Geordie Hussar - the Polish Trail of a WW ll POW

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Hugh Patterson was born in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, in 1917.



At the age of eighty, in 1997, he bought himself an Apple Mac and started writing.



Until that point in his life he had maintained a silence about wartime experiences.

We, his family, were unaware of any detail.

But then a rich story unfolded in the resulting modest memoir ‘Geordie Hussar’: five years of intrepid travel, as a soldier and POW, through Africa, the Mediterranean and Sudetenland.

Only late in life he had felt able to share the tale.

500 copies were published and the costs soon covered by sales of the book which he touted around local bookshops and friends’ networks.

He reached his 90th Birthday but died later that year.



On the anniversary of his 100th birthday, I attended a conference with my wife, Marion. We learnt about Lamsdorf, the large POW camp in Poland where Hugh was incarcerated in 1943. And it became clearer that by some quirk of fate, Marion’s Uncle Roland had ended up as a medic in very same camp as Hugh, although by a very different route. Captured at Dunkirk, Roland had been officer and doctor in charge of the health of POWs at a series of camps from 1940 onwards.



Today we’re off on a plane from Newcastle to Warsaw. We’re driving to the south to discover more about Stalag Vlllb/344 and Hugh's satellite work camp: E352 Freudenthal (Bruntál) Emmerich Machold linen factory, now in Czech Republic.

And then we will follow the trail of the notorious ‘Long Walk’.

In the cruel wintry months at the start of 1945, with Russians approaching Lamsdorf, both men were ordered by German guards to leave camp in the night and start a march with the sick pulled on sledges and little food or shelter.



Their paths soon diverged.





Post script.





The flight to Warsaw was a breeze and we managed to pick up our hire car with no queue or hitches.





But the 353 Km journey from Lodin Airport to Krakow took six hours. E7 and E77 are a ever changing mixture of dual and single carriageway through towns with traffic lights and speed restrictions.

There are some motorway stretches and new sections being built, a sign of less tiring driving to come In a few years time.





MacDonald's dominate the service area stops. After a mid afternoon stretch when I started to nod, a Ronald was all we could only find........ not our usual haunt.

But the staff were charming and coped with two coach loads of ten year olds with stunning speed and kindness.





We arrived in our hotel in the quarter Kazimierz, named after the Kazimier of 1333 - 70, when Krakow was the capital. This king was a protector of the Jews at the time. It's still a Jewish area with restaurants, a modern Jewish Cultural Centre and Synagogue.





There was a fabulous thunderstorm as we ate potato pancakes and stew in a local restaurant and drank piwa.

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