Page 95 - Anthology

The German guards took us out in groups of five hundred. They had the groups scattered out. The
guards were with us, but there really was not much guarding going on; anyone could have left if they
wanted to. Although we were never told it; many of us “knew” or at least “felt” we were being marched
towards the American line and away from the Russians. As we got close to the American line, some of
the guards ran away. They were the ones who had treated us the roughest.

We were force-marched for about one hundred sixty miles in eighteen days; we were marched two days
and rested for a day, so I guess that is about fifteen to eighteen miles a day when marching. The
conditions were bad, very bad. It was early April; it was wet and cold. We had to forage for things to eat.
We ate anything that we thought would keep us alive. There were a few times when our guards were not
watching us closely; we were able to go up to a farm house and beg or trade for simple things like cider
and biscuits. I do remember one time I did just that; I got some cider and biscuits with caraway seeds.
Boy, that was the best I ever got. The farmer kept trying to tell us, and we finally understood that he had
a son that was a POW; he was a flyer. He was telling us that the flyers got to fly and didn’t have to walk.

We didn’t get anything to eat except for what we scrounged on that march. It was strange; I stayed within
my small group of five guys. We had been close while at the Stalag. One guy; he brought in a chicken; I
took hold of that chicken and managed to cook the thing and made a chicken soup of sorts. I got hold of
some wheat one time; it just doesn’t cook up without being ground, it won’t cook up. I got ahold of some
potatoes that had been cut for planting; I cooked them.

They saved everything. I heated water with pruned grape branches. I used a powdered milk can with a
stopper to heat the water of the morning. That was my water for the day. There was one time we found
water coming off the rocks from the mountains. Some of the POWs jumped in that cold water to take a
bath. We had these small pieces of soap from our Red Cross parcels. Anyway, a farmer came by with
his oxen; he had to hold them back to keep them from drinking that soapy water.
I saw horses and oxen teamed together to pull those carts. I’d never seen that before. I figured that the
horses were faster with a light load and the oxen was for heavy loads and going through the hills.

We moved into the woods there at the last, and it rained that night. Like I said there were five of us
together; some of the guys had a fire going so I went down to the fire trying to stay warm. The next night
it rained again; I recall trying to cut bark off the trees to make a shelter from the rain. It did not really
work. Our clothes were soaked, and we were trying to sleep on the cold wet ground. We had made a
lean-to using our blankets and cut bark from the trees for shelter from the rain; the blankets had not been
washed for a year, so they were pretty good for stopping the rain.

Most of it seems kinda hazy; just like back at the Stalag, we slept close together to stay warm. So, when
one guy turned over, we all had to turn.

The rain and the cold made for a bad situation. We were always cold and hungry. We’d been hungry for
a long time before the march. But the marching made the hunger worse.

There came a time when we saw about two hundred Jews in black and white striped prison like uniforms
being marched like us. They were in much worse shape than us. I’ve never seen a man look so bad.
They were skinny, starving and looked like they had been tortured. I don’t know where they were being
taken.

The guys that couldn’t walk didn’t come on the march; I had a guy that was a neighbor at the camp; he
was the one that got to the pictures; my POW picture. He had my address and he sent me that picture.

On the seventeenth day of the march the Germans let us rest in the fields near Braunau, Austria. The
next morning; 26 April 1945; our eighteenth day, we heard the sounds of tanks on the move. We knew it
had to be American tanks. The local civilians had told the Americans that there were POWs in the
woods. The armor was getting ready to fire on us when they were told about us. The Germans