|
Air photograph: Stalag VI-A, Hemer, where I was
sent immediately after liberation
Tu continue
To
put me in a position more appropriate for posing he propped me against the
back of the bed, so that I reclined on it. It was extremely uncomfortable
considering that I had almost no buttocks, but it was worth suffering for
art’s sake. After a while the painter retired without letting me see his
“masterpiece” or helping me back into a more comfortable position. With
enormous effort I slid down into the bed.
Then I
saw the card that Doctor Dyakov had left on a
bedside table. I could not understand a word of the diagnosis written in
Latin, but took a closer look on measurings. I
weighed 26 kg! On the sketch of my thorax a part of my right lung was
crosshatched.
Mischa
called me from the opposite corner of the ward. He was being treated here
as well. He said his feet were badly injured by frostbite, like mine, and
his doctor, suspecting they may turn gangrenous, thinks a part of Mischa’ foot will have to be amputated. My right side
inmate turned out to be my compatriot – he came from Moscow. His name was Anatoly Ivanov. Before the war had started he used to play
cello in the Bolshoi Theater Orchestra. We found
plenty of things to talk about. We reminisced about Moscow, Tretyakov
Gallery, and Recreation Park
with all its rides, which was as popular in our capital as now is Disney Land in the USA.
We talked about the Bolshoi Theater musical
performances I heard on the radio. I have actually seen only two of them –
“Dubrovsky” and the “Red Poppy”. I whistled some
familiar melodies, and Anatoly corrected me when I was out of tune. He
would give me a blow-by-blow account of production plots, mises en scène, decor, actors’ attire and
performers. His glowing descriptions helped us to while away the time.
One day they brought test tubes into
our ward to test phlegm samples for tubercle bacilli. Those found
TB-positive were eligible for extra food. Anatoly asked me to spit into his
test-tube being sure tubercle bacilli would be found in my phlegm sample. I
did what he asked me to, and, yes, a couple of days later the two of us
were told that from now on we would get supplementary ration including
three potatoes boiled in their jackets and a glass of skimmed milk, which
was quite a substantial addition to camp food allowance.
Here I need to break up
the chronology a little bit and tell you what happened some years later. In
1947 being in Moscow
during my leave, I went to see Anatoly. I had his address — 6 (or 10), ul. Marxa – Engelsa. It did not took me long to find the street
behind the building of Lenin State Library. On the opposite
side stood, now demolished, old two-story wooden houses. I walked into the
yard and started asking for Anatoly Ivanov. One
of the residents shot a strange look at me and showed me to the apartment.
I pressed the bell push, explained who I was and why I came, and was let
in. Anatoly’s wife told me he died of tuberculosis several months before.
All I could do is express my sympathy for the family’s grief and tell them
about the time we spent together in POW camp hospital in Germany.
Just how cruel and astonishing are the strokes of fate!
One bleak day would melt into another
one, just as nondescript, and so they could no longer serve as time
demarcation. We ran into a lot of trouble with bedbugs infesting our ward.
There was no possible way to get away from this pest. We put legs of our
beds into dishes filled with water, but the bloody things climbed up to the
ceiling and were falling from up there straight into our beds.
Gnawing hunger was growing upon me.
Never before, even at my worst days of camp life fraught with starvation,
had it been so acute. One obviously needs more food during their recovery.
Once I gobbled up a piece of margarine with sugar that belonged to my upper
bunk companion, the one who helped me to empty the can with fat. I just
could not help it. There were some witnesses to my demeanor, so I had to
give away to him my bread ration to make up for margarine.
There were but a few significant events
that broke the monotony of our camp existence. The one that stands out most
distinctly is Mischa’s gangrene. First they
amputated his right foot, but the disease was progressing, so a part of his
leg together with the knee-joint had to be cut away as well. It did not
work. Only couple of days before liberation Mischa
was taken to dying patients ward.
I made a speedy recovery.
