DE day: after Dunkirk

more from the WiP: the realities of prison

Few men were shot in the chaos of surrender at Dunkirk. The Germans carried crosses and spades to bury the fallen: the survivors were rounded up and robbed of their weapons, their canteens, their cigarettes, and anything else that might give them aid and comfort on their long march into captivity, but this was routine. The front line troops were not brutal. They knew what the fighting had been like. It was once the columns got well behind the line, retracing in surrender the paths of their retreat that the mistreatment began in earnest.

Their guards rode bicycles; the men were kept on their feet for four hour stretches, followed by ten or fifteen minutes of rest. They were not allowed to sit down while resting, and one wounded prisoner was shot when he did so. Marching, they were harried continually, with shouts to hurry up, shots fired over their heads or at their feet, and sometimes blows with rifle butts. One captain who attempted to fend off a blow was shot dead on the spot. The guard claimed his victim had been going to attack him.

The usual ration was one packet of ration biscuits a day, though once they had to march three days on two packets of biscuits. As they marched long columns of motorised German reinforcements, processing triumphantly into France, passed them in the other directions. Some drivers would swerve deliberately to knock down the outermost men in the prisoner columns.

In this way the defeated were marched across Belgium. When they reached the German railway network they were moved on to trains, which ground their way slowly across Germany to the far south eastern province of Silesia, which is now part of Poland. The officers in their third class carriages drew lots as to whose tin hat would be sacrificed to shit into. The other ranks in their cattle trucks just stuck their arses out through the slats which formed the sides of their wagons. In the stink and shame of the other ranks’ clattering cattle truck. Denys learned a lesson about politics. When a loaf of bread was passed into the carriage for ten men to share, one man had to slice it and to share it out fairly. Denys took that responsibility, and they were happy to give him it. Though he had led his men to disaster, he was still their leader. They did not want the job. He still did.

His journey ended at Stalag 8B, a prison camp complex at Lamsdorf (now Lambinowice) in Silesia, about 110km west of the little town of Oswiecim, or Auschwitz, as the Germans called it. This is a bleak country of heathland and sparse pines, harsh winters and scorching summers. The towns are built round coal and iron.

More than 200,000 prisoners of war would pass through the Lamsdorf complex before the war ended. The main camp had upwards of 600 dependent work camps to which the prisoners were shipped out to labour in the mines and factories that fuelled the German war effort. The worst treated were the Russians: 40,000 of their prisoners died in captivity, from starvation, exhaustion and casual brutality.

The British prisoners were not Jews or even Russians: they were fed enough to keep them alive. and fairly healthy for the manual labour they were forced into. Denys was not allowed to die when he developed appendicitis, but was treated in hospital for ten days. Only a Western gentile prisoner would have been saved to work like that. But conditions were otherwise grim. One evening before the war, with friends in Brasenose College, they had discussed in this spirit whether pride and good taste demanded that there should be some things one should never eat. Denys had offered the example of a lump of pure boiled mutton fat – a food worse than death, as he put it. But that first winter in the prison camp, there came a day when all that was on his plate was a portion of soup consisting of nothing but water and a lump of boiled mutton fat. He ate it greedily. He had learned something more about human nature, and his own.

In later life his face was squared off and almost bland and his eyes were apparently benign behind his squared off tortoiseshell spectacles but in the photo taken for his prisoner ID his naked eyes are raging and his jaw is hard edged and pointed like a wedge for splitting logs. Hunger, cunning, and determination would carry him through the years ahead.

In the camps Denys watched his fellow prisoners trade food for cigarettes and then smoke their winnings. He noted that tobacco could never nourish but that it might diminish hunger pangs. He never smoked himself. He used cigarettes solely for currency. They could buy food or inattention from a friendly guard. He still believed that willpower and self-discipline could shape a good life, one which could be formed by struggle into something expressive of an underlying harmony, like the curve of a trout in a current.

In the spring of 1941 he was shipped off to one of the satellite work camps around Gleiwitz, an industrial sprawl about half way between Lamsdorf and Auschwitz. Splintery wooden bunks in draughty sheds or cold brick barracks; bad food and the smell of unwashed fellow prisoners. Guarded barbed wire all round them and privacy nowhere. He spent eighteen months in a factory that seems to have made parts for railway carriages, counted out in the morning and back in again at night. Then he was sent back to a camp, where he worked as an interpreter, with considerable freedom to move around and indeed to get unofficial lessons in Polish from another forced labourer, a woman farm worker whom my mother would tease him about as “Your Ukrainian pig girl.” His prison record shows in April 1944 he was punished and formally reminded that prisoners of war were forbidden “commerce with German women”.

By that time he had made two attempts at escape. Both times he managed to get outside the camp, but not to get far. Once at least he managed to return without being caught. But in May 1944 he was sent to the coal mine in Blechhammer. He stayed there until late January 1945 when all of the camps were emptied and the prisoners marched away from the approaching Russian armies.

It was then that he made his third and successful escape attempt. He slipped away from the column with another couple of men. They were neither spotted nor shot but they had no food. They were extremely cold. It was three days before they reached the advancing Russian army and by then they had started to grub up potatoes from the frozen ground and to eat them raw.

The Russians fed and warmed them but these were still wartime rations. In a camp for allied prisoners they were given food parcels from America. The food was far richer than anything they had seen in five years; Denys held back, but two men gorged themselves and subsequently died of dysentery.

Behind him now, the Red Army moved on to victory and Berlin, slaughtering and raping its way through the German lands of central Europe. Silesia and the Sudetenland were ethnically cleansed. It was terrible and still no worse than what the Germans had done in Belarus, in Russia itself, the Baltics, and Ukraine. This vast and ravaged wilderness was where the decisive battles of the war had been fought, and where Hitler had finally been defeated. For every ten men who had died in France or Belgium 500 soldiers had died on the Eastern Front, and the civilians, too had died in their millions Only the Jews had been singled out for industrial extermination; the others were killed as the opportunity offered, or simply starved to death.

Denys was shuttled slowly through this desolation as a privileged survivor. In late May, after the war in Europe was over, he reached Odessa, and so came home to England and to Auntie Vee in Swinbrook. In September, he resumed his studied at Brasenose, where he made two lifelong friends. The only one of his fellow prisoners he ever mentioned afterwards was Denholm Elliot, the actor.