After his division was captured, my father, Roger Lacroix, was forced to march for nine days across country to Germany, where he was a prisoner of war. The full story of the battle that led up to this and the march are covered in previous posts shown in the side margin of this blog. Here is the account of his German prison camp experience.At Stalag II-A, in Fünfeichen, Neubrandenburg, Germany, the buildings were single story wood frame and would accommodate, normally, about 500 men. They were extremely overcrowded. They were quite large and separated into two sections. Other than Americans, prisoners there included Russians, Poles, Czechs, French, English and Serbians in camp. At first they had to sleep on the floor and eventually he was given a bed to sleep on. There were no regular beds. They had wooden platforms, about one or two feet high, that they slept on -- very much like in a chicken coop. These platforms were stacked two-bunks high. All they had to spread on the bed slats were their two thin blankets. Like John Kline wrote in his journal, my father carried bruises on his hips and upper legs for months after he was liberated. They were caused by the hard boards he slept on in camp, as well as from the floors in the many buildings he slept in during the evacuation march.
This prison camp had an infirmary and a hospital. An official report* regarding medical care at Stalag II A Neubrandenburg states, "Initially, the infirmary of Stalag II A Neubrandenburg comprised two barracks, one for patients with less serious conditions, and the other for more seriously ill patients." My father was in the infirmary, which he didn't remember as being too cold. There was some sort of small metal stove. As Kline states: “We were out of the wind, and the many bodies huddled close together probably accounted for the warmth.” My father said he did not catch a cold during his captivity, and he attributes this to the many Army-issue vaccinations he received prior to his deployment. They normally got grass soup and rotten spuds to eat.
My father had to share a filthy, community bedpan with all the others in his section where he was bedridden in the infirmary. The prisoners called it a mandolin, because it had a handle on it and made a noise when it was used. So whenever they needed it, they called out “mandolin” and one of the prisoners who was well enough would bring it over. There was no nurse or orderly to assist them. The small convenience of toilet paper was nonexistent. My father used the paper currency in his wallet as toilet paper. He had just been paid before being captured, so he had plenty of currency.However, the currency could not buy anything there. The cigarettes he received from the Red Cross were used as money to buy things from the guards. The German guards were older men. As Kline described: They wore long gray winter coats and had the little red triangular patch on the lapel that shows they had had service on the Russian front. They carried old bolt-action rifles and wore a leather belt, much like the American web pistol belt. The belt had a pouch hanging down in the back, which was used to carry their food and personal articles.
My father confirmed what Kline writes: “The other prisoners would cut your throat for something to eat, like a bunch of starved rats…Your own buddy would turn you into a guard, if it would bring food as a reward.” My father said that he would get a Red Cross box perhaps once a week. These packages were designed for a single man, but the Germans always required that he share it with another man. There would be canned meat in there, and my father would cut the can in half to share with the other man. However, this caused the meat to spoil and it was not edible. He definitely attributes his survival to these packages though. He is certain he would not have survived without them. One night he saved some food in the Red Cross box and put the box under his head like a pillow. While he slept, another prisoner cut a hole in the side of the box and stole the rations from it.
A loaf of bread was shared among 15 to 20 men, and they spent a great deal of time making marks on the bread deciding how to divide it among themselves. The Germans mixed sawdust with their dough, and it is known as "ersatz bread." Each loaf was very heavy like a brick, made from whole grain, cracked grain, and sawdust mixed together. All my father could think about was food; he was starving all the time. He also had body lice and other bugs, which caused him to scratch every minute of the day. He was fed rutabaga soup once a day, which is turnip greens, boiled in hot water.
According to the report, "When the War started, each German POW camp was envisaged to hold no more than 10 thousand POWs, with a staff of about 150 to guard them. In practice, these figures were much higher. The maximum for Stalag II A Neubrandenburg was recorded in a report for November 1941 and amounted to about 50 thousand" POWs. Imagine 50 thousand POWs being crammed into a camp that was designed to hold only 10 thousand prisoners maximum!
The report states that "The Germans tried to break the morale of those who stayed in the camp and reduced their food rations, which were limited to just bread and potatoes. Luigi Roso recalled that they were not allowed to take a bath or change their clothes. His arms were covered with wounds which bled because he scratched the lice bites."
The report states that in 1942: "There were just three POW doctors, two Frenchmen and a Pole, looking after them. An entry in the records for April 1942 says that only one French POW, Dr Dumont, was still working in the infirmary. He was overworked..."
According to my father, at the time when he was there, only one American doctor was there at the prison camp, a captain whom my father saw perhaps no more than once per month. There was no medicine, and medical care was not that great.
My father was bedded between two foreign prisoners from Yugoslavia (Serbia) and Czechoslovakia. One of those prisoners had tuberculosis, and had a tube inserted into his lung, which drained into a can on the floor beside my father’s bed. It was this man from which my father eventually contracted the disease after he returned from the war. (He later spent two years in a sanatorium after his release from the Army and was completely healed of tuberculosis). While he was in the prison camp, he had to have the tips of two toes amputated by a French doctor, due to his frostbitten feet. This was done with no anesthesia and they needed to have men sit on my father’s chest to hold him down. His feet were so frozen that the gangrene had set in, and the feet had become black as coal. The gangrene began to move up his legs toward his heart, and they planned to amputate his leg, but the lights went out due to a power outage before they could carry out the amputation.
The French doctor, which must have been Dr. Dumont (mentioned above in the report), spoke to my father only in French. He said he needed to make incisions in his leg and dig a hole in there to let the gangrene out. He said, “You will want to swear at me, but I don’t care. I’m going to save your life.” Sure enough, with men sitting on his chest, my father swore at the doctor and screamed as he dug into his leg with the scalpel. The doctor inserted crepe paper funnels into the holes he made in my father’s leg. This surgery had to be repeated one or two more times. This eventually caused all the gangrene to drain and the doctor truly saved my father’s life through these crude operations in terrible conditions with no anesthesia.
Until the day he died at age 83, my father had the scars to show for this, where several holes were made in his calf. Throughout his lifetime, he had pain in his feet as a result of the frostbite and amputations, and his balance was less than optimal, but he continued walking on those feet ever since the time he returned from the war.
Please see photos below of Stalag IIA also known as Camp Fünfeichen.
If you would like to follow the rest of the story, it's continued in the next post called Liberation.
Photos
In the first photo at the beginning of this article, there is a local newspaper clipping from Manchester, NH, showing my father, Roger Lacroix, in the top left corner of the photo, and three of his brothers (my uncles) who were also serving our country in the military, fighting in the war overseas.
In the second photo above, you can see a postcard that my father wrote to his parents on January 27, 1945, one month after being captured. He was careful not to say anything negative about the conditions, or else his postcard probably would not have been allowed by the Germans to be mailed to his parents. His parents did not receive the postcard until after he had already been liberated and returned to the States.
Attribution notice: *The official report cited in this article is "Medical care for prisoners-of-war in Camp Fünfeichen Stalag II A Neubrandenburg) during the Second World War," from Proceedings 2021 - Behind the Barbed Wire 2021, by Joanna Lusek.
_______________________________________________
Len Lacroix is the founder of Doulos Missions International. He was based in Eastern Europe for four years, making disciples, as well as helping leaders to be more effective at making disciples who multiply, developing leaders who multiply, with the ultimate goal of planting churches that multiply. His ministry is now based in the United States with the same goal of helping fulfill the Great Commission. www.dmiworld.org.
No comments:
Post a Comment