Members of the Seaforth Highlanders stand guard at the White Cliffs of Dover in Kent, sometime around 1940-41. About this time, one of their number, Willy Fischer, was captured and interned at the miserable Stalag XX-B at Marienburg in Germany, now Malbork in Poland. Five years later, Willy, Stan Wells and eight other British POWs risked barbaric punishment and even execution to rescue one Jewish girl from a death march, even though everyone now knew that liberation was just weeks away.
Part 1 of 2
ONE chill day in January 1945, a farm labourer went into a barn a few miles from Gdansk,* and his eyes fell on an emaciated seventeen-year-old girl dressed in rags, and lying in a trough. “Are you Polish?” she whispered, between hope and fear. “No!” came the reassuring reply. “I’m British”.
Stan Wells had missed most of the war, after he was captured in 1940 and assigned to Stalag XX-B near Malbork.* Now the Red Army was near, and the Germans were scrambling to withdraw. Why risk five weeks in the infamous ‘Bunker’,* why risk being shot, with liberation so near? Nonetheless, Stan and nine more POWs wrapped the girl in a greatcoat, smuggled her back into their Stalag, and tucked her up in the hayloft of a stable used by the local police.*
She was in a sorry state: exhausted, frostbitten, starving, and infested with lice. “I got my forefinger and thumb round the upper part of her arm easily” wrote Willy Fischer later.
Gdansk (Danzig in German) was part of Prussia from 1793, and of Germany from 1871. When the former German state of West Prussia was broken up following the Great War of 1914-1918, Gdansk became a semi-independent city state, neighbour to the newly created Second Polish Republic. But in September 1939, in defiance of a British ultimatum, Poland was invaded by Germany once again, triggering The Outbreak of the Second World War. Poland and Gdansk were incorporated into the German administrative region of Danzig-West Prussia, across which Germany set up a network of concentration camps and prisoner-of-war camps.
Malbork is Marienburg in German. Sympathy with Germany was strong here: despite the opportunity presented by the break-up of the German Empire in 1918, the inhabitants voted overwhelmingly two years later to be re-incorporated into Germany, in the Province of East Prussia.
Punishment at Stalag XX-B took the form of a beating and five unpleasant weeks in ‘the bunker’. There was barely any light, sanitation was a tin can, and food was a bowl of thin soup with a side order of bread, made partly with sawdust, served once every five days. For a remarkable account of life in this camp, see “How do you feel about taking a long walk?” (BBC website).
Stalag XX-B was infested with informers ready to rat out their comrades for the sake of a few perks, and unofficially policed by a bully gang of POW collaborators. Under those circumstances, sneaking out of your barracks at night to visit an escaped Jewish internee in the hayloft of a policeman’s stable while carrying a stolen meal was not for the fainthearted.
Part Two
A Polish family is processed by the British Army’s No.17 Displaced Persons Assembly Centre in Hamburg Zoological Gardens, on May 18th, 1945. Like Sara, Gita and Hannah, who were originally from Lithuania, they had been uprooted and used as forced labour for the Germans’ armaments industry. After the end of the war, the Allies were faced with the challenge of treating hundreds of thousands of such people for diseases, malnutrition and infestions, and returning them to their home countries. There were 120,000 in Hamburg alone.
THE girl in the hayloft whispered that she was named Sara, that she was Jewish, and that she, her sister Hannah and her mother Gita had been among 1,200 women from nearby Stutthof labour camp rounded up by the SS for a stumbling death march to the sea.* After a month of snow, starvation, beatings and executions, just 300 remained. Sara herself was almost executed after a desperate attempt to buy bread with a diamond ring.* At Gita’s insistence, Sara unwillingly slipped away, never to see Gita or Hannah again.*
The POWs nursed her for three weeks under the Commandant’s nose, until on the shortest possible notice the entire Stalag was evacuated, leaving barely enough time to entrust Sara to a kindly lady in the village.
Sara eventually reached the USA, where she became a nurse, and spent more than twenty years tracking down the men who saved her life. “Why did you do it?” someone once asked them. “Well,” they explained, “we’re British.”
Stutthof was a sprawling labour camp over many sites, chiefly at Sztutowo 20 miles east of Gdansk. Originally, most of the inmates were non-Jewish Poles, but more and more Jewish people were brought in from the Baltic States in 1944, as the advance of the Russian army forced Germany to retreat. Over 60,000 people died in the camp, of disease, starvation or execution.
“I didn’t mind being killed” Sara said later. “But not in front of my mother."
Sara lost her father, her sister, two uncles, four aunts and six cousins to the Holocaust. Later, after settling in the United States of America, she took her sister’s name, Hannah. Although she obeyed her mother and fled the column alone, Sara’s intention was actually to come back with food, but she collapsed with exhaustion in the barn and would have died but for Stan and his friends.