I pass, like night, from land to land;
I have strange power of speech;
That moment that his face I see,
I know the man that must hear me:
To him my tale I teach.
— SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE,
“RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER”
For some, the moment of liberation was quickly followed by truck rides to airfields and flights to Britain. Barely a day passed between when Royal Marines slapped Ian MacDonald’s back and showered him with cigarettes and chocolate bars and when he climbed down from the Stirling bomber in an airport in England, where, within minutes, he went through what amounted to the ex-POW’s baptism. “They took us to an outdoor area and put small pipes in our pants legs and the arms of our jackets and blew in DDT to kill the fleas and lice.” Having washed and donned a new uniform, he and some other men climbed into a truck heading for the Canadian base at Bournemouth. “For weeks I’d had only the haziest idea where I was. And then, on the truck that took us from the airport, I saw through the wet windshield the unmistakable landmark of England, Big Ben, and I knew exactly where I was,” says MacDonald.
Andrew Carswell was back in England on 19 April, just days after feasting on a loaf of white bread still warm from the oven and a disconcerting encounter with two British soldiers in a Jeep who urged Carswell and another POW to kick down the door of any German’s house and “pick up some souvenirs.” When Carswell pointed out that looting was illegal, the soldier asked, “And who’s going to report us?”271 Honoured by the co-pilot who offered the ex-Lancaster pilot his seat, Carswell’s first glimpse of England was of the cliffs of Dover standing against the setting sun. In his tattered clothes, he felt bashful when, upon landing, a pretty young woman wearing the stylish uniform of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force led him to table and supplied him with tea and cakes as she explained the delousing and bureaucratic procedures to follow. Then he was assigned to a sergeant’s room, where he found clean towels, soap and a razor, as well as a pair of RAF-issue pyjamas. Sitting on the bed, with its clean, starched white sheets, Carswell savoured his freedom.
Jack Poolton arrived in England on the 22nd. In the ten days since he’d been liberated when an American Jeep arrived at the barnyard near Ditfurt and a German guard handed over his rifle with the words “Ich bin jetzt der Gefangene (sic)” (I am the prisoner now), much had happened.272 A week earlier, as the former POWs awaited transportation to Britain, a delegation of Ditfurt’s older women came to the Senior British Officer and asked him to billet British or American “kommraden” in their homes to protect them against marauding Poles. Poolton volunteered and understood the mother of the family he was assigned to when said she had always “despised Hitler,” though he did not believe her. And he understood what she was offering when she said she would sleep on the couch and he would sleep in the bed with the young woman. The man who had survived a sniper’s bullet at Dieppe, who had been so thirsty at Envermeu that he tried to suck water from the damp earth beneath a factory floor, who had been shackled like a common criminal, turned down the offer by saying he would sleep on the couch.
A few days later, while walking back to the town, Poolton and several other men were surprised when a soldier stepped from behind a hedgerow, Tommy gun at the ready, and said, “Who the hell are you guys?” Poolton’s explanation brought a deluge of cigarettes and chocolate bars from American troops, who, despite the radio message sent on the 12th, had not known there were any POWs there. At Halberstadt, Poolton’s and the other British POWs’ haggard looks stunned the “beautiful American Red Cross women” and sickened the “black American attendants” charged with delousing.273 On the 21st, after he realized RAF planes would not be soon arriving, an American pilot welcomed Poolton and his British comrades aboard his plane for a flight to Brussels. A day later, Poolton walked into an office at Waterloo Station and sent a telegram to his family before travelling to the Fourth Canadian General Hospital in Farnborough.
