The better part of valor is discretion.
Shakespeare

Chapter 16

Food, the Lack of It

Food was the most important subject in the POW camp. There was never enough of it and what there was wasn’t nutritious. The work crews received 400 grams of bread a day, while the IC got only 300 grams. Once a day there was soup consisting primarily of water, cabbage and potatoes. Sometimes we got some jam, and some Sundays even “kasha”, kind of a millet gruel. My military canteen had been stolen by some employees in the jail, so I had to eat out of an old tin can with a piece of wire attached for a handle. My only eating implement was a hand-carved wooden spoon that I had gotten in jail in exchange for cigarettes. There were no tables to eat at, we sat wherever we could find a spot.
With the quality of Russian bread, heavy with water, the daily ration was a slice of bread approximately one and a half inches thick. The Russian bread was in a “special quality” class. There was so much water in the dough that the loaves had to be baked in metal forms. Fast distribution was compulsory for the finished product, because if given a chance to dry out, the weight would have been reduced drastically. The camp was allotted so many kilograms per day. The bread loaves without any packaging were transported into camp on open trucks. The loading (after weighing) at the factory and the unloading inside the camp was done by POWs.
The bread hauling process was a constant battle of wits between the POWs and the Russian men and women at the government owned bread factory. Speed and diversionary tactics were necessary to tip the scales in favor of the POW camp. Rigging scales to show less weight, calculating faster than the Russians could comprehend, and other more or less crooked methods were applied. There was a limit to what could be done, but every additional loaf of bread was a lifesaver. The men employed for this job were a permanent crew, had a reasonable amount of success in this racket, and were trusted by the POWs. I wondered how many of them had been CEO’s in their civilian life. Each member of the bread crew was given an extra loaf of bread for that battle against the bread factory. Everything in the “worker’s paradise” was based on hook or crook.
For the bread distribution inside the camp, each group had their own scale, and everybody would sit around watching the man working the scale to make sure he was doing it right. A beastly job that I turned down.
We took the bread and either ate it right away or put it away. Saving it was dangerous, because it could be stolen. Since four other man and I worked in a workshop by ourselves, we could store our bread there because we trusted each other. In the dorm stored bread would disappear overnight. In general there was good discipline, because if a man got caught he’d be beaten up by the other POWs. In camp No. 195 things were well organized, probably because it had been in existence for a long time. The camp commandant was a racketeer, who organized the work of the POWs so that he could make some profit.
During the monotony of POW life, one of the highlights was the kitchen duty (KP) chore. Every guy hoped they could get extra food this way. One day it was my turn with some other men to help prepare a truckload of cabbage for the kitchen. When I arrived at about noon for KP we were face to face with a huge pile of cabbage heads piled in one corner of the kitchen. We had to chop the cabbage with a cleaver, the only way to process that amount of cabbage fast enough to feed 1,500 POWs.
We had to be very careful not to chop our fingertips off, so we each developed our own chopping techniques. When the man next to me found a fat maggot in the first cabbage head he attacked, he asked one of the cooks what to do. The cook stared at him, then laughed. The other soldiers laughed too and told him, “Hey man, chop it, chop it, where do you think we’re getting our protein from? Chop it, we’re in a hurry here. What do you think is going to happen to the cook if the soup isn’t ready when the work commandos come back to camp?” So, we didn’t pay any more attention to the extra meat in the cabbage, and consoled ourselves with the fact that it would be cooked by the time the soup was finished. I snatched a piece of raw cabbage trunk once in a while, just to get an extra bit of carbohydrates and something to chew on.
The chopped cabbage was pushed into big buckets, which were then emptied into one of the big cooking kettles. At the other tables fresh fish were cleaned, and they were added to the kettles, bones and all. I, who had always been a finicky eater, had to turn my mind off completely about this whole unappetizing mess in the kitchen, or I would have thrown up right into the cabbage. After the maggot experience I scrutinized my soup more carefully, and sure enough found a couple of green caterpillars in it. I offered them to any taker, but there were no offers, so I used my spoon as a catapult and flicked them out the window.
