Missing The Boat: War Stories of Thomas Alan Dirkin

65 Hitlers British Slaves Life for enlisted men was hard. The daily routine was working long hours in one of approximately 600 working parties “Arbeitz Kommandos”. A sample of what tasks working parties did ranged from coal mines, salt mines, a sugar beet factory, quarries, forestry work, cement factory, railways, brickyards, farm laboring, and sawmills. My father mentioned that he worked in a stone quarry and a steel works. Pure speculation on my part, but because in his personal correspondence, he mentioned the town of Gogolin, he may have been in working party E131 doing quarry work. Working party E138 in Ratibor steel works is also possible. The perception of the POW’s back in Britain was all across the board. A surprisingly large number of people conceived the POW experience as similar to a holiday camp (ref. Sean Longden Dunkirk: The Men they Left Behind). In my father’s explanation of quarry work, he highlighted how poorly dressed the men were. Often in wooden clogs, the men would work in quarries using hand tools for long days with minimal food. The climate in Poland in the The 1929 Geneva Convention allowed prisoners of war to send letters and postcards back to their families and friends. These group photos were common and ended up as the basis for a postcard. My father sent the card to a friend, not wanting to share the address of his family with the Germans. My father is back row left.