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It is almost exactly sixty years since I worked on the farm at Gross Wadkeim in East Prussia, but sometimes it seems like yesterday. It was a large estate with an extensive farmyard containing various brick buildings housing a pig sty, a cowshed containing 120 milking cows, stables housing 100 working horses, 20 riding and coach horses, plus two stallions, one for each type of horse. In the middle of the yard was the usual pond. Alongside one side of the yard was an enormous barn in which was stored the harvest of wheat, rye, barley and oats for threshing during the cold winter months.

Near the entrance at one end was the manor house, garden and orchard. In front of each of the cattle sheds and stables were an ever-growing mountain of manure which we cleared in the spring and autumn and spread over the fields.

The main road to Marienwerder passed through the farm, just outside the farmyard and was bordered, on both sides, by the farm worker cottages. Another farm road went through the yard in front of the big house and continued past the forge and a meadow for the riding horses, through a long avenue of ancient trees with arable fields on either side.

We were billeted in one of the empty cottages, empty because most of the labourers were away in the forces. Some of the prisoners were allocated jobs according to their former employment in civilian life. One became the gardener, so we saw little of him during working hours. Another worked different hours milking the cows in the early morning and again in mid afternoon, and a third as assistant to the groom in the stables. Another became a pig-man. A former truck driver worked in the forge and drove whichever of the four tractors they managed to keep in working order. As time went by he and the forge master had to vandalise the tractors in turn to enable at least one to be available, as long as petrol was available. Also, we were allowed a full time cook who spent most of his time peeling potatoes, our staple diet. He was an Irishman who had spent most of his life, as many Irish did, dealing with potatoes. With only three guards they were too widespread to receive any close supervision.

During the summer months, from spring to autumn we worked from 6.30 am to 7.30 pm, with a twenty minute break for what was called ‘second breakfast’ and again in the afternoon. We also had 1½ hours for lunch at mid-day, mainly because it often took twenty minutes or more to trudge back from some distant location. Effectively we worked for eleven hours a day from April to October. During the rest of the year we worked from dawn to dusk as the days got shorter. So in mid-winter we only worked from 9.00 am to 3.00 pm. Even then we set out in the dark and returned in the dark. Only when the temperature fell below —20˚C were we allowed tostay indoors, because of the danger of frost-bite, followed by gangrene setting in, which becomes fatal.

As the months went by we went through all the usual farm activities. In April covering the fields in manure, ploughing and sowing after we had removed every stone that had come to the surface and using them to fill in any potholes in the farm roads. The worst job was hoeing and singling out the sugar beet to a few inches apart in the blazing heat of June. The strain on various parts of the body is agonising, especially in the lumbar region. All you want to do at the end of the day is to lie down on your straw palliasse and go to sleep.

Then followed the corn harvest of rye, wheat and barley, and a crop of a combined mixture of oats, barley and peas, for the cattle, from which we were able to supplement our diet with a handful of peas, when the guard was snoozing. Some of the crops were threshed out in the fields, some put in stacks, but most put under cover in the barns. The straw was stacked to the rafters in the roofs of the cattle sheds for the winter feed and bedding.

Following the corn harvest there were hundreds of acres of potatoes and sugar beet to dig up. Nothing was wasted. The potatoes went through a machine with three riddles. Those that stayed on top were put in long clamps, covered with a thick layer of straw and then with a very thick layer of earth, to keep out the frost. During the winter we went out regularly to bring in a wagonload for everyone’s consumption.

The potatoes that stuck on the middle griddle were similarly put in clamps for the next year’s seed. The small ones at the bottom were fed to the pigs. The sugar beet was dug up in November. We chopped off the leafy tops and they were stored in a silo for winter feed for the cows, which caused the milk to turn a pale shade of green and taste sweet.

The beet was taken to the nearest railway station goods yard and by rail truck to the sugar factory, where they extracted the sugar, which comes mainly from the bottom end and the roots. The main body of the beet was chopped into ‘schnitzel’ and returned to the farm form cattle feed. This was stored in the granary in which I sometimes worked; and again I managed a little extra sustenance by munching a few very sweet granules. We also occasionally got a container of black treacle from the liquid extracted from the beet. I managed, in the cold days of November and December, to get on the trip to the station. The day before we loaded up two large and four smaller wagons and the following morning hooked up all six wagons in tow behind a tractor. It was hard but warm work, loading on to the rail wagons and we invariably arrived back in the dark.

The first Christmas on the farm, 1941, was celebrated with a day off; the locals went to church. One New Year’s Day the local gentry had a shoot over the estate, led by the young son, on leave, who was soon to be shot down and killed. The snow was several feet deep, but we had opened up the roads. We were driven in an open horse-drawn wagon to the perimeters and formed an extensive circle. We spread out and beat our way slowly towards the centre and the guns. Clustered in the middle was wild life we did not know existed — deer, wild boar, hares and rabbit, and all were duly shot for a banquet, no doubt.

