, while the jagged edges of the miniscule shards of salt crystal ripped open the lining of his nose, which bled copiously.
CDWARDS OWES HIS LIFE TO A BRAVE DUTCHMAN
In the quarry, men whose skeletons were barely covered by paper-thin skin chipped out stones using picks and sledgehammers. There, bored guards took aim at prisoners covered in sweat and dust, or soaked by the rain, and then shot them for target practice. Today, second growth hides the scars in the earth carved by thousands of men, many of whom died, their bodies dragged back to the main camp, where they escaped the torment set in the pleasant hills of Thuringia the only way possible: “up the smokestack.” It is to this Steinbruch, or literally, “place of stone breaking,” that Carter-Edwards was ordered on the morning he was released from the infirmary.
The walk from the Appellplatz to the quarry took Carter-Edwards’s work commando past the gallows, past where three of his fellow Canadians had breathed their last, and through the SS compound, where Carter-Edwards saw the SS bandshell and a building that held the SS Kasino. But none of this registered in his befogged brain, which managed, still, to direct one foot in front of the other.
“My only clear memory is of that brave Dutchman, Kurt Baars, who must have been the foreman. When I reached the quarry, he took me aside and said that I was clearly too sick to work there and that he was going to put my name on the list as having died. ‘You’re going to go back to the infirmary. How you survive [there] is up to you, but this is all I can do to save your life,’ he said,” recalls Carter-Edwards in a tone of reverence for Baars’s risk.
IAN MACDONALD IMAGINES HIS MOTHER IN THE KITCHEN
At least his mail, though not the packages his mother carefully packed for him, had started arriving again, so Ian MacDonald knew that, three months earlier, his parents had been well. The letters did strange things to time. No matter when the letter was written, POWs tended to read them as if they had been written just a few days earlier, and they had the effect of transporting the POWs back to Canada in an almost “cinematic” way. He “saw” his house and yard in the spring, when the trees were leafing and the flowers, coming up. He was as if at home watching the garden come to life, and his mother at the stove, an apron over her housedress, making apple preserves to use in pies.
The card written on 16 October arrived in Lourdes, Nova Scotia, on 21 December, while the letter he wrote at the beginning of October arrived on Christmas Eve. Though the letter dealt with what could appear as a serious topic—forced inoculations—MacDonald adopts a jocular tone, saying, “We’ll probably be riddled with needles when we get back.” The card doesn’t mention the inoculations, but its banter reflects better than did the letter’s assurance that his arm “wasn’t too sore” that he had suffered no ill effects from the inoculations.
On Christmas Eve, as the MacDonald family knelt to pray at midnight mass, they could not help but think about how, at the beginning of October, Ian was already thinking about their reception of his letter at Christmastime, and that on that holy night MacDonald’s overriding emotion was his desire for freedom.
THANKS TO REICHSMARHSALL HERMANN GöRING, HARVIE AND 156 ALLIED AIRMEN LEAVE BUCHENWALD
The Allied airmen’s hopes rose when they heard that officials from Berlin would be coming to Buchenwald to investigate what even Kommandant Hermann Pister admitted was the mistaken commitment of the Allied airmen to the concentration camp. To help the officials establish that they were indeed airmen—and hence came under Geneva—Squadron Leader Phil Lamason ordered the airmen to go beyond giving only their name, rank and service number to also say when they were shot down and what squadron they belonged to; they were still, however, to refuse to answer any question that would tip off the Germans about the Resistance.
On 21 October, the airmen’s fading hope turned to anxiety when they were ordered to assemble at the Effektenkammer, the storage building where the SOE agents had been ordered to surrender their personal effects before being marched to the Leichenkeller to be murdered. The airmen knew that their identity cards were stamped with the acronym DIKAL (Darf in kein anderes Lager), which meant “Not to be transferred to another camp,” and that Berlin had authorized kangaroo courts to try to execute what Goebbles called Luftgangsters or Terrorfliegers.
Instead, they found themselves in the final moments of a bureaucratic affair that began when a Russian prisoner who worked at a nearby airbase gave a note Lamason had written to a Luftwaffe officer telling of the airmen’s plight. Sometime later, two Luftwaffe officers, including Luftwaffe ace (58 victories) Hannes Trautloft came to Buchenwald, ostensibly to inspect the damage caused by the Allied bombings. In reality, however, he came to meet with Lamason to determine whether he and the other “airmen” were in fact airmen and not spies. Trautloft’s report, which told of the imprisonment of the Allied airmen, landed on Hermann Göring’s desk. The Reichsmarshall demanded that his officials get the airmen out of Heinrich Himmler’s bureaucratic empire and transferred to his.
