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Published: November 2nd 2016
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Saturday 22 October 2016.
Lamsdorf POW Commemorative Day, London.
We never knew it until recently, but it turns out that Marion and I share a bit of wartime history. Her Uncle Roland and my dad, Hugh, both were Prisoners of War in Lamsdorf Camp, in South Poland (now Czec Republic). Dad might even have been treated by Roland or kicked a ball with him.
Roland, Marion's mother's younger brother, was a medical officer captured at Dunkirk. He was taken to a couple of different Oflags (Officers' camp in old inadequate castle where he became bored), but asked to be transferred to help in the medical care of the everyday soldiers in one of the biggest of the Stalags, VIIIb, 344. It was west of Kraków, and North of Brno. Thus he spent virtually the whole war directing healthcare of POWs.
Hugh, was an Acting Corporal captured on Crete, shipwrecked off Libya, but remaining in the custody of the German Army gradually moving up Italy in camps before ending up in Lamsdorf. After a month or so he volunteered to work in a linen factory at Freudenthal, now known as
Bruntal. He was posted to E352, a small satellite camp beside the factory and worked as a builder's mate developing wheelbarrow and rendering skills on various building projects at the factory with occasional clogs thrown in the works (mostly weak mixes of mortar.......)
On Saturday we attended a meeting of fifty folks in the Rising Sun pub in Pimlico. It was a well conducted affair organised by tour guide and researcher Philip Baker. And the guest speaker, a Polish museum curator, was Dr Anna Wickiewicz.
We learned of the long term history of the camp from the Franco Prussian War, through WW1 when Austro Hungarian forces imprisoned Russians and others at the same site, to WW2, where 48,000 British (a category which included Commonwealth soldiers from numerous countries), Polish, Russians, Palestinians, Argentinians were interred before its final use as a camp for captured Germans run by Soviets after victory in Europe.
Roland would have arrived at Lamsdorf in 1940 when conditions were 'death camp' like, with Typhoid, lice and fleas an everyday reality. Hugh recalls in his memoirs 'Geordie Hussar' it being the most Spartan camp he had experienced on arrival in 1943.
Paradoxically, Saturday's mini exhibition showed the breadth of activity that went on: sport, arts and crafts, education, theatre, bands, orchestras, gardening and a school run by the teachers present. This breadth of activity is testament to aspiration and resolve of the likes of Roland, who gradually negotiated the gear, instruments and goodwill required for such enterprise. Red Cross and the YMCA shipped out saxophones, dart boards, leather footballs and, of course Red Cross Parcels which provided currency which could access local resources from the guards. Indeed, cigarettes were much more important than the Geneva Convention 'pay' that each soldier received for work, essentially the wage was in the form of paper tokens that couldn't be exchanged for anything.
And Dad took the opportunity of regular clean sheets by working at Machold's Linen Factory. Machold, the proprietor, is remembered by Hugh as a kind man who was known as 'The White Jew' by his employees.......... but it seems unclear how he could continue as a free man in Nazi occupied Poland if he was really Jewish.
Anna showed us much photographic evidence of camp life, some taken by British soldier Bill Lawrence who made his own camera and had a knack for capturing candid shots of everyday life that official records fail to encompass.
Two young actors read love letters between an officer toff and his wife back home..... the lack of synchronicity in the correspondence was the thing that struck me.... they kept on writing to each other despite the lost and late mail over a two year period.
Today I reflect upon the whole event.
I gained some new information, but mostly a regeneration of my interest in the subject by meeting relatives of POWs who had shared a life changing experience seventy years ago.
Dad bought an Apple Mac and learned to use it at the age of 80 so that he could write his book. We published it in 2000 with 500 copies printed, and he sold 400 copies himself covering his costs and giving himself due pride and pleasure in the process.
So, the conference made me conscious of everyone's interest in shared detail, new snippets and connections. It makes me interested to make his book available again (we'll put a website together soon) and, perhaps, to go and find the linen factory where he gave chocolate to jewesses who worked alongside him and befriended a local lass who looked after him for a month on her family farm as he slipped out of the unguarded camp whilst the Russians approached..........thus avoiding the 'Long Walk', a march of POWs enforced by the Nazi guards in the worst winter for years, in 1945.
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