Thursday 26 January 2012

Day 29 - A Tribute to Maxwell and Others Brave People!

"One day one of the guards we called "Discipline" put the radio onto the B.B.C and walked away leaving us to listen.  By this time, my hand had healed nicely and I had no after effects from it, I could move it. !!!

The last guard was younger than the previous ones and his name I can't recall.  One day he was very upset after returning from leave as most of his family had perished and he had also been reprimanded by his superiors for allowing thirty inmates to escape from the top floor.  They took the bricks away from the window, bent the bars upwards and used their sheets knotted together in strips to get to the street below and flee.  This was done dodging between the patrols and the guards at the gate.

Only a few were brought back, the rest got away.  So the guards continued to tap bars and watched us like mad.  Nevertheless, one day my luck came!  We found ourselves cleaning the anti-room used as a store room near the street.  It had no bars or bricks built in and very dirty, as we swept the dust began to swirl upwards, so the guard opened the window for air.  At the same time, some mice were disturbed and they came out from among the furniture as we moved in with our brooms.  Like a cat on the chase he and my mate were after the mice.  They took off towards the passage with the guard and my mate in hot pursuit.

I was alone standing straight in front of the window.  Looking outside to my left and right I saw just the sentry at the big gate returning.  I waited for a chance for him to turn away from my view.

My opportunity vanished with the return of my guard.  He was very flustered and blowing from his run with the mice.  Looking at me and then at the window he quickly realised what could have happened and shut it.  He went very red in the face and took us quickly to our rooms, ignoring everything else.  I bet he had a shock.  He wasn't quite sure of anything, neither was I.  We both had our regrets, I am sure, for our failures.  Such opportunities only come once they say.

I remained there for 9 months and I began to think they had forgotten about me as everybody was going out on regular transports, all before me.  There was only a couple like me left.  In between the big room and the soup run I continued my education.  We had nothing else left except professors and members of the diplomatic corps as well as a few others.  The professors took great delight in teaching us in the evenings and weekends when most of the guards were off duty.

The guards arranged for us to have the Red Cross and Quaker packets distributed and we had competitions as to who could produce the best looking cake in the straight bowl.  It was a mixture of French bread blended with the ingredients in the packet, from jelly to all kinds of biscuits.  It was amazing what came out of it, like that we had an interest and made it last.  One poor soul from Lithuania could only hold out for a short while as he was famished and then he set upon it like a wild animal.

The bugs were still unbearable and I saw one person wrapping himself up like a mummy, only to make it worse.  The bugs got in between and underneath the material.  He had big blobs really swollen up to an enormous size and he cried like a child.  We couldn't console him his mind was deranged.  Listening to the professors talking about Ghengis Khan, Kublar Khan and the light of Asia Buddha brought him back into the fold with us!

Then there was Professor Beck from, The University of Tarbes, talking about his re-generated potatoes, produced in his lab.  The Nazi's were after his work on potatoes as well as he studies of locusts.  These studies started just before the war in Mauritania and Senegal.  He made an effort to farm the locusts and experimented with making them sedentary so that he could produce an ideal food from them, a kind of flour meal.

To top it all, there was Maxwell of Brussels talking nine languages fluently and teaching us the rudiments of them all.  We even went as far back as Sanskrit with him.  There was a real Gypsy amongst us too, looking more like a Sikh.  He was taken as a Sikh on the frontier of the Pyrenees, unable to explain or write in our languages he was a suspect and they took no chances with him.

Within a week, Maxwell was able to converse with our Gypsy in his own Romany.  He started to teach him to read and write in our language.  One day, Maxwell disappeared on one of the transports and as he was Jewish there was not much hope for him!

At that time, I didn't know what happened to the Gypsy but we met again later.  Maxwell left us a statement on the real origins of the Gypsies.  He said that they were an early nomadic tribe from the Punjab regions who travelled westward towards Europe after the big migrations of the Indo Europeans.

I also met a Polish cadet, Janeck who tried to cross the mountains dressed like a boy scout.  He had made his way from Poland to Greece via Transylvania where he was eventually captured.  Later on, he told me that he had killed a couple of Germans and changed his name from Pareuski to Borofski.  When the Germans caught him, they let his beard grow for three days, which proved that he was older than the boy he tried to make himself out to be, so that was it for him"


To be continued ...


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