Syd Whyte Part Two
Sydney talks about his experiences as a p.o.w. in Germany in the Second World War.

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You know you always thought you might get wounded or something, you never thought you’d be taken prisoner.

 

They marched us to Luxembourg and into Germany. It was then that we were bundled into cattle trucks and we was in these cattle trucks, crammed in anything to about sixty to a truck, so you could only stand up more or less.  And we were in those, believe it or not, we were in there three nights and four days, shunted about, over Germany into Poland.  And I was called out on a working party of two hundred and fifty which went up to Gdynia. There we was working – well, we had to make a camp – I was working in the camp making bunk beds and things there.

 

It happened that we had to build a bathroom on the end of our billet.  But bars had to be put in the windows you see, so they left that for us to do.  When the bars were put in, one bar, I went in the blacksmith shop and threaded a bar that screwed into a T piece what was built into the wall. This bar can be screwed into that and it could go through a tube in the other side of the wall so when you unscrewed it, you could slide it back.

 

It was only the slimmest used to be able to get through but they did.  And I know this, this time we was distilling sugar beet and the fellows used to have to get out and get this sugar beet but we couldn’t have it in the billet. The blacksmith had it up in his rooms you see, ’cause when it was fermenting it was, it get so much smell you see and so they used to nip out at night and they get these sugar beet you see, but ours wasn’t good enough so the next farmer you had to go across the canal.  They had better sugar beet so they used to use this wooden tub as a boat to go across the canal. At night.

 

Anyway, in the end we got given away and some plain clothes officers come down there and they went right over that billet, everywhere. In the end, they looked at the bars, it got a bit shiny, being slid to and fro, so they figured it out in the end. That day a welder come down and welded these bars together all the way across.