Inside the Effektenkammer, the vaunted German bureaucracy returned to each airman the shabby clothing he’d worn when hustled out of Fresnes Prison, clothing that provided scant protection against the October cold. For the men who had been captured wearing their cut-down flying boots, the fleece lining provided the first soft and warm sensation they had experienced in months. Then the SS crosschecked numbers with identities, and the Luftwaffe officers checked each name against the nominal role authorized by Berlin. Finally, as the rain fell, the SS, unwilling to miss a chance to impress Göring’s men, provided a row of black-uniformed, machine-gun-toting troops who marched the 156 Allied airmen to the gate that when closed left behind 12 men, including Carter-Edwards and his fellow Canadian, Harry Bastable, and the American Roy Allen in the infirmary.
JACQUELINE WRITES TO HER FIANCé, JACQUES NADEAU
The unseasonably warm weather that graced the small town along Quebec’s Richelieu River only intensified her loneliness. But in a mirror image of the tens of thousands of letters POWs wrote that strove to maintain their position within their families, Jacqueline’s letter shows that, despite his absence, Jacques Nadeau remained present. “Where is a small prisoner who awaits his hour of deliverance?”227—which in her native French is less a question about location than about time—she writes and then assures him, “Oui, Jacques, elle sonnera bientôt cette heure” (Yes, Jacques, the bell will soon toll that hour). Her prayers at morning mass asked that her fiancé come home safely.
Aware that he would not be reading her words for months, Jacqueline continues, “When you receive this letter, the winter’s coat of snow will probably cover the ground. It might even be 1945.” These sentences do more than tritely take into account the time lag between when the letter was written and when it would be read. By sketching Nadeau’s world as it exists when he reads the letter, Jacqueline placed herself in his time frame. Though the snow would not fall for months, she was writing about the scene as the snow crunched beneath his feet at Appell the morning the letter arrived at Stalag II-D, in Pomerania. By extending the period before Nadeau received the letter into 1945, Jacqueline was being realistic; by late October, no one believed that the war would end before 1945. Rather, Jacqueline brackets time and space so that even though they are separated, in the way that matters to Nadeau, she is with him in his present.
HARVIE HAS TROUBLE ADJUSTING TO A POW CAMP
Later they would learn about the 50 men murdered after the Great Escape. Later still, some of the men of the self-styled Konzentrationslager Buchenwald (Buchenwald Concentration Camp) club would come to feel that the Kriegies they met at Stalag Luft III, who had electric lights, regular if meagre food, and amenities such as toothpaste and single bunks, lacked, as RAF Squadron Leader Stanley Booker said (somewhat unkindly), “the soul, the magic of real companionship and dependence on each other.”228
But in the hours after leaving Buchenwald, while in boxcars loaded with only 25 men, a pot of ersatz coffee warming on a small coke stove, Harvie and the others could not believe their good fortune. Over the course of the three-day trip they ate bread, margarine and sausage, and, once each day, real soup prepared by a field kitchen. The guards were still armed, but they were old enough to be the airmen’s fathers and were shocked at what they heard about the men’s treatment in Buchenwald.
As they walked the two miles from the siding to the POW camp, instead of the foul smell of death, their noses were filled with the scent of pine. Instead of the dance of death by human skeletons behind electrified barbed wire, they saw men in uniforms playing football, and RAF and Luftwaffe officers on the sidelines watching the game. Instead of being ordered to strip to be sheared like sheep, Harvie and the others were led to a shower room, where “they were able to luxuriate without harassment, in the delightful warm water, with smooth Red Cross toilet soap, and … dry themselves, not on rags as [at] their last shower in Buchenwald, but on fresh white towels also supplied by the Red Cross.” Instead of stained rags or worn clothing stolen from those burned in the ovens, they were given uniforms, two sets of clean underwear, socks and two shirts. Instead of being led to a rock-strewn field or desperately overcrowded barracks, they were led to a barracks with pictures of loved ones pinned to the walls; with cubby holes for personal possessions; with bunks, one for each man; and with tables complete with plates, knives and forks. Even a gramophone played music.
