THE RUSSIAN POW © Tom Barker
"Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know."
Wilfred Owen
The snow was drifting down and it was cold, and at the back end of 1944 it seemed to be cold everywhere and when we heard news, it sometimes came from a Guard or Ferret.
A Ferret was a Guard, who having been wounded, and was bi-lingual, was employed in a P.O.W. Camp to look out for anything untoward that the inmates were doing or saying. Then he would stuff it up for them.
But I think now we had got to a stage in the War, where a lot of them were beginning to see the light and when the Fuhrer would address everyone over the loudspeakers, one could see a Guard who had stopped to listen, turn and with a shrug would mutter,
"Ya, ya, wier haben es alles ein mal gehurt." (yes yes, we've heard it all before.) and would waddle on like a disgruntled duck looking for a pond to jump into - if it wasn't already frozen over.
I was walking round the wire - on the inside that is - and the bloke who was walking with me was negotiating a blower. He wanted me to make him a little machine made out of tins that gave off heat like a miniature blacksmiths forge and was very handy for brewing up because it only burnt a few twigs that could boil our small brew up tins very quickly and that just happened to be our favorite pastime. It also prevented our reproductive gear from snapping off should we try to get through a door that would not open any wider due to frozen hinges or banked up snow.
And whom should we meet up with, but Hans. Well, we didn't know his real name, but we called him 'The Hands' to begin with, but it got corrupted to 'Hans', because he was expert at searching.
On one search someone warbled casually,
"Cor lummy, luk at 'em 'an's goin'. E' can search me anytime." so the name stuck, and from that day everyone referred to this particular Ferret as Hans.
Hans was fluent in French, a little Russian and the odd word in English and when called upon, he would correct the bloke calling him and reply,
"Nein nein , ich bin Gustav." (no no I am Gustav)
But in the end he gave up trying to correct us and if someone shouted to him,
"Hey, Hans!" then he would stop and turn and ask,
"Ya?" and the bloke would ask,
"When yu goin' tu tek yu cyanide pill?" and like most Germans who didn't understand much English but pretended they did, or were so sick of having their leg pulled, would give the stock answer,
"Ya ya, morgen wielleicht!" (yes, tomorrow perhaps), then muttered, "Merde" as he carried on walking.
Sometimes Hans paused in his nature walk, and because he recognized me, he knew he didn't have to get the Interpreter,
"Na Junger, was machen sie den?"( now boy, what are you up to?) and I replied,
"Wir sind spazieren nach den Russischer Front." ( We're taking a walk to the Russian Front)
One could be forgiven for having a laugh at this pidgin German but it got results sometimes, and one could glean from some of these blokes tit-bits, which, when fitted together, gave a good overall picture of what was happening, because one could not believe all the bullmire that was coming over on the German news, such as, "The German Army has got a pincer move on Venus, und ve hef already occupied Mars!"
One of our Geordie lads shouted back one day,
"Hey yu Kraut g-t, Ma will be pleased, an' yu cin come an' see me. Ah'm a big mate o' Walt Disney. Ah cin git yus Pluto fer nix."
Well we knew Jerry had a flying bomb, but Mars and Venus, do me a favour please!
Hans continued with his German lip exercises and suggested we didn't even make a joke about going to the Russian front where thousands of good German Soldiers were dying every day. Then he pointed to the knee-high single wire that was three yards inside the main wire and wagged a finger,
"Aber nicht da spazieren, verstehen sie!"( but don't walk there, understand)
Two heads nodded and in unison replied,
"Ya ya" and so we parted company with Hans the Ferret.
When we got back to our hut we passed on the conversation to others, and one bloke putting a tin on his blower with a view to making a hot cup of tea said,
"Yea, well they are the best kind, ain't they? - dead Jerries, tot, kaput, f ---n' finito, mafeesh, backshee."
"Yea, alright mate. Calm down. We got the bleed'n' message." came a voice from up top of a bunk.
Then another posh voice joined in with, "I take it, you don't particularly like the dear old Hun?"
Another day we walked and the bloke with me said. "'ere look at 'im then." and this bloke over the wire in the Russian compound was sitting in the snow and weeping while doing a kind of bowing and clasping his hands together in despair over this other bloke with bare feet who must have been crouching out of the icy wind behind the barracks. But he had finally given it away and departed this life, and his body must have keeled over because now he lay like someone sleeping with his knees pulled up.
Others must have found him and taken his footwear, but the bloke hovering over him with his face awash with tears would stroke the hair of the dead man and pat his shoulder, as if to assure him he would feel no more pain.
And as I looked at this scene of abject misery I could almost feel what that bloke had gone through, until he must have thought in Russian, "Bugger this, I've had enough!" and he would know that if he fell asleep that would be the end.
So he just did it, and now all the Swastikas and SS soldiers with their whips and cudgels didn't matter anymore.
It was as simple as that, well for him it was, but what about this obvious mate, or son, brother or father who was here now weeping over the still, frozen body? He now had what was already a heavy burden added on him, by what had happened here. Perhaps he was now alone to face, who knows what?
"Come on mate. We can't 'elp 'im." said the bloke with me, who looked a bit peaked by this particular slice of life that had just fallen off the platter of time.
We trudged back to the barracks, and because our fuel ration had been cut off as punishment for escape attempts, all the glass in the windows was iced over due to the condensation inside.
I agreed to make the bloke a blower and told him to come back tomorrow, and as soon as he was gone, on impulse - because I was an impulsive bloke - I grabbed a packet of biscuits from my parcel and went back to the perimeter wire which was a single strand of galvanized wire about knee high which had no sharp spikes on it and was supported by inch by inch wooden posts hammered into the ground about ten feet apart and about a yard away from the main double barbed wire and the bloke was still there.
I shouted to him, held up the biscuits and threw them over when he looked up as he had obviously seen me through the wire.
They landed in the snow near him and as he picked them up he kissed the packet and held out his arms as a gesture of gratitude through the wire. Then he was gone.
I looked round with a feeling that someone was watching me, and I was next to the perimeter wire which, if anyone crossed, the Tower Guards had orders to shoot.
We always kept well clear of the perimeter wire because after an air raid, some of the Guards had been known to be a bit trigger-happy the following day.
I don't know why, but I suddenly looked at the Guard tower. I sensed that someone, somewhere was watching what I had done, and the Guard in the tower was leaning on the edge of the woodwork with his elbows, where the nose of a machine gun poked over. He must have watched the whole thing and as we looked at each other, he slowly put up his glove covered fist and his thumb was sticking up.
He must have been a Christian, because he then turned and went to the other side of the tower and gazed over at the woods in the distance and I thought,
"Well done God! At least this lavatory has one clean toilet roll in it!" and I went back to the cold barracks and my bunk, with its sack of straw and one thin blanket.
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'Ne Obliviscaris'
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