Wednesday,
May 2 1945.
The following day the remaining POW were withdrawn to Luckenwalde
and the Hitler camp left to the refugees who were last seen removing
tear gas bombs to their quarters. Our journey back by lorry was
more interesting than by foot earlier in the day as it took us
along the main road where we saw more signs of the war than in
the woods and on the railway line. A large number of tanks, troops
and equipment were seen and we realised that operations were
still in progress but the troops were all German; probably the
main battle had passed them by and they would shortly be rounded
up by the Russians. We had no Russian escort and were warmly
greeted by all the troops when we passed - it was a weird experience.
While passing through the town of Luckenwalde, we came across
a small group of German prisoners under one Russian guard and
they included one prison camp guard who had been particularly
unpleasant; they had clearly been walking for some time and were
in poor shape but I have to confess that it gave us all great
pleasure to see our once proud captors in the reversed position.
The town was not greatly damaged, it was after curfew with hardly
a soul about and all the shutters were down, giving the town
a dead appearance. And thus we returned to our Carpenters shop
after a fruitless but interesting day out of the wire.
That night I was so tired that I slept solidly for 12 hours and
apparently I was not disturbed by heavy gunfire throughout the
night, which was explained on the radio on Thursday. It was announced
that a huge pocket of German resistance SE of Berlin had been
finally cleared up with huge numbers of casualties and prisoners.
This came as quite a shock as we had not appreciated the scope
of operations in the area and it looks as if we were even luckier
than we thought in having been unscathed in the proximity of
such a battle. Certainly we did not expect so much resistance
locally so long after the Russians first appeared nearly two
weeks ago.
Friday,
May 4 1945. Big
plans are now afoot for extension of the works to be done by
the carpenters and Ted has been taken into Luckenwalde to organise
supplies. If this does happen I am to run the office which will
have to be set up but it all smacks too much of a permanent or
long term nature and I wish we could hear news of our return
home. With the cessation of military activity in the area surely
we can now hope for some move in that direction. |