The same latrine and “Smelly Nelly” that had so distressed Father Goudreau years earlier delighted Harvie. Later Harvie would learn that hunger stalked Stalag Luft III. Given their wretched condition, it was unlikely that any of the new arrivals was a German plant, but with a new tunnel begun, the Escape Committee took no chances. After the execution of the 50 escapers, the Kriegies feared that as the Reich crumbled, Hitler would order the execution of all Allied POWs. Therefore, instead of leading out of the camp, “George” led toward the German guards’ compound, where if necessary the POWs would seize weapons and fight their way toward whichever Allied army was closest. Unlike when the Germans discovered “Tom,” the discovery of this tunnel would endanger Father Goudreau; he could hardly have claimed ignorance of the escape tunnel that began immediately behind his chapel.
Harvie was interrogated a few hours after he attended his first church service since the one at which his squadron asked for God’s help on D-Day. The following Monday, after having been initiated into the mysteries of circuit bashing, Harvie was given his first high-protein Red Cross parcel. Later that day, he received his full security clearance, which meant that, though no longer a bombardier and still so weak that he could barely make one circuit, he was again a man at war.
HUBERT AND WINSOME BLENKINSOP LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED TO THEIR SON
Although written by a lowly British signals corps driver named Ernest Betts, the letter was like manna from heaven. One day, Betts had stopped at a country house near Webbekom, Belgium, to barter for some eggs. Welcomed into the Pypens’ house, he saw a photo of what he took to be an RAF officer. When he asked who he was, the family told him that they had hidden RCAF Squadron Leader Edward Blenkinsop in the weeks leading up to 11 August. Betts’s letter showed that Hubert and Winsome’s son had survived the crash of his Lancaster bomber, and he had known kindness. Not only this, but he “was not hurt much,” wrote Betts. His abbreviated story of Blenkinsop trying to teach the Pypens’ three daughters English sounded so much like their Teddy. The Pypens, who “thought the world of him,” were, Betts told the parents in Victoria, “very lucky not to have been shot for hiding him.”229
Betts probably knew more than he wrote. No censor would have allowed the words through telling of Blenkinsop being blown out of his Lancaster bomber and landing so hard he dislocated his shoulder and was knocked out. Likewise, Betts could not write what he knew of Blenkinsop’s move from safe house to safe house, or that for a few weeks he had lived in a vermin-infested hovel. And delicacy might have kept the Pypens from telling Betts that, the morning after Blenkinsop arrived, Mrs. Pypen found him in tears from the incessant itching, the shame of wearing lousy rags and the fear that he might infect the children of his benefactors. According to Paula Pypen, who was then 18 years old and smitten with the airman, her mother did more than just wash the Canadian evader again and disinfect the bedding; she cared for him as she would have her son, who would have been the same age had he not died when he was little. Betts likely also knew of Blenkinsop’s plan of waiting for the advancing Allied armies to reach him. But in early August, following the murder of a prominent local collaborator, the SS moved to settle accounts with the Resistance. Blenkinsop was arrested with the Pypens’ son, Jos, and another man as they ran from the Pypen farm moments after word arrived that the SS had started mass arrests in the village.
St. Gilles Prison, where Blenkinsop was taken after being arrested, already held some 50 Allied airmen. Ironically, the prison named for the patron saint of fear of night was a Bruxellois version of Fresnes, another island of torment shrouded by what the Gestapo itself called Nacht und Nebel—Night and Fog. In addition to the beatings, isolation and putrid food, the Germans staged mock executions, which Blenkinsop knew about because other officers tapped out word of these horrors in Morse code on the prison’s pipes.
Word that Blenkinsop had been seen alive in Belgium heartened the pilot’s family in Victoria, who paid special attention to the news stories that told of the Canadian Army’s advance toward Belgium. They had no way of knowing, however, that on 30 August, German guards evacuated St. Gilles Prison.
Even as 40,000 German soldiers fled Holland and Belgium, the SS made plain its demands: each prisoner was to prepare two parcels; one with toiletries and some food to be taken with them, and another with valuables that would be sent on later. Shoved into trucks and then cattle cars, the prisoners were in various states of shock and panic. The moment of elation vanished quickly when the train stopped almost as soon as it started. For instead of the doors being slid open by Allied troops, whose guns could be heard in the distance, or by Resistance workers, the train sat under a baking sun for hours.