Late the previous week, the SS Duchess of Richmond tied up in London and Father Boulanger disembarked. His journey back to England began, as did Jacques Nadeau’s and that of the men the Russians liberated with him, with a trek east. Nadeau’s liberators had allowed the Canadians to take a horse and cart, and their encounters with suspicious units to the rear eased (though their watches not saved) by a pass signed by none other than Marshal Zhukov, who upon meeting the former Kriegies insisted on toasting them with vodka. By contrast, a Russian officer told Father Boulanger and the men with him, “The road is there … March!” Over the 28-day, 200-mile arduous march across the devastated Polish countryside, the priest came to see his small, almost always hungry party as a gathering of Cains, frightened and fleeing “the land of sin.”274
Somewhere south of the ruins of Warsaw, Nadeau’s group boarded the same Katowice-Odessa train Boulanger had boarded a day or two earlier after praying before the famed Black Madonna, in Częstochowa, Poland. Perhaps because Boulanger was a priest or because he had crossed Poland with British POWs, whom the Soviets assumed to either have received aid from or been sympathetic to the Polish nationalists loyal to the exiled government in London and not the Communist puppets Stalin was in the process of installing in Poland, the Russians herded Boulanger’s group into an overcrowded cattle car the priest likened to “a library of humanity.” In Nadeau’s car, in contrast, the five Canadians could stretch out and sleep. None of the Canadians was injured when several trains jumped the tracks. Instead of helping the wounded and respecting the dead, the Russian troops and trainmen looted the broken bodies. Boulanger wrote in disgust, “You’ll have to convince someone else other than me that these are civilized people … But I forget … they are our allies! Vive Stalin! Vive the Russian paradise.”275
Of the few days he spent in the Black Sea port before boarding the SS Duchess of Bedford, Nadeau’s most difficult moment occurred while he and his comrades were being deloused. The women who came into the room to pick up the basket filled with their flea-ridden clothes pointed at their penises, laughing at each other’s running commentary. Though spared this mortification, Boulanger was interned in a makeshift camp where armed guards patrolled and once again Red Cross parcels staved off hunger. On 22 March, Boulanger stepped aboard the SS Duchess of Richmond, and since she, like the Duchess of Bedford, belonged to Canada Steamship Lines, like Jacques Nadeau, the priest was actually on sovereign Canadian territory almost a month before reaching London.
By 8 May, Victory in Europe Day—immortalized for most North Americans by the image of a sailor kissing a woman in Times Square—more men, including John Harvie, were back in England; years later he recalled enjoying the difference between the second-class hotel he had been billeted in when he was a fledgling airman and the turreted Royal Bath Hotel he stayed in in 1945, and rued the fact that his stomach was not quite up to the rich food available from the kitchen more used to serving royalty. Though liberated by the Russians, Stan Darch was lucky that he was not, as were Kingsley Brown and hundreds of other men from Stalag Luft III, still in a POW camp, this time under Russian control.
The well-armed female tank commander likely knew nothing of the growing tensions between the Russians and the Western Allies over Stalin’s demand that Soviet POWs who had fought for the Germans be forcibly repatriated to Russia. These tensions had resulted in Russian soldiers firing over the heads of ex-POWs who had climbed into American trucks arriving in Luckenwalde, thus forcing the men back into the prison camp.276 Instead, the tank commander gave Darch and the other POWs a team of horses and a wagon that allowed them to cover the 40 miles to the American lines in time to eat supper at a proper hour on 5 May. Darch arrived in England on the 10th, three days after the crew of HMCS Athabaskan arrived in the belly of a Lancaster bomber and three days before Robert Brooks and his crewmates arrived in England; they had been liberated by the Russians on 23 April.
Hitler had been dead for almost a month, and the war in Europe had been over for nine days when a plane carrying most of the Oblates and Sacred Heart Brothers touched down at Stanmore, just outside London. Since they were not soldiers, after being deloused they were sent to Canada House. There, les religieux were given identity papers and money. The Knights of Columbus arranged for rooms at a reasonably priced hotel. Despite years of living dans la langue des anglais, the priests and brothers soon discovered that cockney was for all intents and purposes another language and that its speakers could not understand their pronunciation of “Trafalgar Square,” “Pall Mall” or even “the Thames.” Saddened by the devastation wrought by the Blitz, by the V1s and V2s, one of which destroyed the transept of the Catholic church closest to their hotel, the Oblates and brothers soon had reason to thank Jesus again, for Fathers Goudreau and Bergeron had joined them. By the end of the month, their ranks had grown to 14 with the arrival of Fathers Larivière and Juneau.
