Page 60 - Anthology

We went from Ruins on a train ride to Germany. It took about sixteen days. We were in boxcars. That is
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when we went to Stalag XII-A in Limburg, Germany. That was the first place I was signed up as a POW.
Before that we weren’t even considered a prisoner. No one knew nothing about you. They had not
reported us as POWs. If you had two pairs of pants or anything, you had to shed one. They kept one
and you got to keep one. That is where I shaved my beard off. Everybody who was on that train ride
were POWs at Stalag XII-A for a few days. There were maybe two hundred or more of us that were on
that train and now officially a POW.

Stalag XII-A is where we got our first Red Cross parcel. It was like Christmas to us. We hadn’t had much
to eat. They didn’t have much for anyone to eat – potatoes and bread is about all they had. If you could
get the civilian bread it was really good, but that military bread was tough – hard.

The Red Cross parcels had five packs of cigarettes. They were good trading material. It also had a D-
Bar – a chocolate bar that was as hard as a rock. It traded pretty good too. But you could hardly eat it;
you just had to fool with it. There was a can of preserves – fruit preserves. We had a can of Oleo
margarine and crackers – round biscuit-like crackers. And, let’s see; coffee, instant coffee. The parcel
weighed twelve pounds. Everybody got one and the Germans never tried to take them away from us.
The International Red Cross handled the parcels. The federal government paid for it, but the Red Cross
there in Switzerland delivered it. They came in on a train boxcar.

We had to carry them from the train to the camp. And did you know that a lot of the GIs would not carry
them? They said: “Hell no, I won’t carry them around, let the Germans carry them”. I couldn’t believe
they wouldn’t carry them. I carried one when my shoulder was in a sling.