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prisoner in Poland
Ben Macintyre has a great book about a British POW/spy in Poland. Colditz and other nazi pow camps in Poland were absolutely hellish. Brits were treated relatively well, esp. vs. Eastern Europeans who were received extreme abuse, but it would’ve taken real mettle to survive there without turn-coating or cracking mentally.
Leshaches-
Robert Kee wrote an excellent account of being a POW (A Crowd is not Company), in which he cheerfully confesses to being one of the ones not motivated to attempting escape (even though he did eventually make several goes at it). He also recounts the forced marches. At one point, his group of POWs found themselves walking parallel to a column of Russian POWs and were appalled by the state of them. They started throwing cigarettes and spare rations to the other column, only for one of the Russian column's Volksturm guards to run up and beat the shit out of a Russian who was picking the gifts up. This nearly started a riot among the European POWs, shouting and throwing things to the point where the Volksturm guard was about to shoot them. The Luftwaffe guards of the European column intervened. Kee says that one of his fellow Brit officers turned to him and said "After seeing that, the Russians can do whatever the hell they like to the Germans and not hear a peep of complaint from me."
He may have changed his mind if he heard about the gang rapes. Book doesn't say.
itsbruce
That’s quite a thing to have to cope with.
I could never really understand it all: caught in france, prisoner in Poland, escaped (?) and ends up in Yugoslavia, ends up home in the north east.
It sounds fantastical tbh. But I never got to speak to him much. He was dead by the time I was 15.