Lie in the Dark and Listen by H Rees

Author:H Rees
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS027100, World War 2
ISBN: 9781908117496
Publisher: Grub Street Publishing
Published: 2006-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

1 I now know that the person in the first house we had called at, realising we were injured, had rung Dr Lundewohl. And it seems that whenever a doctor is called out in such circumstances he must inform the military.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Stalag Luft III, Sagan: East Compound

November 1942

Prisoner of War

It is a melancholy state, you are in the power of your enemy. You owe your life to his humanity, your daily bread to his compassion. You must obey his orders, go where he tells you. Stay where you are bid, await his pleasure, possess your soul in patience. Meanwhile, great events are in progress, opportunities for action and adventure are slipping away; hours crawl like paralytic centipedes, life is one long boredom from dawn till slumber. Moreover, the whole atmosphere of prison, even the most regulated prison, is odious. You feel a sense of constant humiliation in being confined, fenced in by railings and wire, watched by armed men, webbed about with a tangle of regulations and restrictions; one can only hate every minute of captivity.

Winston S. Churchill, 1899

It would be some time before I fully appreciated these sentiments, expressed by Churchill when he was incarcerated by the Boers in South Africa, but for now I was just relieved to be in a permanent camp, out of the hands of the Gestapo and into the hands of men who were at least airmen like myself, the Luftwaffe. ‘Stalag’ was short for ‘Stammlager Luft’, permanent camps purpose-built specifically for airmen of all the services. Stalag Luft III had opened in May 1942, and was under the command of Oberst Friedrich-Wilhelm von Lindeiner-Wildau, the holder of two Iron Crosses.

That first grim view of Stalag Luft III was not designed to make you feel anything but that you were miles from anywhere, isolated even if you were in company. You saw barbed wire and bare new-cut wood, a bleak vista of tree-stumps where what appeared to be endless woods had been cut down and this camp carved out of vast, unfriendly wilderness. I cannot say if actual walls might not have been an improvement on the bleak and uncompromising barbed wire which allowed you to look out but realise how hopeless it was to think about escaping into that bleakness. There were five miles of perimeter barbed-wire fencing, eventually enclosing fifty-nine acres when all the compounds were finished. By July 1943, Stalag Luft III would be a large configuration of three compounds, with two further compounds nearing completion. When I arrived there in November 1942, much of the camp was still under construction, the constant hammering and sawing part of the general background noise. What had already been built was a stark collection of large huts, a minimal roof-angle away from being simple boxes on stilts two feet above the ground, surrounded by a web of barbed-wire fencing, with a few guard-towers we called ‘goon-boxes’, just covered platforms, really, looming like malevolent spiders in a web of electric wiring above the whole scene. The overridding impression was of barrenness.

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