Kriege
Irv Pliskin
(Just a note, before I begin this segment. The title may look strange, and it is quite obviously not proper English. The word is pronounced Kree-gee. It is what we POW’S called ourselves. In the German prison camp the goons, our German captors, called us ‘kriegsgefangun.” We shortened it to Kriege.)
Our train trip from Dulag Luft in Frankfurt au Main to the camp to which we were assigned took at least four days. Cold, hard days, with nothing to do but swap war stories, talk about things like girls and home and not much else. We had been given Red Cross parcels for our food, but curiously we had very few utensils with which to eat things.
We were all aviators, flyers. Consider this: foot soldiers carry everything they need with them in their packs and on their belts. Foot soldiers have their canteens, mess kits, knives and forks with them all the time. Aviators have none of those things.
None of the flyers I knew ever been issued a mess or a canteen to strap on to our belts to carry with us. As a matter of fact, if during World War 11 you had a water filled canteen aboard a heavy bomber, it would probably freeze and burst at altitude. Remember, temperatures in our unheated, unpressurized aircraft hovered at about 40 degrees below zero, centigrade. Should a guy carry a canteen aboard an airplane headed for high altitude, it was a safe bet it contained an alcoholic beverage, and that was a no-no. You were no good to anyone if you were soused, believe me.
And if we had knives, or anything like that, the Germans would have confiscated them when we were strip searched back at Dulag Luft. Yes, we had a food parcel, but without a way to open it, we had nothing but tantalization to deal with.
We could open the boxes, the crackers, the sugar, the dried fruit and the cans that opened with a key, like Spam, but the rest of the cans were just there, to carry around. Nobody had a table knife or fork. Since we had no water, the situation was rather unsanitary.
None of us knew where we were going, either. The guards did not say, so we sat in the trains, looking out at the stars at night and the sun during the day, trying to decide which direction we were going in. But we had no maps of Germany, and even though the Navigators, like me, insisted we were headed North, North East, in a direction of about 15 degrees, I recall that some of the other crew men argued with us. They didn’t choose to believe.
In the discussions of such things, tempers flared, and angry words shouted. It was hard to keep the antagonists from duking it out in the train aisles. It was hard to remain aloof, and apart from all of the angry feelings and individual discontent. Not knowing where we were going was a matter of some concern, although knowing wouldn’t be much help, regardless.
In the middle of the night, on the fourth or fifth day the train chugged to a stop at a cold, dark, lantern-lit train station. The guards threw the doors open, letting in blasts of frigid air and started ordering us: “Raus, Raus” Schnell, Schnell. Raus, Raus.” Out, out, quick, quick, out, out. They hardly gave us time to retrieve what was left of our Red Cross parcels from the luggage racks or under the seats. They began to push us off the train platform down the train stairs to the station floor.
The area we landed in, with our Red Cross parcels in our hands was surrounded by jackbooted soldiers in the black SS uniforms. They were all totally armed with automatic weapons and each soldier had a ferocious looking, slobbering, snarling Doberman Pincher on a short fragile looking leash. These were frightening animals, slobbering and growling as we got off the train and were lined up in columns on the freezing platform.
Some one asked where we were, and was ordered “Shtill, Zie Shtill”. Even if you had no German, you could understand that.
Stay quiet. If anyone said anything more, he was poked with the butt of the rifle. We got the idea, keep quiet.
Once we were all off the train, they shouted “Achtung,” and then started us marching down the streets of the town heading east from the train station. We marched, in quiet terror down the black streets for about two miles - it seemed like fifty. Fortunately, there were no problems, but it was quite possible that we would be taken to some remote woods, the safeties would flick off the automatic weapons and we could all be shot where we stood. That did not happen to us.
We reached a set of huge barbed wire gates, and stood outside in silence until someone came to open them. The only sound was the growling and whining of the dogs and the stamping of our feet as we tried, in vain to keep warm. Once the guards inside came to open the gates, we went through and down a road into a fairly well lighted reception hall.
The snarling dogs and the jackbooted guards were still with us. The guards were struggling to hold the dogs at bay, but I got the impression that it would not take much for us to have them let the dogs go, and then -Watch Out. The feeling I got was that the guards would have merely chortled as the dogs made mincemeat of us.
Inside the room they marched us to a long table. Standing behind it was a group of Wermacht soldiers, or perhaps prison guards. It is hard to know. Someone in accented English ordered, “You men, put your possessions on the table in front of one of the men, and wait for him to inspect them.”
