Armageddon - Max Hastings [283]
By 1944, there was scarcely a farm in Germany which was not dependent upon PoWs or foreign forced labourers to replace absent soldiers. Stanislas Domoradzki, a Pole, was among those treated far less humanely than Tom Barker. He was regarded as a slave by the first family for whom he worked near Kitzingen on the river Main. “Stan” was just fourteen when he was detained in a summary round-up near his home, herded on to a train and shipped to Germany. He was issued with a yellow “P” armband, and sent to a farm where he was relentlessly beaten and bullied by Herr Schmitt, his elderly employer, and Schmitt’s daughter-in-law. “You’ll fill in for my sons who are away fighting,” said the farmer sourly. Stan was eventually returned to the local mayor’s office, as not worth his keep. He was not strong enough to manage heavy labour. He fared a little better with his next employer. The father of the house was a harsh taskmaster, but his eighteen-year-old daughter Guedraut befriended Stan, and eventually provided his first sexual experience.
As an officer, Captain John Killick was not liable for work. He spent his time as a prisoner in a room with three other men captured at Arnhem. The adjutant of 1 Para occupied himself almost exclusively, it seemed to Killick, in polishing his boots. He himself played a guitar in the camp band. The paratroopers were exceptionally fit when they arrived, so that it was several months before hunger began seriously to corrode them. They were appalled by the mental state of some of those who had been captives for four or five years. “Many had become deeply withdrawn. Several were frankly psychotic.” When Richard Burt, a Liberator gunner, arrived at Stalag IVB after being shot down in November 1944, “we were told by the guards not to stare at our fellow-prisoners, because many of them had been here a long time, and acted a little peculiar. If we were to see them sailing their little boats on the fire pond, we were not to make fun of them. I guess before it was over, we were all a little peculiar.”
Yet it often fell to long-serving prisoners to lend support to bewildered, traumatized new arrivals. At Stalag IVB, the British were horrified by the state of some of the Americans who joined them after the Bulge battle: “their morale was at rock bottom. They were shocked, frightened, suffering from frostbite,” and in need of help and leadership. In all the camps, unlikely people held the prisoners together and strove to keep spirits alive. In Stalag IVB, the guiding light was a forty-year-old dental officer, who had been “in the bag” since 1940. Another veteran, Regimental-Sergeant-Major Andy Samuels, earned the lifelong admiration of other inmates for his leadership in the last months of the war.
The tedium of camp life was dreadful. It was shattered at intervals, however, by incidents which emphasized the prisoners’ circumstances. At Stalag IVB, three PoWs were shot dead during 1944: one was caught stealing coal; another crossed the perimeter tripwire; a third broke the curfew. A twenty-year-old Liberator gunner from Pittsburgh, Charles Becker, believed that the guards at his camp, Stalag IV in Pomerania, behaved well enough as long as men obeyed the rules: don’t cross the warning wire, ensure that windows are barred and no lights shown at night: “I thought they did the best they could under the circumstances and conditions.” Yet Becker suffered the usual chronic malnutrition. His teeth loosened. The diet of starch, bread and potatoes inflicted constant