Introduction
As the Second World War came to an end in 1945, the Germans began emptying their concentration camps by ‘death marches’, gruelling, roundabout (dodging the Allied advance) journeys on foot to the Baltic shores, where the SS forced their captives into the sea and gunned them down. But one young woman escaped, with the help of ten British prisoners-of-war.
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.
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