Doctor Gradoli as usually mercilessly maiming his
Russian pronunciation once came out with something vaguely reminding of
“Oh, but you are fat!” Indeed, I was gaining some weight and could even
sometimes rise to my feet leaning against the walls and walk around the
ward on crutches (I can not really tell where I got those from).
One night — it was probably in the
middle of March we heard machine-gun bursts ripping through the air. It
turned out that some Russian prisoners attempted to stir up a revolt.
Knowing that the front line was slowly approaching (the allied forces
appeared to take their time), they set their minds
to breaking free. The ill-fated attempt was crushed, all those trying to
escape were caught, and some of them were shot.
The Germans and Russian polizeis never frequented the hospital block for
Russian POW. Sometimes a chaplain wearing the uniform of a non-commissioned
German officer would stop by. He was a Russian priest from the Protestant
church. He gave us some thin religious tracts, quite primitively written
and obviously meant for an ignorant reader. Once they handed out cans with
condensed milk — one can for two. According to the leaflets wrapping those
cans it was a gift to Russian prisoners of war from the people of Switzerland.
One could tell the allied forces were
getting closer. Tall poles, white flags with red crosses hoisted on them,
were put up around the camp (from the barrack window I could see the camp’s
outer fence made of several rows of barbed wire, as well as watchtowers
with guards on them). The German guards began to wear armbands with red
crosses on them, too. The spokesman for the only recently established camp
committee paid a visit to each barrack. He read aloud the appeal to the
Allied Command issued by the committee describing severe hardship that POW
had to undergo. (That was not exactly the case with English and French
prisoners that suffered only from separation from their families.) They
planned to send the appeal with a special envoy for whom
escape would be organized. The answer came promptly, which surprised me. A
couple of days later an English fighter plane while flying over the camp
territory released a drop-message container. The message read approximately
as follows:
Your envoy has arrived. The Allied Command are aware of what you are going through and take
appropriate measures to liberate you as soon as possible. Please be patient
and abandon your attempts at escape: they impede the allied troops. Destroy
fascists. General Montgomery (or, maybe, Clark), the Forth Army Commander.
By the middle of April we knew the
front line was very close. We could hear distinctly the blasts of bombs
dropped by English planes speeding above the camp territory.
Once there came a warning to leave
barrack windows open at night so that they would not be blown out, when the
allied forces started to bomb the power plant. However there was no
bombing.
A small German village lying behind the
camp’s outer fence could be seen through barrack windows. People who lived
in it started to dig trenches right near the barb wire fence. We could not
see why they would do it. Major changes were in the air. Instead of our
usual bread ration we got some biscuits. Those were a lot more filling that
the inedible staff that passed for bread in 1939. And then they handed out
American humanitarian packages with supplementary food ration — one for two
people- that were lying unclaimed in supply park. This looked almost as a
birthday present. It was then that we realized why prisoners from allied
countries looked as holidaymakers. The packages that meant to be
distributed among prisoners every week contained so much food that one
could do without German ration for two weeks. They included two cans of
cocoa powder, two cans of milk powder, about 2.5 pounds of sugar,
several cans with instant processed foods (soups, oatmeal porridge), a pack
of bouillon cubes, biscuit, instant juice, a can of egg powder, chewing gum
(that we somehow mistook for god-knows-why-it-is-so-hard marmalade), some
cans with Camel cigarettes and toilet paper.
On April 26, we found ourselves almost on the
front line. Rumble of mines and shells in the air before bursting, roar of
dive-bombers, showers of debris flung up in the air by the blasts — it was
all so familiar, and it was happening right near the camp fence. But no
bomb, shell or mine was actually dropped on the camp territory itself –
neither by the allied aircrafts, nor by the Germans. Only stray bullets
whizzed through the air and lodged sometimes in the barrack walls. From April
26 through April 29 the camp lied on the neutral territory
occupied neither by the allied forces not by German troops. Looking out
from the barrack window I had a rare opportunity to watch the battle
closely almost without putting my life at risk. I figured that the
villagers had dug shelters near the camp’s walls because that area was
relatively safe. I dread to think what would have happened if the camp was
lying between combatants emplacements!