We did as instructed. The man who went through my stuff--the remaining contents of the Red Cross parcel, took everything out of the carton, and put it in on the table. I began to talk to him in Yiddish. He grunted answers and then he took an awl or an ice pick and began to puncture holes in the top of the cans that had not been opened. “Vas tooen Zie”, I asked. (What are you doing?)
He explained that his orders were to make holes in the cans so the food would have to be eaten or spoil. Otherwise, the food might be stored and used for escape purposes. Escape? What a dumb idea that was, but the Krauts took no chances.
Then he turned to me and asked, “Du bist Yudda, nein?” (You are Jewish, aren’t you?)
I was already registered as Jewish with the Red Cross, so I said, “Yah, ve asso kenst do vissen?” (How do you know that?”)
“Alla de Yudden kennen Dutsch good sprechen.” (All the Jews speak German well.”) He should only know. Nothing more was made of it. We took our damaged food parcels and were marched out of the hall, down a long road.
The dogs and guards were still with us. And even though it was dark, we could tell that we were walking alongside a barbed wired road...and behind the barbed wires were barracks of some sort. There were wooden guard towers, with guard stations about 20 feet above the ground...and they seemed to be manned. The barracks were set up in compounds, and we walked to the last of these, through a gate, which guards opened, and into a sort of clear area, like a playing field. In groups of three or four, they took us to the barracks that stood lined up in the compound, and pushed us inside one at a time. This was, we were told, to be our home in the prison camp.
It was then that we found out where we were. One of the men there, and the place was packed with prisoners, told us that we were in Stalag Luft 1, located in Barth Germany, on the banks of the Baltic Sea. We were about as far north as we could get in German held territory.
Had I not convinced some of the men I had traveled with on the train that I was legit, I might have been in trouble with this group. The men already in the camp started asking questions about professional sports back home. This has never been an area of interest for me. I sounded like some one who had just come from Mars when I was asked about current athletes, and the games they were playing. I overcame that, however, and was accepted in the group as a legitimate American.
The Krauts sometimes found an American speaking German soldier and tried to pass him off on us, to find out what we knew...that at least was the general feeling among some of the prisoners.
I have often wondered about that. What could we know, really, that was of that much interest that a spy would be put in our midst. It had been weeks since any of us had been in combat. Whatever we knew was outdated and antiquated. The idea has never made much sense to me, but our paranoia - and we were paranoid - fostered such ideas.
I was now in what they called South Compound, in a reasonably new barracks that housed five or six hundred prisoners. We were assigned to fairly large rooms, in which there were no beds. The Germans had built large wooden slatted shelves against one wall of the room. They were about seven feet deep, and perhaps fifteen to twenty feet wide. There were three or four such shelves on each side of the room. In the center of the room there was a clear space for a table and a few chairs.
The shelves were to be our sleeping area. They issued us each a straw filled burlap sack, and those were our beds. We pushed our sacks into a section of the shelf, carving out a very small area, and that was our sleeping room. Later I found out that was the same sort of sleeping accommodations the Germans provided for the people in places like Auschwitz, Treblinka or Dachau.
We could not determine much when we arrived. It was late at night, and there was no electric lights on in the barracks. Just before sundown, the Germans closed, and locked huge, thick wooden shutters over every window. The insides of the barracks remained lit for about an hour with weak 40 watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling. And then, lights out. The lights were turned off from the outside, and we were all in utter darkness. Kreiges were innovative however, and we had found a way to burn oil in small lamps made from tin cans. These flickering lights were all the illumination we had.
I was not feeling well when we got to this barracks. I think I had a temperature, and stomach upset...which kept me running, as best I could in the darkness to the latrine buckets in a smelly, unpleasant little room at the end of the center corridor.
In the morning, my travel mates insisted I stand sick call. We had sick call available to us every day. I did, and was led along with a handful of other men, out on to the road to the infirmary. The infirmary was a small building, located on the road that ran alongside the three barbed wire enclosed compounds: North one, and South one and two.
Each compound had about a dozen barracks that in total housed about three thousand prisoners. There may have been some doctors, British prisoners captured at Dunkirk, years ago who were there in our infirmary, but I got to see a tall, swarthy black man (probably from India) who was a medical aide of some sort. He listened, and gave me a couple of spoonfuls of castor oil. “Castor Oil,” I protested, “That's a physic. It’s gonna give me the GI’s for real.”
