"I was feverish by the time we were herded into a largish hall. The guards were joking around and making signs of the gallows and stringing us up. I didn't like it, mostly, I think, because I wasn't feel too good and I felt very much enclosed in that hall because it didn't have much sunlight. The building was old with bars on the top of the curved windows and reeked with a musty smell of age.
What a way to go I thought. I preferred to be executed in the sunlight and in open air. I mumbled something which nobody understood, it was something like a last wish. I must have been really delirious. People pointed at my hand and somehow that explained it to them. I wished they would leave us alone now.
When we were sorted out they put us into cells, which were converted rooms with the same curved windows, bricked in with bars. I thought that we might escape from the third floor, the bricks were loosely placed. The rooms were quite big containing a lot of people who would be available to remove the bricks.
Those big rooms were my first quarters and the conditions were not very good. One latrine for all of us, which had to be carried in an out and cleaned. The senior prisoners and new inmates took turns at this task. They dished out watery soup and rations. There was also some wooden bunks and each of us had a bowl and a metal cup. In that room there were twenty four people!
The biggest problem or rather plague was the vermin that swarmed through those buildings. All kinds of vermin and so many appeared. It made one wonder whether they had just poured them out of a big bag to make life difficult for us. From daybreak onwards we were kept busy delousing and the Germans were fully cooperative with this process.
At night the only chance to delouse was when the guards put the lights on to see whether we were still there. When the lights came on we heard the guard's heinous laugter, like hyenas, as they saw us killing the bugs creeping everywhere and stinking from drinking our blood.
In the evening, we usually put our cups and bowls under the table legs, chairs and beds enabling everybody to have a turn at sleeping on those objects. The bugs still dropped from the ceiling sensing the warmth of our bodies. We just could not rid ourselves of the bugs.
Eventually, the bugs reached the German quarters. However, it took time before disinfectation took place. The Germans seemed to enjoy watching us and the bugs. By the afternoon we managed to get some time for a nap, that is if the guards didn't come and tap on the bars. We were also allowed to have an exercise run in the square between the buildings with machine guns trained on us.
During the afternoon, we were allowed to smoke from cigarettes supplied by the parcels from the Quakers and the Red Cross. Usually, Tjitane and Gaulois, very heavy, real black tobacco. In the short time allowed some prisoners collapsed after taking a quick puff and inhaling.
Eventually, we found a way to snip the ends off, turn the cigarretes around, light it and take a few puffs under the surveillance of the guards. We would extinquish the lit end, put it in a tin and take the best butt end inside making a light when everything was quiet. We used what they called "Amadou", from coat padding and small flint stones.
One of the guards, who we called "Donald Duck", was a non-smoker. Donald Duck could usually smell the smoke from a long distance. He would follow the trail of smoke and then stand in front or our door quaking and looking like a duck. Nobody looked and sounded more like a duck than him. He never gave us away either, so no extra punishment was received.
Our guards were mostly old reservists pressed into doing their job. "Yup", another guard was always hearing things when nothing was there and vice versa. He helped himself to our food parcels and everything else that we possessed. The guards had access to our belongings and it was Yup who replaced my slashing knife with a dirty little pen knife"
To be continued ...
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