Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell? (30 page)

The highly efficient news machine continued through the winter and into the spring of 1944. The recipients of the news were reading about the heavy bombings of German cities and that Japanese troops had retreated from Burma. However, they would also hear towards the end of March 1944 of the grievous losses the RAF suffered during a huge air raid on Nuremburg. The committee of the camp journal – as it was affectionately known – agreed that all news would be reported without exception, no matter how tragic it was and what effect it might have on the prisoners. They all agreed not to compromise the honesty of the operation.

Unknown to the prisoners of Freiwaldau, in May 1944 the Allies were preparing for D Day. Reports filtered across the airwaves of increased Allied bombing in France in preparation. The camp journal delivered the news but its team were unaware of the real reason behind the intensity of the bombing.

Occasionally a radio part would malfunction but Horace continued to escape and meet up with Rose, and she would always have a replacement within a few days. By the summer of 1944 the camp journal was being read by a staggering three thousand prisoners of war, every single day. That was too many men. It was only a matter of time before a slip of the tongue would be overheard by unfriendly ears. It happened as a camp civilian worker relieved himself behind a hedge adjacent to one of the working parties in the forest, four miles from Freiwaldau.

The news had been good the previous evening and the prisoners could not contain their excitement. Late August and early September 1944 had brought night after night of monumental news. The radio brought reports that Paris had been liberated and De Gaulle and the Free French had marched triumphantly down the Champs-Elysées. The Germans had also surrendered at Toulon and Marseilles in the south. Canadian troops had captured Dieppe and the Allies had entered Belgium. Brussels, Antwerp, Ghent, Liege and Ostend had all been liberated by the Allies. The Russians had also liberated the first concentration camp in Poland. It was the beginning of the end for Germany and the Third Reich.

Two prisoners of war were talking as they took a break at the side of the road. Rather carelessly and a little too loudly, one of them handed a cigarette to his friend from another camp and announced that the news was good. ‘The radio was red hot last night by all accounts.’

‘It was?’

Andrezj Netzer, a Silesian with Nazi-sympathetic views, was spilling a stream of hot urine into the hedgerow. He was hidden from view and nipped the end of his penis to slow the flow for fear of being heard. What a stroke of luck, he thought to himself as the conversation continued. His mind was already working overtime, wondering how this information, if passed on to the right people, would further his rise up the pecking order in the camp. Overseeing and supervising the outside working parties was certainly better than some of the jobs in the camp but as winter approached, he had his mind set on a nice warm office job, pushing paper and drinking hot coffee all day.

‘The Allied troops have entered Germany, according to the reports from the BBC.’

‘Get away.’

‘They have, at a place called Aachen. And the Germans and the Japs are surrendering for fun.’

The second prisoner whistled as he fingered and stared at the cigarette containing the news. ‘So it’s true. This war really is coming to an end.’

‘It looks that way, pal. It looks that way.’

Andrezj Netzer shook the last drops of urine from his penis and buttoned up his flies. He waited quietly as the prisoners bade each other farewell and moved away.

Horace and Rose began to make plans for the end of the war. They hadn’t made love that evening; Rose was too full of excitement and planning. They lay in the church just talking. For once they were fully clothed.

‘New Zealand.’

‘What?’ Horace replied.

‘New Zealand,’ Rose continued. ‘We can go to New Zealand. My father said the government of New Zealand are making plans for the end of the war. It’s a big country and they are encouraging farmers to work the land.’

Without realising, Horace was nodding. Rose was in full flow.

‘You have farmed before, Horace. We could apply.’

Horace never heard the next few sentences; his mind was far away. He had dreams of a sheep farm and a wife and children and a beautiful climate, and peace. They’d discussed the end of the war many times. He wanted to be with Rose – he wanted to be with her forever – but he’d always wondered, where would they live? Taking a German Silesian girl back to England was impossible. For five years the Germans had brought terror to his country. They’d bombed and shot and slaughtered. How many families in Ibstock had lost sons, daughters, fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts? His fellow
countrymen wouldn’t understand, especially in a small village the size of Ibstock.

He could not take Rose back to England.

