POW Life

The thing to do was to see people that you thought had been killed. They were all in there, putting in the time for the war. It was nice to see your old friends again - people that I hadn’t seen since I had trained in 1937. My navigator was the only other officer in the crew and he was in the same camp as I was, although I went to ... I lived with some old friends and he went to a group that he hadn’t known before. It worked out alright. Some people would learn languages. I wasn’t very good at languages and I suppose if I had got out to make my escape, I wouldn’t have done too well with the German people. I tried Russian, but I didn’t get beyond the alphabet. I don’t know if you have ever tried to learn Russian, but it’s not easy. The thing to do was to get a book to read. There weren’t too many in the camp. We got parcels from our family in Canada. In fact, I got a pair of skates from my sister. The temperature wasn’t all that great for building ice on the sports field. A very short period of time that we had ice to skate on. You have to keep as fit as you can while you’re a prisoner. The only way to do that was to go for a walk every day. It was about a quarter of a mile around the interior of the camp where we could go out and walk. We were fortunate. As long as the Red Cross parcels were coming through Switzerland, we got fed pretty well. We had a box about yea big and that was enough to keep one man fed for a week. While they were coming through, everything was quite happy. We got fed reasonably well. But, at the end of the war, when the railways were getting clobbered by the RAF, the parcels didn’t get through to us. We pretty well starved, apart from the German rations which weren’t very great. They had soup and dara brot which is a dark bread. You could live on it, but it wasn’t very great. I think we all lost weight while we were there. We had a secret radio which we managed to get the CBC news once a day, and we would copy it out and read it to each other so we knew what was going on in the world pretty well. It was a friend of mine who owned it and he hid it in a toilet. So he took it out for a while in the morning and got the news and put it back again. I was one of the ones who used to copy the news and read it through the different blocks.