As was true of so many other trains filled with civilian men, women and children—and POWs—there was not enough room for everyone to lie down. Nor, of course, was there adequate food or water. As October passed into November, the train crossed into Germany. Just after midnight on 3 November, it reached a suburb of Hamburg. Then, Blenkinsop and 52 other Allied airmen and more than 300 Belgian prisoners disappeared into the Neuengamme Concentration Camp.
CDWARDS IS AMAZED THAT GERMAN SOLDIERS PROTECT HIM
The stamp on his POW record is clear. Carter-Edwards was transferred to Stalag Luft III on 9 November 1944. The words spoken by a Luftwaffe officer are, however, less distinct. All that mattered was that after 101 days, Carter-Edwards was about to leave Buchenwald.
“I don’t remember gathering up anything or even how we arrived at the train,” says Carter-Edwards. “Harry Bastable who, like Carter-Edwards, had been shot down on 8 June 1944], who had also been in the infirmary when the rest of the boys left, told me we left the camp together. The only part of the trip to Stalag Luft III I remember is when, at one of the stops, the guards wanted to get something to eat, so they led us out of the train car and into the station. It didn’t take long for the people in the station to realize we were airmen—Terrorflieger—and they soon started threatening us. The guards pointed their rifles at the crowd and, to protect us, led us back to the train.”
HARVIE FINDS THAT A CHURCH SERVICE MAKES HIM HOMESICK
Since arriving at Stalag Luft III, Harvie had been initiated into the mysteries of tin smithing, tunnel engineering and how ferrets searched for tunnels; how a well-timed cup of real coffee, piece of chocolate or cigarette could suborn a guard; and, amazingly enough, ballroom dancing. When he first saw the paper on the bulletin board offering dancing lessons, he thought it was “a subtle British joke” but soon found that the men viewed these classes as seriously as they did those in accounting or the common law, or the lecture by the Kriegie who once raced at Monte Carlo.230 The presence of three of his barracks mates in the class did not lessen his nervousness when he went to his first lesson. The instructor drew on a blackboard, mapping out foot movements with the precision of a navigator.
Harvie was surprised by his reaction to dancing with the male instructor, who took the female part. It took only moments, but the drab barracks in the middle of Silesia in a camp that held 40,000 dissolved as he fantasized about asking a girl at the Ritz-Carleton in Montreal to dance and surprising her with his footwork. In his daydream, Harvie held the girl in his arms as he “effortlessly led her through the most intricate steps and routines…. We would retire to the candlelit table in the corner where, holding hands, she would easily persuade me to talk about my heroic wartime adventures.” When the reverie ended, he saw another POW “with a faraway look on his face humming to himself while taking odd little steps and turns” and knew that, for at least a few moments, he too was dancing with his girl.
Five weeks earlier, just after arriving at the POW camp, had Harvie talked to Father Goudreau after Sunday services, he likely would have agreed with the priest’s complaint that the men were not devout enough. Now, the Canadian pilot had stopped going to Padre Douglas Thompson’s services, though not because he had suffered a crisis of faith. Rather, he found that, far from linking him to the Divine or to his family back home, the hymns and music he had learned as a child made him unbearably homesick.
BLENKINSOP IS A SLAVE LABOURER
The letter from Squadron Leader W.R. Gunn shattered the hopes the Blenkinsops had carefully built on corpsman Betts’s letter. True, Blenkinsop had survived the crash of his plane, but he was now under a death sentence for having been caught out of uniform. Hoping that a statement from Sir Anthony Eden might save their son, the Blenkinsops wrote to him; their decision to work through the British foreign secretary showing just how underdeveloped Canada’s machinery for dealing with its POWs was.
Unlike Reid, who was given every Sunday off and laboured in the dry salt mine, during the coldest and wettest winter in generations, Blenkinsop slaved away outside at the Deutsche Werft shipyards near Hamburg, wearing only a paper tunic and wooden sandals. Day after day without any breaks, Blenkinsop’s day started in the middle of the night. At noon, he and the other slave labourers were given their one meal: 200 grams of sour black bread, 10 grams of margarine and the ubiquitous watery soup. By late November, the Canadian, who shivered through the night on a paillasse while sharing a thin blanket with a prisoner named François Fernand, had fallen desperately ill.
LES RELIGIEUX HEAR THE PROMISE OF REPATRIATION
Many POWs report that even as conditions in the camps became harsher because Allied bombing prevented the transportation of coal from the Ruhr Valley, guards became friendlier and some Kommandants relaxed a few rules. Earlier in the war, when each was serving in adjoining parts of Milag und Marlag Nord, the SS had prevented Fathers Barsalou and Bergeron from meeting for sacramental purposes. Now, however, for the second time in just a few months, some of les religieux were attending a religious retreat.
