Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? (13 page)

‘Not before time,’ Big Stoop smiled, as the shape of the nervous Garwood appeared in the light from the office window. He opened the door and beckoned the prisoner inside.

Flapper was breathing hard now, his face flushed. ‘Not here. Someone will come.’

The German stepped forward and took him by the throat. ‘You do as I say, prisoner… inside.’

‘No please, not here. We’ll be caught. I’ll be shot, and you’ll be shot too.’

Big Stoop released his grip and Flapper took a deep breath of
cool evening air. ‘Over there,’ he pointed, ‘in the forest by the toilets. I have a rug hidden there. It will be more comfortable.’

The German chuckled. ‘You have planned this well, haven’t you? You want it outside like the animals.’ He purred, turned Garwood around and slapped him on the backside. ‘Then move quickly.’

Flapper gagged but managed to maintain his charade. He walked the dozen or so steps until he stood adjacent to the toilet block as the guard followed.

‘Keep walking, handsome, it fucking stinks here.’

Flapper stood motionless, with a look on his face that puzzled Big Stoop.

The German took a step forward, went to push the prisoner in the chest. ‘Move, you pig dog. It stinks here, didn’t you hear…’

Garwood pulled hard on the arm of the guard and spun him round so his back was to Garwood. Before Big Stoop could realise what was happening, Flapper brought the cut-throat razor up and across the man’s throat in one well-executed motion. The sharp blade sliced effortlessly through skin, sinew, tissue and windpipe, only coming to a stop against Big Stoop’s vertebrae. Garwood removed the weapon and held it by his side.

The German’s mouth fell open as he tried to scream. Blood cascaded down his body like a waterfall and he managed nothing more than a gurgle from the new entrance carved into his body. As the German tottered on the brink of collapse, Flapper sliced through his belt and pulled his trousers to the ground. The last thing Big Stoop saw as he breathed his last breath was his own bloodstained penis inches from his face.

Garwood dragged the heavy body into the toilet block and filled the dead man’s pockets with stones. He was breathing heavily, and the smell of the shit seemed a hundred times
worse than he could ever remember. Positioning the body under the wooden frame, he took a hold of the plank with both hands. He placed one foot on the German’s thighs, the other in the small of his back, and with one final surge of effort pushed the body over the edge six feet into the excrement-filled tank below. He watched as the body floated for a moment. Then, as pockets of air hissed and gurgled their final release, the body tipped like a stricken ship and sank into the depths below.

The executioner spent the best part of the next hour cleaning himself and rearranging the sand and dirt of the compound in an attempt to cover the blood stains. Thankfully most of the blood had been soaked up by the dead man’s uniform but a few telltale signs remained. He used dead pine needles in the toilet block to wipe away the trail of blood on the floor. Sweating but satisfied with his night’s work, he cleaned the blade and returned it to where he had found it. Then he walked slowly back to the stable block, confident that the night creatures and early morning flies would complete his task.

Big Stoop was officially pronounced missing at noon the following day. The camp commandant sent a guard to his home in the village and found the small cottage deserted. The commandant made a few tentative enquiries and interrogated some of the prisoners but nothing was discovered. It was assumed that Big Stoop had deserted. It happened. In fact it was quite a regular occurrence.

Meanwhile, the normal ‘one ladle, no meat’ ration had resumed and the afternoon tea had disappeared from the menu. The makeshift showers had been dismantled and the wood chopped into kindling. But the sun was still shining and an air of optimism hung around the camp as the Germans made arrangements to leave. Forty-eight hours later a convoy
of lorries rumbled into the camp and the prisoners were ordered on board.

Horace was more than happy as the lorries pulled out across the bridge over the moat. The prisoners had not been told where they were going, nor for what reason. But nothing could be worse than what they had been through at Fort Eight in Posen. Horace and his comrades were on the move. They had survived a living hell on earth.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

H
orace sat in the back of the open truck as the camp that had claimed so many of his comrades disappeared from view. The men were strangely subdued, quiet, as they laid to rest the ghosts and memories of that awful place.

