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Description
Mr. Curry speaks of the underground network in the prisoner of war camps and gives an example of their sabotage effort.
Kenneth Curry
Mr. Curry was born in England in 1922. He was the youngest of two brothers and emigrated to Canada with his family at the age of one. The family settled in Stoney Creek, Ontario where Mr. Curry went to school and also served in the Army reserve. Mr. Curry falsified his age by one year in order to enlist with the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry. His war service included participation in the Dieppe Raid where he was taken prisoner of war.
Transcript
We had an underground network, oh, a good underground network! They, they could pretty well cover anything up, they could hide anybody too, you know, that was in trouble like for sabotage or anything. They could, I never knew of, I've heard of guys that were in that were liable to be executed for sabotaging or something like that, you know, caught putting sand in journal boxes. But we used to have our own way of sabo, they sent me on a working party to a flour mill at a place called Hindenburg, and every, there were 16 of us and every morning when we went over to the flour mill, it was about eight stories high, we'd all go to the top floor and throw out three handfuls of flour. Now you might think that's not much, but 16 men throwing three handfuls of flour out every day for a couple of years, that runs into a lot of flour. Also the, the in the flour mill it, they had bins that were, you could get into them from every floor and we used to sweep all the sweepings into the bins and we used to urinate in them too. And that was our idea of feeding the (inaudible). When I think of it, it was childish but it gave a great sense of satisfaction, knowing what we were doing. Now the only trouble was, we, they used to issue us bread to eat and we never used to eat it because we'd say, "Hey", you know, "we urinated in that." But we used to steal the white flour and we had a kitchen, and we had the guard under our thumbs and he used to let us use the stove and we'd make our own white bread. We never ate their darn bread.