An Ordinary War 2

 One of the intriguing - and delightful - things about doing research, particularly, perhaps, when you're doing it, as I do, in a fairly haphazard way, is that often, serendipity steps in and points the way forward. 

I explained in last month's post what decided me to write An Ordinary War, and how I began to do the research at the Imperial War Museum and at the National Records Office at Kew. Now something happened which could not have been foreseen or planned, but which turned out to be enormously helpful. My son had a new partner - and she was Polish! Hitherto I had known very little about Poland and its turbulent history, but now I had a personal reason as well as a research-related reason to get to know much more. I talked to Richard and Joanna about what I had found out so far - including the location of the two main prison camps Dad had been in. Gradually the idea emerged that I would meet them in Warsaw and we would go in search of the camps at Thorn/Torun and Marienburg/Malbork. (Dad knew the camps by their German names: it's a feature of Polish history that the land changed hands over the centuries, and so place names changed too.)

The staion at Torun

It was in the summer, and it was a hot train journey from Warsaw to Torun. But, I reminded myself, Dad's train journey into captivity from Trier to Torun would have been infinitely more uncomfortable: he would have been in an overcrowded cattle truck, and he would have been utterly exhausted from lack of food on the long march across France to Trier. He wouldn't have known where he was going, or what was coming.

I thought the station at Torun probably hadn't changed all that much since 1940. (This was about seventeen years ago: it may well look different now.) I knew that the prison camp was not purely a purpose-built camp: some sections of it were based on old forts built during the Franco-Prussian war, many years earlier. I had a map of these forts which I'd printed off from the internet. As we left the station, I could see an old wall, which I thought was probably part of these same fortifications.

Looking over the rooves of Torun

Torun is a beautiful town, with copper-coloured rooves, built beside broad waters of the River Vistula. It's famous for being the birthplace of Copernicus, and for its delicious gingerbread. As we sat that evening enjoying a drink outside a cafe, it struck me that Dad would probably have seen very little of the actual town: I knew that from the station, the prisoners were marched across the bridge to the camp on the other side of the river. 

The next day, we set off in search of the camp. There was no mention of it anywhere: even today, if you look Torun up, you are unlikely to find any mention of it. We were at a bit of a loss - but then serendidpity stepped in again. Joanna suggested taking a taxi - and the driver turned out to know all about the camp and its different locations, because his father had been imprisoned there, as many Poles had been. Different forts were used for different nationalities. He showed us where the hutted camp had been. There was nothing there now. We looked across a barbed wire fence - not, I think, the original one - at the plain which rolled out as far as the eye could see. I imagined the winter winds driving across it straight from Siberia, finding their way through the gaps in the wooden huts.

And then he took us to what looked like an old quarry. He said when he was a boy, he and his friends used to play here. We pushed open the tall metal gates - and there was the brick-built fort which I had read about in contemporary accounts: the place where Dad and many others had been imprisoned for part of the time. The place, surrounded by high banks, was dark and dreary. But at least there were trees there, and birds.

My son on the bridge over the moat surrounding the old fort, which his grandfather once marched across.

Torun and all we saw there made a great impression on me, and much of it found its way into the book. It was very moving to walk, at least partly, in the footsteps not just of Dad, but of all those other young men caught by the war, and to imagine something of the bewilderment and fear they must have felt.

We had intended to go on to Malbork, known to Dad as Marienburg. But our time was limited, and in the end we decided to head in the opposite direction, right down to Lublin in the south-west, where my small grandson was staying with his other grandparents. Lublin too has its camp, which I also went to see. But this was Majdanek, a concentration camp, and its story is far darker, and one for another day. Unlike the one at Torun, this camp has not been forgotten. And nor should it ever be.