“Man,” he said, “that’s all we got. You take that now it’ll fix you up”. Despite my objections and protests, (I think I was too sick not to try it) I took the stuff. And darn, it worked. It may have nearly killed me, I don’t remember, but it got rid of anything inside that was making me ill...and I soon began to feel better.
According to what the medic told me, the Germans provided little or no medicine besides the basics such as Castor Oil. Basic Castor oil he said worked to help a guy get rid of many stomach problems. What they saw, generally, was stomach discomfort and diarrhea because of the lousy food and bad water. The prisoner-doctors could not do much for a guy who was really sick because the Germans gave them no medications or supplies. As a matter of fact, and I have only rumor to go on regarding this information, we were told that the Germans reluctantly provided some anesthesia, when needed, but never provided scalpels or clamps, or things like that. If an operation was required, the British Docs used what they had to do the work. They spent hours sharpening spoons so they could be used as scalpels when necessary. That may be apocrypha, but I saw enough of the German disregard for us to believe that it could very well have been true.
Although we Americans treated the German prisoners we had captured like people, the Germans just didn’t seem to give a damn.
I was in South Compound for only a few more hours, when a goon guard came and got me, calling me out by name. I was marched down the road to North One compound, and into a barracks that had existed for several years. I was assigned to a room with crude double-decker beds, and shown the one I could have. It was a lower bunk, in the corner of the room by the door. There were no springs, of course. We had slats on which to put our straw filled burlap mattress and on which to sleep. This room which was about ten foot by twelve foot, held seven, crammed- together, double-decker beds. There was a table, a few chairs and a small stove. Fourteen of us were assigned to it, and we were all Jews. I was now, despite the regulations of the Geneva Convention, isolated in a special barracks, because I was a Jew. To the Germans, I was no longer an American Army Officer, but a maverick Jewish soldier, to be isolated, removed from normal Aryan society and perhaps prosecuted or even shot.
Our barracks was in what was called North Compound 1. It was the first compound that had been built on the site, and it had been originally designed to house German soldiers.
It had some worthwhile amenities. For one thing, it had a built in military washroom, urinals, sinks, flush toilets all inside the building, instead of in a separate building outside the structure, as in the two southern compounds. Those latrines had running water, but no flush toilets. They were giant out houses, with wooden seats cut out of splintery boards, and placed over large trenches. Fortunately, we did not have to clean or empty those ‘honey pots’. Slave labor from the concentration camps in the area had that lovely chore.
There was another advantage to being in North Compound one. We all shared a communal mess. There was a large community building in north compound one, which was used for central activity. Thanks to the rec hall, some of he krieges had established a theatre group, and put on plays for the men in the compound. The room was used for card games, socializing, and also as a communal mess. We were all to get the same amount of food...about a cup full of whatever was on the menu at that time. All our rations were pooled and cooked to provide us with two meals a day...which was a decided advantage over the other two compounds. In them, each man, or each room, was responsible for cooking and allocating their own meals.
By this time, food was an essential concern to everyone. By the middle of 1944, the rations supplied to the prison camps had begun to diminish markedly. They had never been ample, even though prisoners were supposed to be given one Red Cross parcel per man per week, and then have their rations supplemented with meat and vegetables and bread. The Krauts had begun to hold back rations substantially.
By the time I got to prison camp, the weekly Red Cross parcel was to be shared by six men. The parcel was supposed to be the minimum amount of food a man needed to sustain himself for a week if he were comatose. We had one sixth of that to sustain ourselves plus the food supplement the Jerries provided: a handful of dried cabbage, a moldy and deteriorating potato and brewable Erzatz coffee...which tasted like spoiled ipecac.
The ‘mess hall, entertainment center’ was an advantage for us, and it was there for about my first week in the compound. And then, during the second week, in the middle of the night, the place caught fire and burned to the ground.
That changed the dynamic. We now had to prepare our food ourselves, in our rooms.
Irv Pliskin is a retired advertising agency owner. He is a combat veteran of World War II and an Ex Prisoner of War of the Germans. Married, with three kids, and four grandchildren he devotes his time to writing flash fiction. He hopes, that someday, he may become the Grandma Moses of flash fiction. He lives with his wife of 57 years in Cherry Hill, NJ. Contact Irv.