In the course of those three days the
English troops delivered steady and methodical artillery and mortar fire
against the main German fighting line, bombing and attacking it from the
air. At first the German forces would return fire aggressively, but then
their guns were blasted into silence.
On April 29, the English infantry launched an
attack. They marched forward pouring gunfire in front of them and not even
bothering to bend down. What little German soldiers escaped death hiding in
dug-out were, no doubt, now stunned and demoralized by intense fire.
Liberation
On April 29, 1945 following
the camp liberation, prisoners of war overwhelmed by a tremendous joy
smashed the barbwire fence and broke free. You would not want to be in the
shoes of those who lived in nearby villages. Russian prisoners tortured by
hunger were not really wrestling with their conscience while relieving
German Bauers of their food stocks. American
military police soon had to guard the camp. However, it proved impossible to
keep people who flavored freedom for the first time in many years confined,
impossible without violence. But American officers never considered
resorting to it. Those capable of walking ransacked the surroundings mostly
for alcohol, food being abundant on the second day after liberation. We
could feast upon white fluffy Canadian bread, real butter, liquid milk,
tinned stew and ham. The aftermath of this abundance was grim. Many
prisoners gorged themselves on it, and because their stomachs were too weak
to deal with so much rich food, they fell ill with diarrhea from
starvation, a disease with symptoms similar to those of dysentery, and died
after having gone through all the hardships of captivity. My upper bunk
inmate, whom I mentioned before, was among them.
We were transferred from the
bugs-infested wooden barracks to brick casernes with all amenities, earlier
occupied by the English. Then, during a whole week or may be longer, we
were being medically examined. For this purpose, a field hospital was set
up where the camp’s sick ward used to be. Catholic nuns attended to the
sick (beats me why though: the English are not Catholics).
Prisoners from England and France left the camp almost immediately after
liberation, while the Russians, as well as the Poles, the Italians and the
Serbs had to stay longer.
Whole “delegations” of well wishers —
former allied prisoners, as well as the officers of the army that liberated
the camp among them — would pay us, the disabled, frequent visits. The
Englishmen in their green – and — brown sport-like uniform were friendly,
but of course in their prim and proper English manner. The noisy loud –
mouthed Americans, on the other hand, felt perfectly at ease, clasped us in
their arms and clapped us on the backs. They never came without food on
them, probably thinking we would never appease our hunger.
On May 8, the official announcement about the end
of the war and Germany’s total capitulation was issued. But for us that
day did not hold much significance – for us the war was over a week
earlier.
Soon English ambulance buses with
hammocks arrived. We were taken to a cantonment consisting of three — and
four- storied white brick houses. Before the war had started it served as a
military station, then it was used as a POW camp (stalag
VI –A). Now this is a Bundeswehr station. It was
in that cantonment that the English and the Americans set up a
displaced-persons’ camp for Russian POW. One of the buildings was
transformed into a hospital with dressing and surgery rooms. This is where
I was taken to, along with many other former POW.
Because I received professional medical help, my
wounds were closing up quickly, except for fistulas; doctors referred to it
as osteomyelitis. I was pretty deft at walking on
crutches; it hurt too much to step on my right foot.
Camp life seemed to be rather eventful.
Crowds of people were wandering from one camp building to another looking
for their townsmen and camp inmates. There were some atrocities, too.
Sometimes prisoners recognized a person trying to pass for one of them as a
former camp guard. He was then beaten up mercilessly, in the most brutal
manner, and — if law enforcement officers were not quick enough to
interfere – murdered.
Stalag X-B
Former prisoners were intoxicated by regained freedom. And, of course, one
of their major concerns was finding some alcohol. They ransacked the
surroundings, traded their clothes and food for alcohol and home-brew. (On
the camp territory there was a storehouse stuffed with old clothes and
shoes. There I found myself quite decent corduroy trousers, shirt, a German
service jacket and a pair of good shoes.) Some of my former inmates were
driving around in a car that had no tires on its wheel plates.
|
