Germany in War Time: What an American Girl Saw and Heard — John Shaqi
Germany in War Time: What an American Girl Saw and HeardMcAuley, Mary Ethel
History
Germany in War Time: What an American Girl Saw and Heard
McAuley, Mary Ethel
World War, 1914-1918 -- Germany
The camps are divided into military divisions, and they are run like
real military camps. The common prisoners sleep in dormitories, and
they are furnished with a straw mattress, a pillow and colored bed
covers. The men must keep their own beds clean, and they are compelled
to take a bath every day. Many of the prisoners are employed around the
camp, some of them helping in the cooking and the baking. In a camp of
10,000 prisoners it is no easy task to get the meals ready.
The prisoners, especially on the east front, are compelled to be
vaccinated against cholera, typhoid and small-pox, and every prisoner
must be disinfected for lice and fleas, even his clothes. Every Russian
prisoner must have his head shaved. Prisoners are employed as barbers.
[Illustration: _A Street in Ruhleben, the English Prison Camp._]
Every prisoner is allowed to write four postcards and two letters
each month, and these letters are censored. All prisoners except the
Russians receive many packages from their homes. In the Stuttgart camp,
where the soldiers are mostly English and French, the twenty-four
hundred prisoners receive on an average seventeen thousand packages
each month. Every package is censored. No alcoholic drinks are allowed
to be sent, and also no cartoons that would be offensive to the
Germans.
[Illustration: _Russian Prisoners Receiving Bread._]
The English and French prisoners receive spending money from their
families, and most of them are never without spending money for tobacco
and beer. It goes much harder with the Russians whose families are too
poor to send anything. That is one reason why the Russian prisoners are
anxious to work.
Most of the Russian prisoners are employed in carrying the ashes out
of the apartment houses, and the big burly fellows lift the great iron
cans as though they were made of paper. These men are quite free, and
they run their wagons without a guard. They are very well behaved,
attending strictly to their own business and speaking to no one. It is
_verboten_ for the German people to speak to them, so of course they do
not do it. The working Russian prisoners wear their soldier uniform, a
brown coat, brown corduroy trousers and a brown cap with a green band.
They have a black stripe sewed around their sleeve. This shows they are
prisoners.
[Illustration: _A Canteen in the Zossen Camp._]
Last fall many of the prisoners were employed in cutting down trees in
the Grunewald. A guard was always stationed near them. I was walking
one day with a German who spoke Polish, when we came upon a group of
prisoners. The German asked the Russians in Polish how they liked
Berlin. "_Sehr gut, aber_--" (very good, but--) one of the fellows
answered. Just then a German guard came from the top of the hill, and
he told us to move on. In Germany, every time anything became truly
interesting I was told to move on.
[Illustration: _French Prisoners Gathering Wood._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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