Among the last Canadian POWs to leave war-shattered Europe was Kingsley Brown, who along with hundreds of other Allied airmen, including many who had been in Buchenwald, waited with increasing impatience in Luckenwalde. The end of the war did nothing to improve the appalling conditions at Luckenwalde, though the local commander, Major Ledbedev, moved quickly to improve the food situation by making available to the Allied soldiers stores captured a few miles away. The wine the Russian drivers shared with Brown was welcome and, in his inebriated state, the show they put on blasting the empties and then carving their initials into the concrete supports of an overpass with their automatic weapons was impressive. However, what meant more to him was the surplus of beans. For about a week before the Russians drove Brown and the other Allied airmen to a Bailey bridge that spanned the Elbe, and thus the American lines, the airman who had spent years being hungry brought pails of bean soup to a German family that lived in Weinberge, “a little row of charming middle-class homes nestled on a wooded slope overlooking Luckenwalde.”277 At one time the facility held 45,000 men, in a space designed for less than a quarter of that number. Five thousand men died there, including thousands of Russian POWs killed by typhus, and were buried in unmarked mass graves.
By the time Brown and the men with him were feasting on hot white bread, Fathers Desnoyers and Boulanger were already back in Canada, as Carswell and John Harvie soon would be. Within a week, Ian MacDonald walked up the gangplank leading to the RMS Aquitania, still painted battleship grey; before heading across the Irish Sea, the ship berthed in Greenock, Scotland, where Stuart Kettles and most of the survivors of HMCS Athabaskan boarded the ship that had taken 400,000 men to war. Stan Darch walked up the gangplank of SS Ile de France on 8 June. A week later, RMS Scythia, which survived being hit by an aerial torpedo during the invasion of North Africa, steamed into Montreal’s harbour carrying most of the Oblates and Christian brothers; by then the last missing religieux, Father Pellerin, who after being liberated had been sent to Rome, where he met with Pope Pius XII, had made his way to London.
The Canadian government’s decision to repatriate the POWs as quickly as possible, and because they were scattered in different places and reached Britain in a piecemeal manner, meant that men from the same unit were not necessarily on the same ships that steamed into Halifax or Montreal, or the same trains arriving in Montreal from New York. Thus, their welcome back to Canada tended to be a low-key, personal affair. Almost certainly the exception to this occurred just after 8 a.m. on 29 May when the bulk of Athabaskan’s survivors walked out of Montreal’s Windsor Station to find that the band that had serenaded them as they stepped onto the platform was now playing in the street in front of a crowd of 3,000 cheering civilians. Though he welcomed the warmth of their sentiments, mindful of the loss of 120 shipmates and his ship, Stuart Kettles felt that the cheers were misplaced.
Poolton spent these weeks—during which the survivors of SS A.D. Huff, Edward Carter-Edwards and thousands of other Canadian POWs, arrived in Canada—in a hospital, which he had entered shortly after VE Day. He was so thin and sickly looking that his Uncle Bill did not recognize him at a party until he asked Poolton’s brother who his “friend” was. Weeks of being injected with liver did little but damage his extremely thin skin. The infection that affected his ears and throat caused days of delirium and could have killed him had doctors at the No. 19 Canadian General Hospital not turned to the new wonder drug, penicillin. By late July, he too was back in Canada.
On the journey north from Toronto, Poolton, like many other former Kriegies, rehearsed what he would say to his mother and wondered if he would simply smile or cry. To his surprise, his mother and siblings boarded the train at Moonbeam, the stop before Kapuskasing, so that they’d have a little private time before the train arrived in what everyone involved called “Kap,” where some 200 people were waiting under a huge sign that read “Welcome home, Jack.” Poolton found himself as if in a dream unable to say even hello and, more ominously, unable to say how he felt. Perhaps after years of dreaming of it, his first night home could only be a disappointment. An uninvited couple plied him with questions about being a POW, when all he wanted to do was sit at the kitchen table and thank his family for the parcels they’d sent him.
