The Longest Winter by Alex Kershaw

Author:Alex Kershaw [Kershaw, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780306815966
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Stalag XIB, Fallingbostel, Germany—January 1945

Mid-January 1945 also found Private Louis Kalil and his buddies, Roy Burke and Robbie, on the move. They were taken from Hanover by hospital train to Stalag XIB at Fallingbostel, a hundred miles to the north, the most squalid of all camps that held American POWs in Germany during the war.19

Kalil was greeted by captured British medics and taken to a ward in the camp’s infirmary. His fellow Midwesterner, Private James Silvola, had left the ward only days before, having been successfully treated for diphtheria by a Belgian doctor.20 “I then spent most of my time in the barracks because it was so cold,” recalled Silvola. “The Germans didn’t want you outside trying to signal to Allied airplanes. The wound in my left arm healed slowly on its own. I didn’t get medical treatment for it.”21

The POW doctors, as Kalil soon discovered, could do very little for most men. They worked only with medical supplies they had upon capture along with odds and ends gathered from imprisoned medics—if by great fortune the medics had been allowed to keep their sulfa pills, morphine spikes, and bandages. Operations were performed without anesthetic using smuggled-in razor blades. Wounds were cauterized using heated metal objects. Men had to rely on their inner resources rather than medicine to make it through. Every week that winter at least a dozen POWs died in Fallingbostel, mostly from typhus, diphtheria, influenza, and other diseases accelerated by malnutrition.

It was a lucky man who did not at some point succumb to dysentery, which left sufferers severely dehydrated and caused often fatal weight loss because the men could not keep what little food they were given down or digest it adequately. In most barracks and wards, there were just two latrine pails left by the Germans each night. Both were always overflowing each morning.

Fallingbostel, like every other German POW camp, was a giant petri dish of infection: “You’d rub your face with your filthy hands and then lick your lips and you’d had it,” recalled one POW. “With dysentery, a man loses all his self-respect. Nothing embarrasses him any more. If you need a bowel movement, you just drop your trousers and let fly. I felt just like an animal. We were being [treated] like cattle, and we were acting like cattle.”22

Pyorrhea, a form of scurvy caused by lack of vitamins, affected every man to some extent. The most chronic cases suffered liver and kidney failure. Most men endured bleeding and swollen gums. Some lost their teeth. Hepatitis and anemia—other diseases caused by malnutrition—took longer to take effect. When they were finally diagnosed, it was often too late to do anything.*

At least Kalil and Silvola received some treatment. For other wounded men such as Joseph McConnell, who had also ended up in Fallingbostel, there was no help. “Germany wouldn’t give us any medical treatment at all,” he later claimed. But he did see a German doctor who told him in perfect English that he had practiced medicine in Chicago before the war.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.