THE SWISS RED CROSS
We read or watch films of the War, POW camps, escapes and so on, and
amid all the clamour and
excitement we ignore or miss out on a movement or group of people who
even today in peacetime quietly go out of their way to bring help and relief
to the less fortunate of us who sometimes through our own stupidity or
accident find ourselves in dire situations.
What prompted me to jot this down? About a week ago I got a query from
a gent who was doing a
bit of research and I was pleased I could answer his question, and I
got to thinking that while writing all this, "Bang yu is dead stuff",
a lot of other stuff got left out, like on Thursday we got a Red Cross
parcel between two men
What is wrong with that?" you may ask. Well, if you ever read
the add in a newspaper, Wanted,
bath for a baby with a copper bottom , you may want to peruse the two
men bit again. It would have made more sense to say one Red Cross parcel
was shared by two men.
But sometimes when one sticks to the King's English, one loses the rhythm
of a story and if a person
can jot down his thoughts as they enter his head the reader gets a fresh
and original yarn to read. I suppose it is in a way the same as painting
in oils. When one paints a picture sticking rigidly to the rules no one
give it a second glance, but if someone paints something outrageous he
gets a million dollars for it. So with that in mind, if I wander a bit
don t worry too much, because all this is true and you get cat an skin
an all so to speak.
Anyway, we have read that parcels were issued but what was never mentioned
was what was in
those parcels. A Red Cross parcel would be made of very strong cardboard
and would be in two parts, the bottom half and the top half. The top half
covered the bottom half and was secured by strong string. This was not
unlike a shoe box except this lid reached to the bottom of the bottom half,
making a double barrier against damage to the contents at the sides. It
had a Red Cross stamped on one corner and on another corner it was stamped
Croix Rouge. The colour of the cardboard on the inside of the box was a
very light blue, but the out side was a beige to light brown colour. The
size of the box in cm was roughly 40 by 20 by 20.
The contents of each parcel varied, but among a group of POWs we could
swap what we didn't
like. A typical parcel would contain the following:
1 bar of soap or
toothpaste
1 bar of Cadbury s nut and fruit chocolate or similar
1 tin
of Klim ( Canadian dried milk powder) or 1 tin of Carnation evaporated
milk or 1 tin of Nestles condensed sweetened milk.
1 tin of Player s cigarettes
(50) or 1 tin of Digger flake pipe tobacco.
1 tin of Irish stew or similar.
1 tin of rice pudding or similar.
1 tin of Fray Benthos corned beef or
1 tin of pilchards.
1 tin of sardines.
1 small round tin of cheese.
1 tin
of jam or marmalade
1 tin of butter, usually Canadian, and I used to love
the way it squeezed through the holes in a cream 1 tin
of coffee.
And other yummy stuff.
You would not believe the mischief you could get up to if you got a
tin of coffee in your parcel. It
used to happen like this. One of our blokes perhaps has done a bit of
washing and hangs it out on a line between the barracks to dry. Sounds
a bit mundane, but there is a lot more to that than meets the eye. To begin
with, he has chosen that particular spot to hang his line so that when
he washes his rags out he can dry them on said line. Since he has chosen
a spot near his window, he can now sit by that window and while reading
all about Betty Grable he can make sure no one nicks his apparel or what
passes for a uniform. While devouring Betty s picture on the front of his
book and nibbling on his nails, (I thought it s a good job we don t have
mental telepathy or he would be barging into Betty s mind just as she was
having a cup of tea in her favourite restaurant-- ok Blondie, Ah'm ere,
gerrem off!)this character would now and again look up from the page as
he caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye. He would
note the approaching ferret (a roaming-at-will guard inside the camp) and
a couple of sharp taps on the wooden wall would alert any ne'er do well
to desist in his enterprise until the all-clear was given.
Sometimes he would leap up and yell, There s a truck at the main gate!
and some blokes with
dirty minds would immediately scramble to the nearest windows with tongues
hanging out with cries of where, where? and the droll reply from our
mate with the book would be I said TRUCK!