The great patriotic bedbug caper
One of the biggest problems in the camp was the infestation with bedbugs. This caused a lot of sickness and many lost working hours and consequently pissed the Russian commandant off, because there was a never ending stream of complaints from the working group captains.
One Saturday, Commandant Shlitzki decided to take “great patriotic bedbug action.” He called all the POWs to a rally and through the interpreter let it be known that tomorrow, on Sunday, a bedbug extermination campaign was to be launched. This action would consist of the following: Room by room all bunks were to be dismantled and carried down to the yard, where another group of POWs were to wash every wooden board with a strong lye solution. After that, all the bunks were to be reassembled and the action continued until the entire camp had been cleaned. From my own childhood experience with these nasty pests, I knew that this action would be totally ineffective. First, the bedbugs were in the walls and floor and relatively few in the bunks, and the lye solution didn’t bother the bugs at all. They probably would laugh all the way to the next victim. Shlitzki made it quite clear that, after this action was finished, no more complains were permissible, and no more sick calls would be accepted. I thought, if that’s the way the Russkis solve problems, maybe I ought to attend their political schooling and learn more about that system.
Since I was very sensitive to bedbug bites, I had already devised my own remedy, which was ninety percent successful. I had fashioned a sleeping bag out of my blanket. It had an upper flap long enough to cover my head while I was in it. I slept right on the floor in the middle of the room under a light that was on all night. That helped, but occasionally I still got big welts from their stings. The bedbug misery brought back a memory of my childhood.

In 1927 my parents had moved to Breslau and into a very large apartment. When the place was redecorated the painters had nonchalantly painted over some bedbugs on the wall. When the bugs crawled away later, the original paint color underneath them showed through. It was an interesting color effect and absolutely infuriated my mother. She called the painters damn pigs, and called the building manager and gave him a piece of her mind, pointing out the stippled wall. He in turn called an exterminator, but even his first attack was unsuccessful and had to be repeated to get rid of the pest. In light of that experience the “great patriotic bedbug hunt” was laughable.
Better Groucho than Karl Marx
The camp had political schooling and I was curious to see what the guys with the other red flag, the one with hammer and sickle instead of a swastika, had to say about solving problems. Maybe I would be able to use some of their methods in my future life. I took a course in Dialectic Materialism. After listening for three evenings, I decided that what the communists were preaching was far worse than anything I had ever heard. Worse than Goebbels’ “fairy tales”. On the fourth evening I fell asleep during the lecture and canceled my subsequent classes, because I thought my falling asleep might net me some re-schooling in Siberia. I could not understand how anybody with that kind of a convoluted philosophy could win a war. When I had enrolled in the course the other POWs immediately picked at me, saying I was obviously one of those guys who always turned my flag into the wind, as the saying goes in Germany. Orje came right away to my defense and stated that as a young man, I was certainly entitled to at least hear what the other political philosophies were.
I have to admit that many years later, after reading the book “Stalin’s War” by Ernst Topitsch, I finally understood what the Russians and Stalin specifically meant by “dialectic”. It certainly wasn’t what Aristotle and Plato had in mind. That is also the reason why in debates with communists one never receives an answer to a question, but a diversion to another subject. It equates with Murphy’s Law which states, “Dazzle them with your brilliance or baffle them with your bullshit.” The Russians were masters of the latter.
The Swedes to the rescue
One day there was a notice on the bulletin board that a Swedish Red Cross Commission was going to visit the camp. Their physicians would examine POWs who were sick and/or amputees, for possible early discharge. Anyone who felt qualified could put their name on the list. Both Orje and I submitted our names. I had come down with pleurisy, and a heart murmur had been detected. The German camp doctor had no medication to combat it. He gave me a tincture of natural digitalis, because he hoped that it would help with my heart problem. He told me to try and keep my chest warm. The only thing I could do was to trade some bread for a strip of material from an overcoat. I cut a hole in the middle for my head to poke through, folded the two ends over my chest and back, and tucked the ends into the pants. At least my chest was warm.