Just after finishing the mass, Father Pâquet announced, “The [Swiss] ambassador delegate is in the camp in order to tell you some very happy news.” Later, toward the end of the retreat banquet, which consisted of chickens and duck, Pâquet rose and, with a glass of wine in his hand, said, “Those passengers who remain of the Zamzam will be repatriated. All that we lack is a boat, and we expect one at the beginning of January.” Several of the priests and brothers wept openly. Brother Georges-Aimée Lavallée was not at all surprised that after 66 days of rain, that afternoon the sun shone brightly.
ROBERT PROUSE DIGS UP TREE STUMPS FOR FIREWOOD
The order to draw their Red Cross parcels was not accompanied by the usual excitement. For according to the Kommandant, these would be their last because of the ceaseless bombing of depots and trains. Combined with the earlier cut-off of coal-dust briquettes, this foretold a sorry Christmas and a cold and hungry winter.
The deep cold soon forced the Germans to agree to allow the POWs to forage for wood to heat their barracks; to heat their own barracks, the Germans imposed a 10 per cent “tax” on them. For the first few trips, the Kriegies had use of an old, sway-backed horse, but it soon died, leaving the weakened men to drag the wood back to camp. Though the POWs could have overpowered the guards “with the Allied advance and constant bombing, plus the increasing itchiness of the Jerrys’ gun fingers,” recalls Prouse, there was no point in doing so.231 Further, had they made a break for freedom, the Kommandant would have cancelled all future foraging parties, and those left behind would have remained desperately cold.
The foragers used some of their dwindling supply of Canadian cigarettes to bribe guards, who not only allowed the POWs to remain unguarded in a room in the guest house where they ate lunch but also bought them good stout German beer. Several hundred miles away, at a POW camp near Schivelbein, Poland, not far from the frigid Baltic Sea, Stan Darch paid a teamster a pack of cigarettes to bring his wife a ball of yarn that came from worn-out socks to knit the POW a pair of gloves. For her troubles, Darch paid her with a bar of Camay soap.
FATHER JUNEAU SURVIVES A BOMBING RAID
The POW knew that while the fleets that sailed across the Reich’s skies, some with more than 1,000 planes, heralded their freedom, they did not come without danger. Near noon on 18 December, six American planes mistakenly dropped their payload on Father Juneau’s camp, in Austria.
The blasts threw men some distance away to the ground and killed 48 men, including two doctors in the small hospital, which was all but obliterated. Others, including Joseph Charles Hobling, the Anglican chaplain with whom Juneau shared a room, died in their barracks. Juneau would have died with him, but just as he reached the door to their room, he heard a voice saying not to enter it and he remained in the corridor. Thanks to “God’s mercy,” he told his parents in a letter written three days later, “I was not even wounded.” Providence did not, however, save a French priest.
When the smoke cleared, Juneau saw that the tabernacle had been smashed. Some consecrated Hosts—which Juneau knew were the very body of Christ—lay on the floor among the wreckage, while others lay among the broken plaster, smashed into shards.
CHRISTMAS EVE
The men at Stalag Luft III knew that there’d be no repetition of 1943’s Rabelaisian celebration during which both the Kriegies and goons got so drunk on rotgut whisky that some of the former climbed the inner barbed-wire fence before collapsing in the area between it and the second fence (the Christmas spirit explaining why the guards didn’t open fire), and several of the latter ended up sleeping off their drunk under the POWs’ bunks. “How could the drab life of a prisoner of war,” Harvie wondered, “[have] room for such frivolous things” as Christmas decorations; the answer lay in the chapel.232 Harvie found there light glinting off the decorations and the chalice, and the white linen napkin in which Father Goudreau held it in the joint service with the Methodist Chaplain, Douglas Thompson. Whether they intensified homesickness, as they did for Harvie, or spun mystic chords linking POWs closer to their families, the carols unleashed a flood of memories, as did the tinned turkey, cranberry sauce and plum pudding in the special Red Cross parcels distributed on Christmas Eve.
