Red Delta

As the cart rolled on, I really wasn’t afraid yet, but then I didn’t have a clue about what was going to happen. Here, I had been in the middle of planning my escape from the hospital, but that wouldn’t be necessary now. I remember how good the sun felt on my battered body. It was summer in Germany and the weather wasn’t too hot yet. When I went into the hospital they thought they had taken all my possessions. However, I always had a hunting knife hidden in my boot. All I ever gave them was my name, rank and serial number. The cart was full of a lot of tired and dirty soldiers. Hardly anyone spoke, but it was more from being deep in thought than not being friendly. The carts, since several had joined our journey. We followed the rail line until we came to this long, steel building with a huge fenced in pen. Inside the pen were hundreds of men of different nationalities, all in various stages of exhaustion. It was crawling with armed soldiers too. One guy begged for some water and he was hit with the butt end of the gun and told to shut up. On the far side of the pen was a pile of lifeless bodies. Some guy was using a pitch fork to throw them into the same cart as he had gotten out of. The fence was high with barbed wire at the top but he noticed that there were areas where the dirt around the fence was lower, like someone had been removing it to make a space big enough to escape. I spent the rest of the afternoon, kicking the dirt around in that area. It was quite loose and I sort of spread it around. I was given my first taste of POW food and said it was disgusting: thin, watery soup-like mixture and a couple of potatoes, but I had heard sometimes they didn’t feed you so I ate it like it was a feast. My leg was throbbing and the wrapping was getting dirty. I hoped I didn’t get an infection and get gangrene. It was so crowded in the pen, it was difficult to find a place to sit on the ground. Tempers were flaring and everyone tried to stay out of the other’s way after they saw how the two people fighting were whipped by the guards and told they would be shot next time. It was great incentive.