Then we would have to wait until the main gate was opened and the truck
came into the camp to see
if it contained a contingent of the Gestapo coming to look for some
one hiding in our camp or somebody to thump because their thumping quota
was down. But on finding out from the camp commandant that this camp was
not political but was indeed a POW camp and held Brit soldiers they changed
their minds and went elsewhere to fulfil their sadistic desires.
If it was a Red Cross truck, we knew it would not be long before the
middle gate would be opened
by the Jerry sentry (Jerry being the operative word since in my opinion
most of them were lavatories) who, bored to tears with standing like a
dead Christmas tree near the middle gate looked around. He would see one
of our blokes on the other side of the wire, sitting on the steps of the
nearest hut nonchalantly tearing the blue and gold label off a block of
Cadbury nut and fruit chocolate, making a big deal out of getting the silver
paper off as he glanced sneakily to see if the guard was watching. The
guard, seeing him looking his way, would hastily transfer his gaze to the
clouds while trying desperately not to drool all down the front of his
uniform and trying to assess by the look of the clouds how long it would
be before it pissed down. As if he didn t have enough misery, getting wet
through and standing there for another hour and a half while watching some
yobbo trying to poke a bar of Cadbury s though the back of his neck from
the front--not the ideal way to spend an afternoon. Our mate with the choc
block could not be bothered to break bits off, so, offering the bar of
sweet brown delight to his noshing gear and making a rough guess, he bit
down on two squares and closed his eyes as his tongue and gums tasted the
delight of years of effort by Cadbury and Co.--and the guard who had been
watching and drooling, bit down on his tongue at the same time.
If you have ever been to the dogs, you know the dog races where all
the dogs are straining at the
leash, and as the electric fur-cum-hare flashes past they leap forward
as the gate goes up, all bunched up muscles and flailing legs, slavering
at the mouth, gleaming fangs, bloodshot eyes fixed on the nuts of the dog
in front--well our mob was a bit like that when Jerry opened the gate,
and if he had not stepped back a bit sharpish he could have got trampled
to death. Then we would get to the truck and file past. Sometimes there
were not enough to go round, so the senior Brit would get out his notebook
and after ten to fifteen minutes of maths and a conference with some of
his cronies and a bit of head nodding he would decide it would be one between
four. So if any were left over they would be safely stored till the next
lot came in. Then the saved ones could be added to them to boost the number
and maybe we could get one between two again.
We did on occasion get one parcel each, but then the next parcel would
be late so it worked itself
out. As I sit here typing this I can still vividly remember the comments
as the senior Brit announced one parcel per man. A mad cheer would rise
from the motley assembly, and for two men to a parcel there was a moderate
cheer, but for four to a package you would hear, Well it s still better
than just lousy Jerry soup. And sometimes we would hear from the guards
that a long stretch of railway was under repair because a train had jumped
off the lines and stuffed up the time table in that particular area. I
would go have a shave and wink at the bloke in the mirror. Unfortunately,
not only was the gear to the front immobilised, but any Red Cross packages
to us were also held up, so not wishing to be lynched I kept quiet. That
poster I read so often on the station platform informed us that pssst,
Feind hurt mit" (with an umlaut over the U, two dots if yu is higorant)--in
English it meant the enemy is listening. So I played it safe with both
sides, Jerry and his trains and our blokes with their parcels.
But most times it was one between two and the main thing was to keep
your eye on the bloke who
had half of your parcel. If you could have seen them you could be forgiven
if you thought the two were manacled to each other, because whereever the
bloke with the parcel went the other bloke was like his shadow until you
got back to the barrack room where you shared by common agreement. By that
I mean you could say to him, "How about you take that and I ll take
this", and if you could not agree or both wanted the same thing then
you would roll a dice and the highest number took his choice, but a tin
of corned beef or a big tin of pilchards you could not half because it
could go bad so you made an agreement to open it when you both wanted to
use it at the same time, and so too with other things and it worked pretty
good. The only gripe I had was sometimes when you got a tin of corned beef
the key to open it was missing or the metal tab where the key fitted to
wind it open broke off. And since we had no knives it was impossible to
open a tin of corned beef with a spoon so you had to swap 1 cigarette to
borrow a key. That is, if some one had a key.
Of course there is always a smartass who comes up with Ah can open
yu bully fer yer.