Horace remembered the beating that had nearly killed him, and poor Tom Fenwick, and the bitter cold of the winter, how the snow kept falling day after day, week after week. He recalled the smiling faces of Big Stoop and the SS guards as they dished out beatings, and he remembered the tears of joy and despair rolling down the cheeks of Charlie Cavendish as he’d returned to the ranks after telling the delegation from Geneva all about the camp.

Horace wondered whether Charlie had died naturally or whether the SS had helped him on his way. Charlie had been in a bad way, as if already resigned to death, and he knew as the guards argued with the men from Switzerland that he would never see another day dawn. Horace had seen the signs, seen the same relaxed, seemingly carefree attitude in Tom Fenwick as he’d munched greedily on his last loaf of bread. It was as if they were at peace with the world. They knew their time had come and in a comforting sort of way,
knew their suffering at the hands of these monsters was drawing to an end.

For hours his head was filled with the horrors from the camp. Flapper sat opposite and a kind of mutual understanding allowed each man to sit in silence with his own private thoughts. An hour into the journey Horace posed the question.

‘Where did you hide his body?’

‘Who?’

‘Big Stoop.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

Horace looked for telltale signs. There were none.

After a minute or two Garwood spoke.

‘Did you take a shit this morning, Jim?’

Horace thought for a second then nodded. ‘Yeah, Flapper, I did.’

‘Good, Jim. Good. Better out than in, eh?’

As each hour passed and the truck put mile after mile between the camp and the tortured souls on board, remarkably, their spirits lifted. They’d been on the road for six hours when the convoy came to a stop. They had pulled into what looked like a huge factory compound. The walls were whitewashed and sterile looking and could have easily been mistaken for a hospital. It wasn’t. Hospitals didn’t need barbed wire and high fences to keep their patients from absconding.

It was another camp, but as Horace and his fellow prisoners were herded inside and made to stand in an orderly queue, a feeling washed over him that he wouldn’t be there for long. Suddenly he was nervous, frightened even. The Germans had told them nothing and one or two prisoners were beginning to get edgy. To a man they all harboured their private thoughts; some even discussed what would happen if
the POWs became a nuisance to the Germans. Had that day arrived? Nobody knew. Nobody asked the question.

The prisoners were ordered to strip naked, pushed and prodded into distinctive groups of twenty-five. Although it was early summer a cool wind whipped through the camp. They stood shivering for over an hour before being marched through an open compound in full view of a dozen civilians working on what looked like piles of clean laundry and uniforms. Two girls aged around 16 giggled nervously as the naked men walked within a few yards of them. The prisoners did their best to cover their modesty as the girls diverted their gaze.

As they approached the large tiled building at the far side of the compound Horace heard what sounded like running water and unless he was mistaken the cheers of a few men.

‘What the fuck’s that, Jim?’ asked Garwood.

‘Seems to me like a shower block, Flapper,’ Horace said as he pointed to a grate above the building. Steam was rising from the roof. ‘And if I’m not mistaken I do believe they have a little hot water.’

Horace stood under the jet of water. He had forgotten what hot water felt like. It had been a year since he had felt hot water on his body. He thought about his last hot shower; he thought back to his indiscretion with the French prostitute and how he’d showered afterwards in Carenten, as if the hot water would somehow cleanse him, wash off the smell of the girl just in case he was back home in England in double quick time and in the arms of Eva Bell.

Daniel Staines looked across to his pal as the hot water cascaded down his face and body and he smiled and moaned out loud.

‘Better than sex this, Jim, eh?’

Horace grinned and shook his head. ‘You’re doing something wrong, Dan. It’s good, but not that good.’

But it was good. It was luxury. The Germans had provided cakes of soap and scrubbing brushes and the men scoured their lice-ridden bodies. The white stone floor of the shower block was a swimming carpet of the tiny creatures. After the shower the prisoners were deloused with a white powder and assured by the Germans they’d be completely free of the blood sucking parasites.

Next they were issued with clean clothing. This time Horace collected the uniform of a soldier of the Polish 16th Pomeranian Infantry Division complete with a small bullet hole in the left breast pocket. The larger exit wound in the back had been patched and stitched with a crude black thread. It didn’t matter. Flapper, Horace, Dan and a few others laughed and joked with one another about their ill-fitting uniforms as the German guards looked on, puzzled.

