Prisoner of War

My father, Frederick William Lawrence, born November 15, 1918, joined the British Territorial Army in 1938, along with 2 other friends. Sadly, I do not know to which regiment he was attached but he was amongst those who were the first to be called up when war broke out. He was part of the British Expeditionary Force invasion of Europe in 1940 and got as far as Belgium, where he was wounded in the left hand side of his body while running down a road trying to get back to Dunkirk when the invasion collapsed. He was found by German soldiers who took him to a German hospital for treatment.

After recovering, he was then taken by truck across Europe to the PoW camp Stalag XXB near Marienburg where he spent the next 5 years. Dad hardly ever spoke about his experiences — but I do know that they were often extremely hungry especially during the early stages of imprisonment when the Red Cross parcels didn’t arrive. He was put to work in fields and on the railroads along with Polish and Russian labourers in freezing temperatures. I know he always said that the coldest winters here in the UK were warm in comparison to those he experienced in Poland! The Polish labourers, who often smuggled food to some of the prisoners, later indicated that people who were sent to Stutthof concentration camp not far away from Stalag XXB did not come out again. I recall Dad saying that they could see smoke from the chimneys though no one could guess the full horror of what was happening there. Dad said he liked the Polish people very much and thought the Russians were good people too with a dry sense of humour.

I know that he paled up with a couple of other soldiers in the camp and they always stuck together. One of them was called Andy who Dad came to regard as the brother he had never had. There was one incident Dad recalled of a soldier whom the Germans wanted to take away because they suspected he was Jewish. The prisoners all insisted he wasn’t but the Germans took him away and he was never seen again.

Dad was also part of the long march westwards at the end of the war when the Germans fled from the advancing Russians. He spoke nothing about this ordeal although it is now becoming more widely known about the horrors these soldiers endured. The only thing he used to say was that the Germans eventually ran off and left the prisoners to fend for themselves and he was picked up by American soldiers.

As a young girl, I had always wondered why, whenever there was a thunderstorm, Dad would be physically sick and have to go to bed with the curtains drawn for a couple of hours or more. It wasn’t until towards the end of his life that the story behind this was finally told. During the long trek westwards when the Germans knew the war was lost, the prisoners were put on a train, though I don't know exactly where this happened. During the journey, the train was strafed by Russian planes. The 3 friends huddled together hoping that there wouldn’t be a direct hit on their carriage. One of them, Andy, to whom Dad was closest, put his head out of the window to see what was going on. Dad yelled at him to get back in and then he and the other friend pulled him back into the train - only to find that Andy’s head had been virtually blown off. The horror of this must have been unbearable and the reason why thunder and lightening caused Dad to have flashbacks for some years after the war ended. As he retold this story for the first time in 1992, he broke down in tears. The realisation of the horrific memories that Dad had carried with him all his life came as quite a shock. It moves me to tears even as I type this.

But to end on a happier note; dad had been going out with a girl before the war and after being captured had written to her saying that as he had no idea if or when he would return, he would understand if she didn’t wait for him. She didn’t and married someone else. Towards the end of the war, a fellow prisoner called Doug - who was a friend of my mother’s brother’s fiancée - wrote asking if she knew anyone who could write to this lonely soldier who had no one to send letters to. So my mother began writing to him less than a year before the war ended. She met with his family before his return and together they went to see him at an isolation hospital in Berk Hempstead where my father was recovering from typhoid. They married 2 months later. I was born a year later.

The final twist to this story is that my parents’ separated in the 60’s and Dad then met up under the clock at Waterloo with the girl he had been going out with before the war started. They married in 1972 and were together until my Dad’s death in 1993. The story had come full circle.

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