Page 62 - Anthology

STALAG VII-A
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We went from XII-A to VII-A in Musburg, Germany. It was from there that I went to Munich to work every
day. We went by rail. It was about 35 kilometers. We did all kinds of work that didn’t require much skill.
We worked on the railroad, replaced all the rails and ties and everything that was hit by a bomb. We dug
out frozen water lines – things like that. We continued to get the parcels. It was two men on one parcel,
and we got one per week.

I was a POW at Stalag VII-A for about ten months. Between XII-A and VII-A I was a POW from July 1944
to April 1945. We lived in boxcars at VII-A – about thirty men to a car. One of the worst things was when
we were strafed by our planes when we were on the train going to XII-A. We were hit by P-47
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Thunderbolts . We ran into a bridge that was out and something had happened to the train’s engine.
We were just sitting there on the side track and could not move. Before that we’d go on that train and
maybe go all day and we’d run into a bridge out and we’d backup.

It took us sixteen days to get from France to Limburg. There was a sad thing. On our boxcar there were
two guys that was going to try to escape. One of the guys said: “When the planes start peeling off, the
Germans forgot to latch our door, so when the planes start peeling off we are going to jerk this door
open.” The two guys who was going to try to escape, well when the Germans caught them; they was way
down in the country there, and really doing it. We were not supposed to be out of that car, and we did not
know what they would do. We had a guard who had been hit in the leg and said he’d help us if we helped
him. We told him we’d do all we could.

The Germans brought the two guys back up to our car from trying to escape. They shot them right there
in front of us. One of them fell right at my feet. The last one, they had shot that guy first, and they went
to shoot the other guy and the guard’s rifle snapped. Our guy ran in and tried to take it away from him,
but they beat him up and knocked him down and shot him in the head with a pistol. Can you imagine
that somebody is going to shoot you and his rifle snaps? Oh, boy! I didn’t know what was going to
happen to us. I knew what could happen. It convinced me that we had done wrong by getting out of that
car. We were not supposed to be out. They wanted us to know that we were a prisoner and that they
was the head men, which was the truth. We had to abide by that.