At Milag Nord, where the light covering of snow added to the festive atmosphere created by the garland strung around Brother Antoine Lavallée’s barracks and the chapel, midnight mass in Stella Maris began at 11 p.m. By contrast, the Kommandant at Stalag VIII-B ordered that the mass be conducted earlier, which is why the chapel was full at 7:30 p.m. when the air-raid siren began to wail, just as Father Desnoyers was preparing the offering and the choir sang “Adeste Fideles.” A moment later, the camp lights went out and, as the choir continued singing, a few men rose and put up the blackout curtains. With only enough light for the congregants to see Desnoyers’s white chasuble and the shimmering of the chalice, the choir intoned the “Sanctus.” The siren’s wail had been long forgotten, but the chapel remained in shimmering darkness as the choir sang “Agnus Dei” in celebration of the birth of the Lamb of God.
Near 3 a.m. on Christmas Day, as POWs across Europe lay either sleeping or remembering Christmases past, in one small corner of Westertimke, a subcamp of Milag und Marlag Nord, something akin to the Christmas truce of 1914 occurred. Six days earlier, Father Bergeron had agreed to conduct a second, clandestine midnight mass for 32 guards. The mass was unlike any other Bergeron had ever conducted. At no point were all his congregants present; rather, there was “a continuous coming and going of armed soldiers, of clanking genuflexions, of entrances and exits.”233 Since some soldiers could not be there for the blessing of the Eucharist, to ensure that the mass “counted,” Bergeron prepared Hosts for the sentries to take when they arrived—no matter where he was in the service. To lessen the chance that their officers would notice that the sentries had abandoned their posts, for which they would have faced the death penalty, prisoners took their places as the first light of dawn broke on the faux guards’ homeland across the sea.
This being his third Christmas away from home, Stan Darch, who was on a work party on a farm, knew that the buildup to Christmas would lead to a letdown. “It’s most memorable for the booze we made from prunes and raisins from the Red Cross parcels. There were 20 of us and there was no ceremony, but we enjoyed the booze we made. And then when alone, of course, I thought of my family,” he recalls.
Harvie lay awake on Christmas night wondering if his family even knew he was alive—and if Jean and Bert were married, and Bert already flying with Bomber Command. He picked up his pen and, after writing another letter home and a postcard to friends in Scotland, took out a slip of paper that he had found in the pocket of the flight jacket he’d been given upon arriving at Stalag Luft III. On the paper was a female’s name and address, which he assumed came from a girl working in the Birmingham factory that made RAF flight jackets. Perhaps she collected letters from airmen posted to exotic locales. In any case, here he was, a young man forced to cool his heels in a German POW camp, with an address of a girl whose hands had actually touched the jacket that now kept him warm. Later he wrote that he “had fun” writing a postcard to her and imagining her surprise when she heard from a prisoner of war.234
MRS. E.M. CALLAGHAN RECEIVES A CURIOUS LETTER
The letter that arrived at 1368 West 8th Avenue in Vancouver troubled Derek M. Warner’s mother enough to bring it to the attention of Canadian Army officials with whom she worked.
Her son had an expert knowledge of the Vancouver area coastline, yet he had written, “Do you think you could try and get me thru the right connections at your work some D.N.D. 1/25,000 maps. Particularly of the Vancouver area. I would like to get some as they would be very handy for making pleasure trips. I have been doing some work on my Spanish of late and a lot is coming back.” From this illogical request, together with other letters to his wife and grandmother telling them not to bother writing because they would soon be seeing him, Canadian intelligence officers determined that he was sending a message through them to MI9: that the soldier captured in Holland on 13 October was busy planning an escape.
STUART KETTLES SEES AIRMEN DIE TERRIBLE DEATHS
Thirteen hours before the turning of the year, on Brother Antoine Lavallée’s 1,354th day of captivity, Kettles and the other POWs at Milag und Marlag Nord watched the sky in awe and horror. As much as they were awed by hundreds of bombers attacking targets in and around Hamburg, and by the huge clouds of black smoke that billowed into the sky, presumably from burning oil tanks, they were horrified by the human cost they saw when planes broke apart.
Lavallée wrote of “white parachutes balancing for what seemed long periods in the clear blue sky.” Kettles was stunned by the sight of one parachutist turning from a white blossom into a fireball that fell to earth. Then he saw two of a group of four burn. Elsewhere in the sky, nine men jumped from one plane, and one man’s chute did not open. It was, he later wrote, “a hard thing to watch him come down, his arms and legs dangling in all directions.” He saw the man slam into the ground and his lifeless body then bounce almost 20 feet in the air.