The washroom in our barracks contained a row of sinks where we washed and shaved. The water was from underground springs and was a hundred times colder than ice water. it made your hands and face numb so we got as little as possible on us and did it quickly! When we got so bad that we just had to bathe (not very often) we did it when there was still some heat in the stove in the communal kitchen. We would heat up a tin can of water on the stove, go into the washroom and splash on Just enough ice water to make suds then have a friend pour the can of warm water over you and hope it was enough to get the soap off. Even in the summer time the water was just as cold so one or two baths a month was enough. There was a building in camp for doing laundry, but there was no hot water so nobody ever used it much. We washed our clothes in an old pail with a plunger we made from a three foot piece of tree root that was fairly straight and nailed to a powdered milk can at the end. The can made good suction and by pulling it up and down we could get our clothes fairly clean. Our pants would get so stiff with grease and dirt that we could stand them up in a corner. The last four or five months it was winter and we didn't wash any clothes, at least not after we left this camp. A monetary system was set up with each item in the food parcels having a value of a given number of points. Food could be exchanged for D-bars or cigarettes used to pay debts. The army hard chocolate D-bar was the most prized and valuable item besides being our only candy and was nutritious. It was considered to be worth five dollars and some fellows sold all they could get for IOU notes and planned on collecting the money when they got home. I knew these guys were honest and no doubt some made several hundred dollars this way. This system worked very well and points were given to every article in camp. even clothing was sometimes traded for D-bars. The enterprising guys were keeping busy with different projects like the one from Pennsylvania who wrote the book about the prison camp. Ht had a rough draft and went all through the camp taking advanced orders for it. He had it printed after the war and contacted everyone. He made three dollars a book. Someone else drew a poster of a pilots head in uniform with the left side all gears, wheels and levers depicting the makeup of a pilots head. It was an exceptional picture poster.