Page 94 - Anthology

The Red Cross sent us some books. I got “Lassie Comes Home” and “The Donner Party”. You don’t
need to read it when you are hungry. That’s the month I didn’t get anything from the Red Cross.

There was a Russian in our camp. I don’t know how he got in there. They used him for Roll Call. He
slept with me for about a month. We couldn’t communicate. Then he was gone.

There was only one prisoner who got shot while I was there. He was in the infirmary and was out of his
head with fever. He jumped out the window of the infirmary and that put him across the “warning wire”.
The SS tower guards shot him. I never saw anybody get pistol whipped or beat up. There was one guy
who said something they didn’t like so they were going to transfer him to a civilian prison. He was hidden
somewhere in camp and the Germans could not find him. They searched for him for weeks. I have no
idea where he was.

Krems, April 1945 after the evacuation of POWs who were capable of marching.
Rene Brosset

There is something we don’t have anything on. I was a POW for a little more than twelve months, you
know that. But, before being liberated we were force-marched for eighteen days. I was on that march
you see. We had crystal radios, I think we had three we’d use to listen to the countries around the Stalag;
the Germans suspected we had them but could never find them. For more than a week before the
march, we’d been hearing about the Russians coming to Austria.

On the day we marched out, we could hear artillery fire and knew it had to be the Russian’s shelling near
Krems. There was bad blood between the Germans and the Russians; early in the war the Germans had
been brutal towards the Russians. The Germans did not want to be at the Stalag because they knew
they would not be taken prisoners. They were leaving to save their hides.

The morning of 8 April, 1945, our German guards told us to pack up and get ready to move. I stuffed as
much as I could in my pockets before we left camp. They gave everyone a roll of toilet paper and some
stale bread. We could here bombs going off in the valley, so the guards marched us the other way. We
went west as the Russians were coming in from the east. I thought the Russians were shelling Vienna;
they were shelling Krems only a few miles away.