Within a few weeks I received a reply from my mother, saying, amongst much else, that she had passed on my ‘request’ to Birgit. However, months went by without any kind of response from Birgit.
Her silence created a difficult time for me. At first I irrationally expected, hoped, assumed, that she would reply within a few days. Some of the men who had been in the prison camp longest warned me that letters could sometimes take weeks or months to travel to and fro through the international agencies and neutral countries. I struggled to control the torment and settled down to wait, hoping intensely that in this case the system might work more quickly and that Birgit’s reply would soon arrive.
It was nearly a year before I heard from her, by which time I had assumed that no letter would ever come. When I realized who the letter was from, and what it might contain, I ripped the envelope open immediately and read the contents with my heart pounding. Written in the careful English handwriting that for a short time had been so familiar to me, it said:
My dear JL,
I am so pleased to hear you are safe that I cannot find the words. Your parents told me as soon as they heard from you. I think of you with love and excitement and deep gratitude for the kindness you gave me. I shall never forget you. I hope you will come home to England soon and that you will find a nice wife of your own and that the rest of your life will be what you want it to be. I am safe now and also happy with a new husband and a new life. I hope you understand.
Yours sincerely,
Birgit
It had been foolish of me to harbour even vestigial hopes, but when I read her letter I discovered that those hopes had been powerful. Against all the odds I had been counting on Birgit.
Hers was the kind of letter, I gradually realized, that was received by many of the men in the camp. The arrival of the Red Cross mail and parcels was always an event which was highly anticipated, but it was invariably followed by a mood of restless quietness everywhere. This was what it was like to be a prisoner: the lives of the people you loved at home went on without you and it was hard to accept that. A brushing-off of hope is terrible to suffer. For weeks after I received Birgit’s letter I was depressed and disconsolate. I kept away from the other men as much as I could.
The worst of my disappointment eventually passed. I accepted at last that it was over. I wanted her to be safe and happy and could live without her so long as I did not have to see her. When I thought of her as part of my life, I went through terrible rigours of rejection, misery, jealousy and loneliness. But she was out of my life for good.
Some of the men in Hut 119 had built a radio from spare parts stolen from the Germans. With this it was possible to pick up the news from the BBC. From the middle of 1943 we were able to follow the progress of the war: the carnage and suffering on the Russian front, the difficult campaign across the islands of the Pacific being fought by the USA, the invasion of Italy and . the collapse of Mussolini’s regime. After the D-Day landings in June 1944 our craving to go home was intensified by the knowledge that the war was at last being won by the Allies. Again, hopes of a swift conclusion to our predicament loomed over most of the captives. We could do nothing but wait impatiently for rescue. The days and months dragged by.
26
One night towards the end of the war, in January 1945, the air raid siren sounded and the floodlights surrounding the compound were abruptly extinguished. It had happened dozens of times before, so this was nothing unusual. According to the rules of the Kommandant, prisoners were to stay inside their huts and not to move into the compound for any reason until after the all-clear had sounded and the lights were switched on again.
We knew though that the German armies were retreating on all fronts, that the Luftwaffe as a fighting force was almost defunct, that the Russians were advancing at formidable speed across the northern plains of Europe. The British and Americans were poised to cross the Rhine. When that happened, the only question would be which of the Allied armies would reach us first. We were certain the war could not last much longer. The Kommandant and his rules were still a powerful presence, but we no longer feared for our lives. Small freedoms crept inexorably around us, presaging the larger liberty that lay ahead.
I had been out for a stroll around the compound late that afternoon, the weather fine and still. After dark the sky cleared and a full moon was high overhead. The air was bitterly cold but there was hardly any wind. It was possible to stay outside without feeling the worst effects of the cold. I was restless inside the hut, so that night, when the lights went out, I pulled on a thick pullover and a coat. I moved in the darkness from my shared room within the hut, down the short corridor to the main door. In defiance of the Kommandant I stepped out quietly into the Appell compound, where the roll-call was taken every morning. The dark, tall trees pressed in on all sides, beyond the camp barbed wire. The wooden watch-towers were outlined against the sky. I breathed the air in deeply, feeling it sucking down sharply over my teeth and throat, a bracing coldness. I stood on the hard, bare gravel by myself, listening to the sounds of the night. I could hear some of the guards talking restlessly; somewhere the guard dogs were barking; there were quiet sounds from many of the huts. Few of us could relax when we knew an air raid was expected.
I stood alone in the gravelly compound for about five minutes. After that, some of the other men emerged one by one from the huts and walked out into the compound to stand with me. I knew everyone in our part of the camp by sight, but in the unlit square the men were just dark shapes. We acknowledged each other in English, muttering tentatively, not wanting to draw the attention of the guards. Most of the British prisoners were RAF officers and most of those were Bomber Command aircrew. In the same camp, but in their own huts largely by choice, were Polish, French, Czech and Dutch officers who had flown with the RAF. The Australians, Canadians, Rhodesians and New Zealanders tended to mix with the British. We were a cross-section of what the Allied air force had become. There were also many American crewmen, who were kept in a separate compound of their own, but a few of them had managed to transfer themselves across to our part of the camp, and they mixed in with us. The Yanks were popular with everyone but they were generally more fretful about being held prisoner than any of the Europeans. I think some of them still saw the war as a European sideshow, something they had been called in to help with, not a war that was truly their own. They were a long way from home. Their food parcels were bigger than ours and contained foods and treats that seemed to us exotic, but all the Yanks who were with us were generous, so we readily forgave them that sort of thing.
That night we all stood together silently in the dark, watching the sky.
A few minutes after midnight we heard the first sound of engines, far away and high above us. In silence we scanned the sky, hoping for a glimpse of the planes. The sound grew louder, a deep-throated roar, a throbbing noise that was more felt than heard. The aircraft came steadily closer.
Then someone said, ‘There they are!’ and we turned to look away behind us to the west. Against the stars, against the moon-bright sky, the distant bombers began to appear. At first they came singly, then in increasing numbers, high and tiny, flying relentlessly on. The stream thickened and widened. We tried to keep a count of them: fifty, a hundred, two hundred, no, more over there, at least five hundred, maybe six or seven! We craned our necks, looking and looking, expertly identifying them from the engine sounds as Halifaxes and Lancasters, bombed up and ready. The bomber stream went on, a seemingly unstoppable flow, unchallenged, dreadful, unhesitating. The droning of the engines seemed to blanket everything else. In the moonlight we could distinguish the Luftwaffe camp guards emerging from their command positions, standing as we were standing, staring up at the sky.