Missing The Boat: War Stories of Thomas Alan Dirkin

68 Because of the vague directional understanding of the Germans controlling the westward march, food and shelter were happenstance. The conditions experienced by the German guards were also poor, though they had better food and clothing. The guards were motivated to find shelter for themselves. As a result, some prisoner slept head-to-toe, wall-to-wall in farm buildings, factories and warehouses. The sad irony was that those POWs who lagged behind often would arrive too late to get food and shelter and would be forced to huddle outside. Soldiers would sleep together to preserve body heat, rotating who was in the middle throughout the night. In the morning a new day of marching would start. The motivation and difficulty in just standing up to march another day cannot be under emphasized. Men did give up and either froze to death by the roadside, or were shot by the German guards. My father’s firsthand account of the Long March West and the End of his War In 1946 my father wrote a letter to a women called Elfride Gron (aka Hannak) which outlined his journey. This letter was published in Philip Baker’s book The Long March: In Their Own Words in 2020. See Appendix. “Thanks very much for your letter, which I received a few days ago. I decided to have this letter typed so it will be easier for you to read and understand. I will try to tell you the whole story of my adventures, so now to begin. After I had seen you at your office in Gogolin 1 I had many weeks of hard and grueling marching. As long as the snow lasted, we pulled our sledges 2 on which was our kit and what little food we had with us. We spent many nights out in the open 3 in the snow, and after the first fortnight many of the men were very weak and died in the night frozen to death. We marched on endlessly, day after day, in snow and sleet, until we had marched over a thousand kilometers 4 . Some of the German guards were very bad to us 5 , but others who realized that the war was nearly ended and that Germany was falling, did their best to get into our good graces 6 . After a month of marching we were unable to get food, and had to exchange what few belongings we had with German civilians who had little bread to spare. We exchanged all of our clothes except for what we were wearing, our rings, watches, fountain pens and any other valuable articles. 6 The night when the Russian tanks reached the River Oder at Oppeln, we were just on the other side of the river, and we had to leave in the middle of the night with shells and bombs falling among us. That night and the next day we marched 60 kilometers, and many men had to be