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Introduction
It was the last day of February, 1945. The dreadful cold of one of the worst European winters of the century had finally loosened its hold on Bavaria. The soldier sat on a meager patch of grass in a corner of the muddy compound, too weak to attempt exercise. The sun was warm on his back, but the wind remained brisk, whipping his loose clothing around his slight form. Captivity in Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich had cost him seventy-five pounds, a lengthy bout with dysentery, and the health of his teeth, which ached miserably all the time. He had suffered from cold, hunger, and depression. He had not heard a word from home. He hoped they had not forgotten him, as he waited impatiently there in Stalag VII-A for the war to end. But there were some small consolations. Rumors of impending German collapse were beginning to filter into the camp. In fact, though this soldier would not know it until later, within one short week the Americans would cross the Rhine at Remagen, beginning the real endgame with Hitler. The vague rumors he was hearing would soon become even more encouraging. His
other consolation was in his pocket, and was never far away from him.
It was a small address book, in which he had made notes -- some in the
form of letters to his wife -- during his time at the front, and during
his later captivity. Perhaps he realized the tendency of one day to
blur into another – both in combat and, lateron,in
the Slowly he rose to his feet. The wind sighed through the barbed wire; a discarded piece of newspaper blew between the rows of barracks. The soldier shivered, even in the warm sun. "Let the war end soon," he thought, not for the first time that day. This soldier could have been anybody. Stalag VII-A, in the late winter of 1945, contained many thousands of Allied POWs. He could have been just another nondescript, thin figure, scribbling in his address book with a pencil stump, fighting his own little war within barbed wire, as thousands of his comrades were doing. But he wasn’t just anybody. He was my father. ***** It was early June, 1997. "What’s this?" I asked, taking the battered red ledger from my husband and letting it fall open. It had been lodged in between the Book-of-the-Month Club selections and the Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, in a dusty cupboard in my parents’ den. We were in the middle of the sad task of cleaning out my father’s house, following his death; piles of unwanted books destined for charity organizations surrounded me. Making my way to a bare spot, I sat down in a sunny spot on the braided rug of the den floor, and leafed through the ledger. I anticipated another book full of tiny, neat figures in columns – my parents had kept meticulous financial records dating back to the 1950s. The sun streamed in through the windows, warming my back. I shivered anyway, when I discovered what I was reading. I vaguely recalled having heard my father mention the diary he had kept while he was a prisoner of war, but had never laid eyes on it before. He had never spoken much of his experience behind barbed wire, or of his previous, though brief, experience at the front. Nor did he seem to have any particular animosity toward the Germans, and had always intended to make a return visit to Munich. I suppose, in my childish way, my view of his prison experience was defined by exposure to Hogan’s Heroes during my formative years. I guess I thought his German captors had rather resembled Colonel Klink. I could not have been more wrong. After reading for a few minutes, I had to put the diary down. My father’s death had been very recent, and unexpected. I had to deal with that before I could deal with the diary. I lugged it back to my home in New Jersey, where it waited for me on a shelf in my study, and remained always in the back of my mind. ***** It was late winter, 2000. "Why are you putting this up on the web?" my daughter asked, peering over my shoulder as I sat hunched over my laptop, books and papers spread around me, attempting to construct a credible web page. "Would Pop-Pop like it? Would he really want you to do this?" Those were the big questions, of course. Why was I doing this? Over two years had passed before I was able to open the diary and read it without hearing only my father’s voice in my head – before I was able to look at it objectively, as a document of some importance to the family. I had originally intended merely to transcribe the spidery, penciled entries onto a floppy disk, to preserve for my teenaged children another part of their family history. Now here I was, building a web page, compiling lists of resources on prisoners of war, researching the Stalag system, and networking with others who were publishing family papers on the web. What had come over me? I’ll tell you what came over me. It was shame. Reading the diary, I had been overwhelmed by the sacrifices my father had made during his captivity – and his imprisonment was by no means the longest or most brutal on record. Many POWs, for example those captured after Dunkirk, were imprisoned for much of the war, whereas he was a prisoner for less than six months. But reading the diary redefined for me the notion of hardship. I began to wonder if it would be useful to others for the same reason. I was also inclined to publish the diary because of its brevity, which I hoped would appeal to younger readers. Many book-length POW diaries have been published, but my father’s shorter account includes many experiences described in those longer works. Expressions of relief at being captured and removed from the front, for example, as well as descriptions of the boredom, loneliness, overcrowding, and constant hunger in the camp, are all typical of POW first-person accounts. In addition, my father, who was a bank auditor until his retirement, was a precise man, and his descriptions were both brief and succinct. He remembered place-names and knew how far he had walked on a forced march between them. He recorded the details of the barter system, by means of which prisoners attempted to obtain the bare necessities. He was also a gentleman – there was nothing in the diary that I felt needed to be edited out in deference to younger readers. Many of the entries are in the form of letters to my mother, to whom he had been married less than one month when he left for Europe. If letters matching the diary entries were sent and received by my mother, however, they have not survived. I have faithfully transcribed the diary entries that my father copied from the address book into the red ledger, once he had been liberated and had some time on his hands. I have corrected the spelling (not my father’s strong point) in most cases. I have also standardized the recording of dates. As for my daughter’s other question – "Would Pop-Pop like it? Would he really want you to do this?" – I have no answer. "I hope so," I replied to her at the time, "but I guess I won’t know for sure until I see him on the other side." "The other side of what?" she asked, in her best literal/scientific mode. I gave her a dark, meaningful look. "Whatever," she said, on her way out. Judith
A. Vaughan-Sterling
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