From Calais to Colditz by Philip Pardoe

Author:Philip Pardoe [Pardoe, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Historical, History, Military, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs, War & Military, World War II
ISBN: 9781473875395
Google: CD6GDAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1473875390
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2016-07-07T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

A Long Weekend

At Scheesel we were taken into the local hotel where an interpreter was sent for. He was a most un-German type and, although he had just been dragged out of bed, greeted us with ‘Well, gentlemen, I must say you are sports!’ While the two policemen sat glaring in the corner, he set us down to a meal of cold sausage and beer and told us of his life in West Africa. He had been interned by the British in the last war and arrested by the French a week before the outbreak of this one. He was to have been repatriated for old age but he was taken off the ship in Oran and worked for several months in a chain gang in the Atlas Mountains until released after the French Armistice. He said that, given the choice, he would prefer four-and-a-half years in a British internment camp to the months in the Atlas Mountains.

Almost our first question to him was to ask if Stalingrad had fallen – when we escaped the German press had been treating this as a matter of days. The answer was ‘probably to-morrow’. We avoided further discussion on the war or politics which, even with the most reasonable Germans, invariably led to heated argument.

We spent the night in the local cell which had no window, stank of urine and was furnished with one small bed with a leg missing. Next day, 12 September, we left by train for Bremen. We kept our eyes open for air-raid damage but were disappointed to find the station quite untouched. We never got a chance to see the docks but, apart from a few roofless houses, the main town seemed to have come off lightly. The morale of the people appeared normal. The men were in every conceivable kind of uniform and the women were smart and neat even if their clothes gave the impression that they would dissolve immediately if exposed to a thunderstorm.

We were taken to Gestapo headquarters which we entered with some trepidation but found ourselves being cross-questioned, not by the ruthless type we had expected, but by the most courteous civilians who took the maximum trouble in doing the minimum of work. We spent the rest of the day together in a cell with a Czech on one side of us and a Polish girl on the other.

We were called for in the evening by a Marine NCO and a sentry and taken by rail to Tarmstedt, thirty miles away. They were uncongenial companions; the NCO was old, ugly and talked as if he had a plum in his mouth and his awkward young colleague was proud of his schoolboy English in which he tried to explain that it was a matter of indifference to him whether we arrived alive or dead. At the far end, we had a walk of three miles to a camp called ‘Marlag und Milag Nord’. Although accustomed to walking up to twenty-nine miles a night

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