And another will ask Oh and how pray, may I ask?
Dum-dum answers Well it s too easy, all yu do is hold the spoon between
yu hands and work it
back and forwards and the handle will snap off from the spoon bit. Then
when we go to the concrete pool we just rub it up an dahn on the concrete
till it gets a sharp edge on it. Then yu can cut open yu bully tin."
And another voice simpered, Then what yu gonna eat yu soup with?
From the bed area a tired voice drawls, He can always stick is dick
in it and suck it up like an elephant."
And someone else, having noticed our mate when in the showers, suggested
don t yu mean a
mosquito?
Sometimes a parcel would have something different in it, like a tin
of cocoa or Horlicks or a tin of
Benger s food. Benger s food is not unlike dried milk. It can be used
to make a milk shake or can be added to food like a sauce or mixed in with
a custard, there were lots of different ways it could be eaten. I think
it s main advantage was it was ideal for people with tummy troubles and
since it was enriched with vitamins and minerals to enable the sick cope
better with their malady.
As soon as everyone got back to the barracks the questions would fly.
What lucky bastard got a tin
of coffee then?" And someone or perhaps two would chortle, 'ow
abaht that then? and holding a tin of coffee on high for all to see they
would grin at every one like they had just dug up the Hope diamond.
Lucky bastard some one would mutter, but then the bloke had to find
some where to hide it,
because you just don t drink gold. And I sometimes muse today about
during World War 2 how Hitler flooded the market with funny money, how
he went to all that trouble setting up people to make all the different
plates and getting the printing organised and so on while right under his
very nose there we were sitting with the equivalent of $5000 in one parcel.
Coffee in England during ww2 could have cost about two bob a tin, but in
Germany real coffee was as scarce as rocking horse shit and if you had
a tin you were indeed a lucky man.
Of course it was not planned, it just happened. The first time we got
a parcel someone took the tin
of coffee to work and at midday when he made a brew the breeze took
the aroma (a bit like the Bisto kids) over the railway line and past this
factory. If you have ever seen some of the zombie films where a gorgeous
blonde is tied to a tree and then someone rings the dinner bell at sunset
and all the zombies rise out of the ground flashing fangs and making hungry
noises, well this scene was a bit like that. One whiff and every one downed
tools, even those in the toilets, and with noses reaching for the scent
of coffee like a bull elephant s trunk trying to detect a cow elephant
in heat they stumbled over each other to get to the source and it was not
long before the owner of the coffee realised the potential in one tin of
unopened coffee.
Perhaps what the reader does not realise is the fact that in WW2 in
Germany, the nearest one could
get to a drink of coffee was roasted ground acorns. Personally I would
have preferred water from the local duck pond. It is not surprising when
our mate made this coffee brew every one who got a whiff of it was under
a spell so to speak, so it was not long before the price of a unopened
tin of English coffee sky-rocketed. If some fortunate joker got a parcel
with a tin of coffee in the contents it was like winning lotto, and, needless
to say, you didn t leave it lying around for all and sundry to peruse.
It would have been like Barklay s bank leaving a gleaming gold bar in the
middle of the street teeming with out of work, de-mobbed soldiers.
It would not have surprised me if some one had walked past me in those
days with a twig between
his hands dowsing for a bed whose owner had been fortunate enough to
get a tin of coffee in his parcel. Well, when you are a POW, you suddenly
become Jack-of-all-trades just to keep abreast of the times. With four
tins of coffee the world is your oyster to coin a phrase. I often wondered
how many tins would have persuaded some joker in the black market to knock
off Hitler. I think word got back to England that accidentally here was
a secret weapon that could corrupt the German people, because a lot of
flag waving had died down a bit and people were beginning to see that Germany
was not going to get all her own way after all. And more parcels seemed
to have coffee in them all of a sudden.
Sometimes if the guards were a bit slack or they had been bribed, a
bloke would take out a tin of
coffee and blokes on the work party came back into the camp with a loaf
of bread tucked under their jacket and if there were ten men on that work
party, then ten loaves of rye bread wasn t a bad swap for a little tin
of coffee. And the price kept going up as some of the Gestapo now were
taking an interest because there was a profit to be made. Like I said before,
all this was undermining the German war effort.
