Tunnel King by Barbara Hehner

Author:Barbara Hehner [Barbara Hehner ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781443401616
Publisher: HarperCollins Canada

Chapter 9

ONE DAY AT A TIME

With the tunnel shut down for a few months, Wally lost the work that was most important to him. But he was determined to stay positive. As George Harsh told Wally, prison life had to be taken one day at a time.

The day began with appell, the roll call. Wally and the other prisoners had to line up in rows on the sports field while the guards counted them to make sure no one had escaped. There would be at least one appell later in the day, and sometimes several more. After morning appell, many kriegies walked “the circuit” around the perimeter of the camp to chat and get some exercise. Their favourite topic of discussion was how the war was going.

Although the men were prisoners, they were not cut off from the news. The Germans broadcast their news over loudspeakers in the camp, and the men could get a translation from prisoners who spoke German. But the kriegies were also getting the BBC news from England, on their own hidden radios. These radios were designed and built in the camp, using such items as empty cookie tins for the variable condensers, as well as parts brought in by the “tame goons.” The stooge system protected these radios as carefully as the tunnels. Very few kriegies heard the actual broadcasts, but they were passed on quietly to small groups of men throughout the day.

After the circuit, the men drifted off. Each one, in his own way, had to face the challenge of filling his day.

Wally was reminded every time he looked at the high wire fence that his freedom had been taken away. He could not go home, he could not see friends and family, he could not even be alone with his thoughts. There was no privacy anywhere, not even in the bathroom.

Wally lived in a room that was about 16 feet square, shared by eight men sleeping in double bunks. The room also had a table, a stove for heat and making tea or coffee, and three lockers for the kriegies’ clothes and other belongings. Wally and the other men put their lockers in the hall to make a little more space in the room.

At one end of their hut was a room with a row of toilets, and in the middle of the hut, there was a washroom and a kitchen. The washroom had only sinks, but the prisoners rigged up their own shower heads. However, they had to take their showers in cold water. As in the East Compound, they could get hot showers in the Vorlager, but only when the Germans marched them there.

Once a week, Wally did his laundry in the washroom. He used a metal bucket and soap shavings cut from a bar of soap. To wash his clothes he used a handy invention the kriegies called “the prison Maytag.” It was a stick with two cans attached to the end, one inside the other. The larger can had holes punched in the sides.

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