What of Silesia? Could they make a home there? It was too uncertain. It was not clear what sort of retribution the Russians would demand from the German population, and would they class the Silesians as the same? Rose had worked in the camp; her father was the owner. As far as the Russians were concerned she was one of them. It didn’t bear thinking about. Horace had heard the rumours on the grapevine about what the Russians were doing with the German population. Soldiers or civilians, there was no distinction. Stories were filtering through of mass slaughter, hangings, torture and gang rape. A shiver ran the length of Horace’s spine.

‘You’re not listening to me, are you? Rose said angrily.

‘I’m thinking about New Zealand, that’s why.’ Horace pulled her down on the rug and kissed her. He slipped his hand up her skirt, found the thin material of her panties and massaged her clitoris with his forefinger. She moaned for a split second then took his wrist and pulled it free.

She broke the kiss. ‘You are truly thinking about New Zealand, Jim?’

‘I am.’

‘You want to live with me forever and give me lots of babies?’

‘I do.’

Rose smiled. ‘I love you so much, Jim Greasley.’

‘I love you too, my English Rose.’

Andrezj Netzer could barely contain his excitement as he walked through the camp gates of Oflag VIII Oberlangendorf. Without hesitation he went straight to the commandant’s office. A middle-aged sergeant looked up from the desk.
Netzer was aware of that look, the sort of look most Germans gave him. The sort of look that said he was a piece of shit they’d scraped off their shoe. After what he was about to disclose they would no longer look at him like that.

Horace lay on his bunk wide awake. He hadn’t slept a wink and had watched the moon creep slowly across the sky. It was a cold clear evening; the constellations of the stars of Orion, the Plough, and the Great Bear were clearly visible. During his time in the camp he’d learned to read the sky well and calculated that it was around three in the morning. He’d listened to the news that evening and heard of the Russian advance through Prussia, Poland, Hungary and, yes, Silesia. It was good news, but his thoughts were with Rose. For some reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on, he wished it were the Americans who were marching through Silesia.

He gazed out over the forest and sat up as he picked out a tiny beam of light three or four kilometres in the distance. The light came nearer. Despite the cold of the evening Horace became aware of perspiration on his forehead and a warm sticky feeling gluing his shirt to his back. The single beam of light turned into two… car headlights, then another, and another. Eight cars powered their way into the compound. Within minutes the German guards had run around to the front of the camp, unaware and unsure who was coming in at this unearthly hour. They feared the worst – Americans? Russians? Had that awful day had dawned at last?

No. There were no trucks full of soldiers, no tanks or heavy artillery. They were SS staff cars and Horace knew instinctively they were here to search for a radio. It was a well-executed and brutal exercise, designed to show the prisoners there was still plenty of fight left in the German war machine. The SS went into the barracks and the staff quarters heavy
handed and noisily. Any prisoner a little slow in responding to the early morning alarm call would be kicked out of bed and receive several blows from the butt of a rifle. It took no more than three minutes before every prisoner in the camp stood outside in the cold October air of Silesia, some in little more than a vest and underpants.

A large, evil-looking SS officer with a dark moustache began speaking.

‘Prisoners of the Fatherland, we are here tonight to right a few wrongs. We are not stupid and we know that a communications network has been set up in one of the camps in the area. We have reason to believe it is here at Freiwaldau.’

Horace glanced across at Jock Strain and next-in-line Jimmy White. Horace hoped that he was not looking as frightened as they were, though he suspected he was.

‘Keep calm,’ a voice whispered. It was Flapper. ‘They know fuck all, they’re only guessing.’

‘Pretty good guess,’ Horace retorted.

The officer continued. He pulled out a sheet of paper. ‘First, we must tell you the way the war is going. You have been receiving nonsense from your country. They would have you believe that the army of the glorious German Fatherland is on the run.’

The officer let out a forced laugh. The minor ranks around him smiled on cue; one or two of them laughed along with the officer.

‘Nothing could be further from the truth, you stupid English dogs.’