We would use a special place as a post-box sometimes. One ideal place
was the gents' toilet, in the
water cistern. Another was a fire bucket full of sand on the platform,
but this way had its drawbacks in that sometimes the tin would be taken
and you would not see it or the bloke again, but I think that was due to
either the bloke got wind some one was watching him or he decided after
the first time it was too risky. After all, who was stupid enough to kill
a goose that laid golden eggs?
Most German blokes who smoked pipes had a little tin in their pocket
and in it was a pathetic
collection of dried daisy flower heads. These would be crammed into
the bowl of a wooden pipe, and with a grimace the owner would light up.
Our blokes would take pity, and dragging out a tin of Digger Flake with
a nudge-nudge, wink-wink to their mates, they would ask the bloke for his
pipe, knock out the daisy heads and fill it with flake tobacco. Then they
would hand it back, motioning the owner to light up and enjoy. With the
pipe now firmly clenched in his mouth, the Jerry would light up and the
first time he puffed and inhaled he had to sit down because it made him
so giddy. Farfluchter noch mal, was is das? (Bloody hell, what is that,
or the equivalent). But a lot of these little niceties sometimes paid off
later if you wanted a favour later on.
Chocolate brings back happy memories. The Bosh had chocolate, but against
English chocolate it
was no contest. Rowntree and Cadbury s should have got a medal, because
with a bar of either you could bribe some of the guards to do handstands
while you held his rifle. So, in aftersight, the parcel to the Brits did
as much in undermining the German system as secret agents did, because
let's face it, you had only to pick the wrong bloke to bribe and that was
your lot, so one had to step clever so to speak by knowing who you were
dealing with or the next step could be your last. Most blokes made sure
they had some thing on the bloke they were dealing with, as insurance so
to speak.
One day a car pulled in to the camp and two very dapper gents got out
and went into the camp
commandant's office. Our grapevine was such that we knew the moment
the meeting was over, and what we suspected came true. To quote one of
our blokes: There y are, Dicko, yu owe me 10 fags. I knew the Krauts wouldn t
issue new blankets just like that, an Ah'll tell yu what, I bet yu another
10 they is gorn afore they two Swiss blokes is aht the camp." So we
watched them come out of the camp commandant's office. The commandant was
all smiles and stepping back to allow the two gents go first and the Swiss
gents hanging back with a no please, after you and one of our blokes
watching smirked, Take your partners for the turkey trot. But German
manners being what they are, the Commandant won the day, so led by the
Swiss delegation this mob descended on our barracks. Behind these three
fetching up the rear came the German FeldWabel (sergeant) and two posterns(guards),
and this party came strolling to our living quarters as if they were visiting
the local zoo. Mind you, looking at some of our blokes I suppose that remark
is not so far off target.
Anyway on entering the first hut, one of the Swiss gents with pin-striped
trousers and a crease you
could slice ham with, complete with elegant spats over highly polished
shoes and a shiny brief case tucked under the arm asked one of our lads,
"Are they treating you well? We nodded and smiled politely, and glancing
left and right at one another we interpreted the silly grin on the face
of each of our blokes as what a f----n silly question." We also
noticed the grim face of the German Sergeant--woe betide anyone who says
something out of line.
The Swiss Red Cross excelled in another direction in that they would
push until Jerry repatriated
some of our blokes back to their homeland because of mental illness
due to action at the front. To see some of these blokes would make you
weep. Sometimes today you might see a bloke selling poppies at the yearly
parade on the 11th of November, all smiles and a vacant look. Next time
when you see a bloke like that, you may notice there is someone not too
far away from him keeping an eye on him or guiding him to stop him wandering
onto the road where there is traffic. But a lot of young people today don t
even know about, let alone see, some of the old blokes who have to be fed
because they can t even hold a spoon steady now. When a heavy truck goes
by they cringe, weep and whisper, "Stuka" (dive bomber). They
walk down the street and someone kick starts a motor bike, and the bloke
is on the floor trembling and ashen faced and weeping.
But like I said before, the Red Cross did and still do a Sterling job,
and they can call at my house
anytime.