In 1945, nothing was known about what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder; indeed, the Red Cross went so far as to advise families not to talk about the war, and to rapidly change the subject if it came up. On Poolton’s second night home, his father, acting as he might have had the war never occurred, took his son to see the film Drums. The scenes of a Scottish regiment being destroyed in India’s North-West frontier left the survivor of Dieppe traumatized. Like Stan Darch and other Kriegies, he had had nightmares while being a prisoner, but now they came more often. “I’d had a few nightmares in the camps, but once I got home they became more common. I’d be back on the beaches of Dieppe and men would be dying and crying out around me. I’d scream out in the middle of the night and scare the hell out of my mother,” says Darch, who also remembers being wound up so tight that for about a year the sound of a roofer’s construction gun caused him to flatten himself by a building and the sight of an airplane doing stunts over his backyard caused him to dive to the ground in expectation of a strafing run.
Wracked by survivor’s guilt and separated by a gulf from the victorious soldiers now coming home, Poolton’s thoughts turned darker. The horrible memories of the battle he had been in, the humiliation of being shackled, the pain of the Hunger March combined now in a different way than they had in the POW camp, where, no matter how hungry, cold and lousy they were, the POW’s urge to survive was paramount. In the safety of northern Ontario, where his mother’s home cooking was before him three times a day, he started to consider suicide.
As Poolton struggled, reproaching himself for every promise he had made in Germany but now found himself unable to keep, les religieux fulfilled a promise they had made to themselves and the Virgin. On 15 August, after having spent a few weeks with their families, they gathered at the Oblate basilica at Cap-de-la-Madeleine, near Quebec City, for a mass of thanksgiving. As he had so often behind the barbed wire, Father Pâquet led the priests and brothers: “We come to say ‘Thank You,’ kind Mother, in the joy of our liberation and the profound happiness of our return. We thank you for having kept us alive when so many of our companions of exile and captivity have died, and by doing so, you have spared inexpressible sorrow to those we love.”278
Religion too helped Ian MacDonald, who met his first cousin on the ship that brought him home. Their fathers picked them up at the train station in Truro, Nova Scotia. As MacDonald walked into his kitchen in Lourdes, his mother said, “My prayers have brought him home,” recalls Rita MacDonald, Ian’s sister. He drank a bottle of milk, with cream floating on the top, afterward explaining to his mother that the only milk he had had since leaving home had been bluish and burned your stomach.
“When I came home, I had some nightmares and for a while the summer thunderstorms brought back memories of air raids. But, as I had during the war when I’d had those scrapes with eternity in France and Germany, I had faith in my Maker, who had brought me home,” says MacDonald. Hours later, after catching up on the news of his family, he knelt beside the bed he had slept in the night before going to war and said his prayers with the same rosary the SS officer had insulted two years earlier.
Faith and the strong Jewish community in Montreal helped ease Harry Hurwitz’s way back to civilian life. Not long after walking into the family’s apartment in an area Mordecai Richler would later make famous, Hurwitz heard how every morning for five or six months his sister would go down the stairs as soon as the mail had been delivered to check for a letter from him. As his father looked on, his sister told of the arrival of the letter in which Harry informed his family that he was a prisoner in Germany. She ran to the synagogue where her father was praying. Although females were supposed to stay to one side, she approached her father anyway, and as the elder Hurwitz davened, she said, “Papa, Harry’s alive.” He finished his prayer, then took the letter to the rabbi, who announced that their prayers had been answered.
That night, his first back home, the prayers said before dinner, which Harry had said hundreds of times in a Jewish version of a messe blanche, dated back millennia and linked him to his bar mitz-vah when, in the eyes of the Jewish community, he became a man.