On my wagon on the way out, the farm foreman suddenly launched an attack on one of the prisoners, slapping him hard on the face. We dragged him off, but then saw the cause of the assault. The prisoner’s cheeks and nose, not covered by his balaclava had turned yellow. After massaging his face for a while his colour returned to normal. Had it not been for the prompt action of the foreman the prisoner was on the verge of severe frostbite followed by a fatal dose of gangrene, which would have spread all over.

During the following three years we followed much the same routine. Our guards treated us as well as they could but we were in a rut that seemed never ending. One day a recent arrival suddenly collapsed with galloping consumption, which comes without warning as a result of tuberculosis. A doctor came, but the man died with a few minutes. When a van came to take his body away, we and the guards stood together outside and gave our military salutes.

Occasionally we had visits from the SS and Gestapo, but they were more or less ignored by all, to their annoyance. Also a higher-ranking German officer looked in and gave us a pep talk. On the last occasion, near the end when the Russians were advancing fast, he looked at a map of the eastern front I had taken from a discarded newspaper found blowing around in the road. I had stuck it on the wall with little flags to show where the front was supposed to be.

I expected trouble, but he roared with laughter and moved the flags another 100 miles further forward and said that I was behind the times. He then went on to warn us that trying to escape was no longer the sporting activity that it had previously been regarded. There were so many paratroopers being dropped to confuse the matter and therefore they had orders to shoot on sight.

Sometimes we held a Sunday Service with the guards in the front row, joining in singing of any tune familiar to them. Fortunately we had amongst us a couple of Welsh tenors and an Irishman with a mouth organ. At one Christmas, 1944 I think, it was decided to have a concert or some sort of homemade entertainment. Inevitably they turned to a comic fellow, educated at Colfe School in Catford. I wrote a few sketches for us to perform, and then he decided the second half should be a performance of Cinderella.

He wrote the script of a shortened version, with another natural comedian and myself as the ugly sisters. We dressed up as Goering and Hitler, which was not difficult as I had plenty of black hair which insisted on falling across my forehead, and a smudge from a lump of coal supplied the moustache. Again the guards came and sat in the front row. When we appeared they literally fell about, roaring with laughter. One actually rolled about on the floor, gasping for breath. We had long ago realised that members of the Wehrmacht, the German professional army, had no love for Hitler or the Nazi regime.

Over the years I had managed to get the job of manning the machine used for sowing the crops. The machine had a huge span of 26 spouts at the rear, which were lowered into the ground as it moved forward. My job was to stand on a platform at the back and keep the spouts clear of soil or mud, to allow the free flow of the seed. On a high seat at the front was the operator of the steering wheel; and the whole contraption was drawn by four horses with a driver in the saddle of the rear left hand horse.

In spring and autumn, for several seasons, I plodded along the rear platform; the man steering the machine was a tough, strong, middle-aged German labourer named Hans Weiss. By the last autumn the horseman was a small Russian Cossack boy, Ivan of course, who coped easily with the four reins in his hand and who enjoyed cracking his long whip above the heads of the leading pair of horses.

On the very long, last day, we worked until late at night to finish the job, by the light of a full moon. When the last seed had been sown, Hans fell into a long, silent reverie, motionless on his seat. Ivan and I did not disturb him in his thoughts, and waited patiently for him to come back to life. Then he suddenly straightened up and said words I would never forget. He told us he had just been called up to go to the Russian front, and that we would never meet again (which was why we had worked long into the night to finish the job before he left). He said that most people would laugh us to scorn for sowing crops we would never reap. He said he would probably be killed, Ivan would go home to Russia, and I to England. He ended by saying that someone, the next summer, would gather in the crops we had sown, and thank God for what we had done. It was a sad end to a long friendship, but I have always hoped that he survived.

Sometime, in 1943 I think, some families of civilian Russians arrived and were billeted in an empty cottage opposite ours - men, women, children, even a baby. We were usually segregated at work, and I was relieved when they were given the job of hoeing the sugar beet. But, unlike us, working in sullen silence, they sang all day long - beautiful, haunting melodies of Russian folk songs - the women rhythmically hoeing, dressed in multi-coloured layers of long dresses. They could be heard far away in the still air of summer. How they managed to keep all those beautiful clothes so spotlessly clean is a mystery to me.

On a Sunday afternoon the Russians would come out on to the road between our cottages and sign and dance their hearts out. The men doing those incredibly athletic dances and the women swirling round in their long flowing dresses, singing to Russian folk songs and music. Incredible people, taking every hardship without complaint and always seemingly happy. They were not covered by the Geneva Convention, which Russia had not signed up to then, therefore had the status of slave labour. They were mostly Ukrainians, but included the Cossack boy, Ivan, a Tartar and even a Mongol among them. I was, on one occasion working on taking sacks of corn off the threshing machine in the barn, and joined by a lovely young woman who was a science student at Kiev University. She could lift a 1½ cwt sack of corn and toss it on the wagon as effortlessly as any farm labourer. I started to draw a diagram of the Pythagoras theory with chalk on our notice board; she took the chalk and completed my effort. I remembered most scientific words came from the Greeks, and they are almost identical in Russian.

So, while I have never seen or heard of my fellow prisoners again, I still have many memories of others of various nationalities who made life more bearable during 5 years as a P.O.W and more than six years away from home.

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