Charles Waite - Survivor of the Long March

Two guards escorted me this time, a similar route it seemed, except we were going to the main camp at Marienburg. You never knew where you were half the time. There were so many camps and forts which formed the overall Stalag 20B and there were prisoners coming and going out on work detachments all over the area. There were few signs or landmarks to get a sense of place. Any names I saw meant very little to me in relation to anywhere else.

I was standing on my own again in a train, the two guards sitting together in the middle. One took out a packet from inside his jacket, unwrapped it and started to eat. It looked to me as though he’d got a boiled egg and some bread and butter. Oh well, I thought, I’ll eat something too as I missed breakfast. I bent down and put my hand inside my kit bag and felt for the paper packet of biscuits and managed to draw one out.

‘ Essen verboten! ’ – no eating, the guard shouted and I jumped and nearly dropped my bit of food. He got back to eating and I put the biscuit in a pocket. It was going to get all smashed up which was a shame. It would just be crumbs by the time I got there. So I stood and watched the guard munching, and the empty countryside going by while thinking about my biscuits.

The main camp was in the middle of the town surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. I looked up at one of the watchtowers as we went through the main gates. We had the usual ritual of checking papers, opening and closing gates. The guards took me across a square, up some wooden steps into a building and down some dark and dismal corridors. No idea where I was or what was ahead. One of them opened a door, pushed me in and shut the door behind me.

There was an assortment of different furniture. A chair, made up of odd bits of wood nailed together, one of those folding card tables with a rather tatty green felt top and a wall cupboard, locked with a padlock. There was a single iron bed with a palliasse and three folded blankets on it. I prodded the straw mattress which rustled nicely and felt and smelt freshly filled. Not bad. I felt the blankets, and I gave them a sniff too. Quite clean and not too rough.

‘This isn’t too bad. I could stick this for ten days,’ I said to myself. Better settle in, so I took off my overcoat and laid it on the bed; put my bundle, which contained my bowl and spoon, toothbrush, piece of rag, which acted as a flannel, on the table and sat down and waited to see what would happen next.

‘What the bloody hell have you been doing to land up here?’

A British Army officer stood in the doorway shouting at me. I jumped up and stood to attention. I did know that much, even though I hadn’t saluted anybody since being captured. I was too shocked to speak. I didn’t like the sound of this. Why was he shouting at me?

‘All right, Private, at ease. You can sit down,’ he said. ‘What’s been going on then to land up here?’ So I told him everything that had happened, leading up to that point.

‘Bloody stupid, eh? Could have got yourself shot.’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. I didn’t need him to remind me.

‘You’re here now, still in one piece. Right. We’ll have to see what’s what, won’t we?’ He went over to the cupboard, undid the padlock, opened the door and took out a stethoscope.

What an idiot I was! Of course, he was the camp doctor come to check me over before I started my sentence. Then I knew that this was his cupboard, his table and his bed. If this was his room where was I going to be sleeping?

‘So, do you think you can do this?’ asked the doctor as he unravelled the stethoscope.

I wasn’t sure what he meant. My last medical had been on my call up. I was classified ‘A’ then, I was probably ‘Z’ now.

‘Take your shirt off, man. Do you think you can take the solitary?’

I started to undo the buttons of my tunic but my fingers didn’t seem to work properly and I fumbled with them. Do solitary? Was I fit enough? You can’t say no, can you? Can’t be a whinger. I was as fit as any man, I thought, who’d been in a POW camp for years, forced to work outside all year, come rain or shine, twelve hours a day, six days a week. I took a deep breath and said, ‘Yes. I can do it.’ I still didn’t know what was going to happen to me.

The doctor listened to my chest and did the same to my back. ‘Deep breaths. Cough. OK.’ He looked into my eyes and mouth and checked my pulse. He told me to put my shirt back on and he returned his stethoscope to the little cupboard. ‘Not in bad shape considering. You’re going to be on half rations, you know. Think you can make it?’ I nodded. Half of nothing much, thinking of what we normally got.

‘Now you know talking isn’t allowed. Mustn’t speak, not to anyone. Not even the guards, all the time you’re in here. Or in the yard when you exercise or when you have a wash. Keep your mouth shut.’ His eyes caught sight of my bundle. ‘What’ve you got in there?’

‘Just the usual, sir. Washing things. Bowl and spoon.’ I opened it up to show him and he peered inside.

‘What’s that?’ The doctor pointed at my little pack of biscuits and started to fold back the paper to have a look. ‘Right, you got biscuits. You can’t take them in. Not allowed to take in any food. Didn’t they tell you?’

I didn’t think he wanted me to reply or to hear that nobody had told me anything. I continued standing in silence, watching him as he took out my precious biscuits and stacked them neatly in a pile on a shelf in his cupboard.

That’s a shame, I thought, they would have come in handy. No breakfast that day and only a meagre piece of bread and bit of sausage the previous night. I was dying for something to eat and drink. My heart sank when I heard the next statement.

‘You should get a hot meal on the third or fourth day.’

‘That’s a long time to wait,’ I thought. ‘I haven’t got any choice.’ I was willing to bet though, that it would be soup.

‘You can have some of these,’ he said, and picked up some paperback books from the bottom shelf and handed them to me.

I would rather have my biscuits, I thought, but kept my mouth shut and slipped them into one of the inner pockets in my greatcoat.

The doctor looked me up and down one last time and patted me on the shoulder. I thought he was about to say, ‘Chin up, young man, it’ll be fine,’ but all he did was open the door, put his head out and called for the guard.

A guard came in and gestured to me with his rifle. I picked up my coat and bundle and followed him, pausing for a moment before going out of the room. I looked at the doctor and the closed cupboard door where my biscuits were.

We walked along corridors and then passageways which got darker and colder and smellier. You wouldn’t have known it was summer outside. We went down some steps and passed door after door. Then by the miserable light of a single bulb hanging down on a frayed cord, I could see one door ajar at the end. It had a tiny pane of frosted glass high up with barbed wire tacked outside. The guard kicked the door open, pushed me in and then slammed the door shut behind me.

It was almost completely dark inside so I couldn’t make out a thing. I felt my way around until my foot hit something and I tripped and fell. It was some sort of board fixed to the wall. Ah, that was my bed. I patted my way along it till I felt a rough blanket. What a stink! Better off without it. I wasn’t going to sleep under that so I pulled it off, dropped it on the floor and kicked it to the side. Well, it didn’t have far to go. I suppose the cell was about 8ft by 8ft. I was to pace it out a few times A day over the next ten days.

What about a toilet? Now I wasn’t used to anything fancy. Camp latrines are nothing to write home about and squatting down in a field is OK as long as you avoid nettles and thistles but what was I meant to do here? Were they going to let me out to go somewhere? A few seconds later I got my answer. Ting. I kicked something metallic in the corner, not a bucket but an empty jam tin, as it turned out. Germans like their jam and this tin was catering size and was empty at the start of my stay, thank goodness but very full by the end.