In the fall, MacDonald headed off to St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, to study first-year science (a year later he entered the pharmacy program), Hurwitz got a job with the Lionel company, makers of model trains, and Darch went to trade school to study to become a machinist. Poolton struggled, working first laying hardwood floors and roofing, and then in a paper mill. During the early fall, he pinned his hopes on a three-ton Ford pickup truck that friends persuaded him to buy so he could fulfill his promise of working for himself. By mid-fall, he had decided to enroll in a mechanics course sponsored by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Since wartime production restrictions had not yet been fully lifted, the truck did not arrive at the Ford dealership until January 1946. By then, Poolton was halfway through the course and “starting to get on with my life.”279
Still in a state of shock from what he’d been through in Buchenwald and on the Hunger March, Carter-Edwards cried when his mother and brother picked him up at the train station in downtown Hamilton and took him home to the low bungalow, a stone’s throw from the railway tracks that still run past the Dofasco plant, which during the war stamped out millions of armour plates used in ships, tanks and armoured personnel carriers. And he knows he cried when he saw his sick father. Much else of those early months home is still buried, save for the nightmares and the pain of being disbelieved.
The nightmares, Carter-Edwards recalls, were all so similar. There was a building made of red brick. It was filled with people standing almost shoulder to shoulder but, like on the Appellplatz at Buchenwald, there was enough room for them to collapse. “I didn’t see them on the ground, but I knew they were dead,” he says. At times the nightmares were of a woman in tattered clothes holding a baby. “It was obviously her child,” Carter-Edwards says. “And as I watched, its eyes would slowly close.” They were being gassed, and when the baby’s eyes closed, they were all dead. “I knew what the smoke from the crematorium would look and smell like.” For months he would escape by going on late-night walks on the streets of Hamilton with his mother.
His parents, and later Lois, whom he married in 1946, believed the stories of his experiences. But many others, including well-meaning friends, did not. “I’d tell people I’d been in Buchenwald. Some responded by saying I had a severe problem, that I’d mixed up being a POW and being in Buchenwald. They’d ask, ‘Are you Jewish?’ or ‘Do you have a number tattooed on your arm?’ They were right that I was in psychological trouble, but they were wrong that I’d made anything up”—Carter-Edwards’s tone as he says these last words registering the still-present pain of conversations he had with young men now long dead. What was more painful and, Carter-Edwards believes, more damaging were those who pretended to believe him but behind his back expressed their doubts. “My circle in Hamilton wasn’t large, and I soon heard what people were saying about me. Despite the pain and rage in me, the things people were saying kept my emotions frozen, and I kept silent.”
In the early 1950s, Carter-Edwards, who had returned to his job at Westinghouse, joined an amateur theatre troop. “I’d always liked plays, and I joined for fun. I had no idea that learning to become a character, learning his emotions, acting on stage and even singing would begin to free up my emotions,” he says. “I still could not remember much of what happened, but at least I no longer felt emotionally dead about those years. My wife’s warm family also helped, and gradually I began to feel normal again.”
Like so many others veterans of the war, for decades Carter-Edwards did not speak out about his experiences. “It was a strange phenomenon,” says MacDonald. “As we got on with our lives, none of us wanted to talk about our past. Even early on, when I was studying to be a pharmacist, I knew other men who had been in the air force, and we didn’t speak about our experiences. Later I even met men who I knew were POWs, but they didn’t know I had been one, and it wasn’t ever brought up.” In the late 1980s as the 50th anniversary of the end of the war approached, a renewed interest in the veterans and their experiences prompted many to break their silence. Carter-Edwards can date the recovery of his voice almost to the day.
In the early 1950s, the Canadian government recognized via a sentence on his service record and his disability pension that he had indeed been in Buchenwald. In late April 1988, Carter-Edwards received a letter from the International Tracing Service, an arm of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva. The letter confirmed that, according to German records, Carter-Edwards was committed to Concentration Camp Buchenwald by the Paris office of the SS (the order, presumably, also committed the Allied airmen in Fresnes Prison to Buchenwald). The letter, the Red Cross emblem stamped on its upper-left-hand corner now faded, goes on to say that “prisoner number 78361 was treated several times in the infirmary of Concentration Camp Buchenwald in the period from 11th of September 1944 to 14th of October 1944 (diagnosis pneumonia BTS) and from 15 October 1944 to 9th of November 1944 (diagnosis, pneumonia BTS, grippe, bronchitis) [and] was transferred to Stalag [Luft III] Sagan on 28th November 1944.”280