At the end of July, 1945, the Red Cross Commission finally arrived and spent two days examining about 300 to 400 POWs. There were two Swedish doctors and two Russian doctors, as well as the two camp doctors. If a name was put on their list, it meant that an early discharge was likely. Thank God I qualified, the pleurisy, my heart and leg problems must have helped! However, when we would be discharged was another question. We were told it might be several months before railroad cars would be available. So it was back to the old army routine, “hurry up and wait.”
About ten days later, on August 8, 1945, the camp was called together in the evening and the camp interpreter climbed on a box and told everybody that he was authorized to tell us some news. That was highly unusual, since the war in Europe had ended four months ago. He told us that the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan and that the Americans had dropped a new super bomb which they had perfected from a German design. My first thought was, oh shit, this means we are not going to be released because the Russkis will again need all their rolling stock for troop transports to Siberia. Many of my friends said, “So there really was a super weapon that we had always been promised. Why didn’t we get it in time to use against the Russians and England?”
I was more concerned about a postponed discharge than this super bomb. I didn’t think I could survive the coming winter.
Shortly after that announcement all of us on the release list were called together, and we were told that the first transport would be put together within the next two weeks. Then the names of those on the first transport were read. My name was not on that list. By the end of August the first contingent of POWs left Camp No.195 for home, and we gave them addresses and notes to relatives back in Germany. And of course we were envious. We didn’t trust the Russians, and wondered about another release transport.
Several days later the camp gate opened and in came a company of well dressed, disciplined German army soldiers, properly marching to orders of a noncom officer. Everybody was stunned, we hadn’t seen anything like that since the war. They even wore all their war decorations and had most of their equipment except weapons. It turned out that the unit came from Courland. How they got to the camp without being frisked and stripped of their belongings was a mystery. When the tired work commandos came back in the evening they keeled over laughing when they saw those men. Whenever they encountered one of these new POWs still wearing their Iron Cross decorations, they called out loud, “Attention, Iron Cross bearer from the left or right etc.” Well, it wasn’t long and these new arrivals looked just like the rest of us.
Then around the middle of September, 1945, we were told that the war in the Pacific was finished and that Japan had surrendered. I said to one of my IC buddies, “Very interesting, but where is the train to get me home?”
The weather had turned cooler, and fall was unmistakably in the air. The self-made calendar showed the end of September and we still hadn’t heard when the next group would be going to Germany. I visited the camp doctor regularly and my pleurisy was very painfull. It was fortunately a dry pleurisy and according to the physician it was not getting any worse.
“Home” had now become questionable, for me, because we had finally gotten a big map, drawn by a POW, that showed the outline of the occupational zones in Germany. To my dismay I found that the town my parents and I had lived in for the last ten years, Landsberg, was now under Polish administration.
Why should the Poles get this huge area that had been part of Germany for several hundred years? I was really incensed and I remembered what had happened after World War I. Due to the many territories that Germany lost in the Versailles treaty, World War II had started. Did the Allies think it would be any different this time? Or were they deliberately sowing the seeds for the next World War? Let a bunch of idiot politicians decide the fate of nations, no matter where, and they will fuck it up.
In the meantime the guy whom I had met at the NKVD headquarters, and who had told me when we walked into No.195 that he would try to escape at the earliest opportunity, did exactly that. He had managed to get assigned to a lumber work crew, which was felling trees somewhere in the forests around Vilnius. One day he vanished. I could not find out how and what happened, because that work commando did not return to the camp every day as all the other ones did.
Soon, another POW got acute barbed wire syndrome and scaled the high concrete wall one night. He climbed over the barbed wires on top of the wall and, while the guards fired numerous shots at him, escaped right down the other side and ran to the Wilija River. He must have known that a rowboat was tied up in the reeds along the shore. He got into it and skillfully maneuvered it into the fast running river and disappeared. The next morning he was a distance from Vilnius. He rowed to the river bank and continued on foot, but he walked right into one of the POW lumber detachments, where they greeted him like a long lost friend and recaptured him. Back at the camp he got five days of solitary confinement at water and bread.