A little while later, in the early evening sun, they were ordered back on the lorries for the remaining part of the journey, to the prisoner of war camp at Saubsdorf in Czechoslovakia, near the Polish border. It was dark when they arrived but as they made their way through the gates they were handed a bowl of hot stew. Not soup… stew. Meat, potato, a little boiled carrot – it was stew, real food. In the space of a few hours Horace had sampled two things that had been denied to him for so long. Two things, the basics of life, hot water and food. Surely it wasn’t much to ask?

Compared with the previous camp Horace and his pals had just entered the foyer of The Ritz. Little did he realise it would be the one meal a day the POWs would be given. But Horace thought he’d died and gone to heaven when they were led to a large dormitory with a shower block, double bunks and real mattresses. The men were like children at a scout camp as they clambered eagerly into bed. The lights were switched off and despite their best efforts to stay awake, within five minutes the
entire room reverberated with the sound of snoring. For the first time in captivity Horace managed to sleep the whole night through.

He awoke around seven the next morning and experienced another pleasure denied to him for so long. He woke with an erection. In a moment of unbridled hi-jinks he leapt from his top bunk and dropped his underpants to his ankles. ‘Look, lads!’ he shouted. ‘Look at this beauty!’

John Knight opened his eyes. He lay on the bottom bunk and Horace’s swollen penis hovered at eye level. ‘For fuck’s sake, Jim, what are you playing at?’ he shouted as he pulled a blanket over his head to escape from Horace’s pride and glory.

Horace had his two hands around it now and was more than happy to show it to anyone whose eyes were open. ‘But I’ve got a hard on!’

‘So fuck,’ Dan shouted from the other side of the room.

‘But I haven’t had a hard on for months. Look at it, man, it’s a beauty.’

Flapper peeked out from under his blanket. ‘Fucking hell, Jim, watch where you’re waving that thing! You’ll have some cunt’s eye out.’

Ernie Mountain sat up and laughed. ‘You could hang six pairs of boots on that fucker, Jim. You weren’t at the back of the cock queue when they were dished out, were you?’

‘No good to you though, mate,’ Dan muttered, ‘Nowhere in here you can stick it.’

Horace didn’t care. Things were looking up for him and his mates. A warm bed, a hot shower, food, and now a hard on. All Horace wanted now was a nice young lady to use it on. Ah well, he thought, Rome wasn’t built in a day, as he wandered off for his shower wondering if it were at all possible to get three or four minutes’ privacy.

Later that morning the men were assembled and detailed
their work schedules by the guards. To Horace’s immense relief the guards did not wear the uniforms of the dreaded SS. In comparison, these older looking men, 40 to 50 years of age, looked positively angelic.

The camp was situated close to a huge marble quarry and the prisoners were given pickaxes and sledgehammers on arrival. A German civilian, Herr Rauchbach, addressed the men in his native tongue but although the majority of the men didn’t understand a word, it was plainly obvious what sort of work they’d be doing. John Knight smiled as his party walked the short distance to the quarry face and the German guards pointed to the huge slabs of marble. No more digging up Jewish skeletons. The work might be tough, but at least he’d sleep at nights.

And so the backbreaking ten-hour shift began. Horace worked with Flapper, splitting the marble into manageable sections and loading the stone onto trucks by hand. Half a dozen civilian women swept up around the men, gathering the smaller marble chips into large buckets and stacking them by the door of a large wooden workshop. It was clear the women were terrified and forbidden to speak to the prisoners and they worked in silence whenever the German guards were around.

But the German guards were few and far between and Horace at first was a little puzzled. Escape was always at the forefront of his mind but at the first camp it had been impossible. Here, though, it seemed a distinct possibility. The camp wasn’t fenced in; he would later find out that Rauchbach had forbidden any fencing. They were simply locked in their huts at nights. To prevent escape, four or five guards routinely patrolled the area. During the day it was as if they were almost being casual in their disregard for security.