The officer pulled out a pair of glasses from his pocket and put them on. He peered over the top of the lenses at the assembled prisoners. ‘This news comes from an intercepted American broadcast.’ He looked up again and smiled. ‘This is not German propaganda; it comes from your own side.

‘Germany has put down the Warsaw uprising while the so-called glorious Russian Army stood by and watched.’

He read from a list. It was brief and succinct and gave a wholly different opinion from that which Horace had been hearing from the BBC over recent weeks. He tried hard to block out the officer’s voice but the events he was relaying had happened; he’d heard them with his own ears but from a British perspective.

‘We are winning the battle of Debrecan against your Russian allies.’ He paused, looked up. ‘You had better hope that you never ever meet a Russian soldier. They are worse than animals and kill and fuck anything that moves. They are truly devils sent from hell.’ He went back to the paper. ‘Our Japanese friends are winning the battle of Leyte Gulf and have gained control of the Pacific Ocean.’

The German officer spoke for ten minutes. He delivered his speech well and a few murmurs of discontent reverberated in the still, cool air.

It’s all lies, Horace wanted to shout out, German propaganda. But then again, what if it really had come from the Americans? That would mean the BBC had been broadcasting lies and the war wasn’t coming to an end. Horace’s mind was in turmoil until he looked at the German guards. They weren’t smiling, weren’t sticking their chests out proudly. They had the same dejected look on their faces as they’d had for several weeks. Horace smiled, kicked Jock’s ankle discreetly and nodded his head in the direction of two German guards.

‘Look,’ he whispered quietly. ‘Look at those fuckers, they don’t believe him either.’ Jock looked over and Horace watched as a smile replaced the frown he’d worn earlier. In a bizarre relay game, prisoner upon prisoner was kicked, poked or prodded and made aware of the look on their captors’
faces. At that moment Horace understood that the real news coming in each night from London simply had to continue finding its way to the 3000 Allied prisoners in the region.

The SS lined up outside the main sleeping barracks of Oflag VIII G Freiwaldau. The officer signalled and in they went. The prisoners could see them through the open windows, their uniforms lit up from the dim lights in the hut. They trashed the entire barracks. Bunks were broken, mattresses and pillows torn open and the personal belongings of the prisoners were brought out into the compound. Letters from home, photographs, books, magazines and rations from Red Cross parcels were all placed in a big pile before being doused in petrol and set alight.

Inside, the SS were still busy, ripping out shelves and punching in the panels above the prisoners’ beds. One of the German guards was systematically destroying sections of the false ceiling with the butt of his rifle.

Horace feared the worst.

Someone whispered, ‘Stay calm, Jim.’

Horace was aware that the eyes of a hundred prisoners were trained on him. Everyone in the camp knew that the radio was housed in a panel above his bed. Everyone knew he’d got the parts into the camp, it was his responsibility and he’d insisted the radio was to be built into his section of the wall.

The SS and the camp guards made their way back into the compound. They’d found nothing.

The officer held a two-minute meeting with one of his underlings then nodded in the direction of the prison staff quarters. His troops and the guards moved quickly towards the open door. Horace swore his legs were about to give up the fight. The SS officer placed his hands behind his back, smiled at the prisoners and followed his troops into the hut.

Horace closed his eyes. The noise of the staff quarters being systematically torn apart was bad enough as he envisaged the scene inside. He heard the bunks being turned upside down and the mattresses being split with a knife. Worse still was the splinter of wood coming from the panels and the ceiling. The total destruction lasted no more than five minutes and then an eerie silence ensued. As the guards and the SS made their way out in to the darkness, Horace noticed one or two had smiles on their faces.

They had found something.

Last out was the German SS officer. He stood in the doorway and looked along the line of the assembled prisoners. He looked angry. Taking a deep breath, he bellowed at the top of his voice: ‘Bring me the barber!’

Horace swayed one way then the other, on the point of collapse. This was it – his number was up. Two German guards took him by the arms and frogmarched him towards the entrance of the hut. The radio had been found, found above his bed. He would be shot, but what about the others? Incredibly, right at this moment he was thinking of others. He thought about his roommates. What would happen to them? Would they be implicated too? He thought of Rose. They’d want to know his supplier.