9
On 5 June the Germans began clearing out Corinth. The end goal was to send all prisoners to Germany or elsewhere in the Reich – by the Geneva Convention all POW camps had to be within the territory of the capturing country. First, all 8,000 Allied prisoners had to be shifted to another transit camp in the port city of Thessaloniki.
The move was in batches of several hundred, beginning with a twelve-kilometre march across Corinth. At Isthmia they boarded a train.1 Ralph had stuck with Gerry and Wal, and they crammed into a carriage with dozens of others. Many took the chance of a clean floor to catch some sleep. For some this turned out to be a fatal mistake: the train stopped at every station – the passengers weren’t sure why – and when the carriage doors opened at one, a prisoner sleeping against it tumbled out. The nearest guard then put a bullet through the fallen prisoner’s head. A small Greek boy came running across the platform: he grasped the dead man’s hand and began to cry. As the train pulled away those still on it were left with this shocking image.2 The train halted in Athens before shuddering north into the night. At Bralos, north of Thermopylae, Allied sappers had done such a good job of damaging the rail bridge that the train could go no further.3 The starving prisoners had to walk thirty kilometres over the Bralos Pass to join the next train at Lamia.
The guards set a cracking pace, wanting to cover as much ground as possible before the heat rose, but by dawn even the guards themselves were worn out. The sun brought with it beautiful views, but oppressive temperatures. On their right were sheer cliff faces. On their left was an expanse of green scorched shrublands with a few mountain peaks beyond. Anyone sane would avoid marching this terrain in direct sun. Everyone’s boots were splitting; a few sailors from ships that had been sunk had no footwear at all, and their feet turned to a bloody pulp. There was no rest, no stopping, and they hadn’t had a bathroom stop since leaving Corinth, but to stop would risk collapse, being left behind, and death. No one would be able to pick you up if you fell. ‘They won’t let you stop,’ wrote one prisoner, ‘so you [piss] down the leg of your trousers. Is it yours you can smell? It’s a relief to let it go at last.’4 For Gerry, Ralph, and Wal, only Gerry’s indefatigable humour kept them going. For a moment, the trio occupied a fantasy world. ‘Strewth!’ Gerry declared. ‘This ain’t heat, though. I remember going camping out back o’ beyond in ’38. It was so bloody hot it was scorching the rabbits’ fur.’
‘God, Poll,’ replied Wal, ‘what would you give for a bottle of Toohey’s now?’
‘Hell, you don’t drink that stuff, do you, Hans?’ Gerry interjected. ‘I drink Tooth’s! Now that’s a beer!’
‘You haven’t got a beer in New South Wales. Come to Adelaide and try some West End,’ Ralph suggested.
‘Shall we go to Adelaide and have a West End with old Churchie?’5 Wal said it with such conviction that they walked into an imaginary Adelaide pub and shared a drink.
The fantasy was distracting enough for them to reach the rest stop intact. After they descended the pass, a halt was called at a mountain stream, and a bread ration distributed – enough to keep everyone going a little longer. The last stage of the march took them across a flat sun-scorched plain to Lamia Station. Another overcrowded train awaited, but there the endless generosity of Greek civilians made itself felt again. At every later station, despite growing shortages, crowds of local women gathered with food. Some were Greek Red Cross, others were just ordinary civilians.6 The guards would usually form a barrier to stop aid from reaching the train, so the Greeks lobbed cabbages and boiled eggs over the guards’ heads. The selflessness of the Greeks continued to astonish; the prisoners would remember the defiant bravery of these women forever. Finally, after more than a day of travel, the train reached Thessaloniki, an ancient, bustling commercial hub of the Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman Empires.
The cruel ordeal of the prisoners’ journey was not yet over. The Germans now made a great show of parading the starved prisoners through town in a three-kilometre shuffle up the hill from the railway station to the Greek Army barracks named after Pavlos Melas, a Greek revolutionary hero. Crowds came to offer aid to the prisoners with food and cigarettes, and some locals were assaulted and thrown in with those they had tried to help.
Many in the crowd were members of the city’s great Jewish community, some of whom were descended from families who had fled the Spanish Inquisition. The Nazis would destroy almost the entire population, and their culture with it. Throughout the German occupation and the Holocaust the Jews of Thessaloniki showed the defiance and courage that they demonstrated on the streets of their city. ‘These few survivors from the Jewish colony of Salonica,’ wrote the Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, ‘with their two languages, Spanish and Greek, and their numerous activities, are repositories of a concrete, mundane, conscious wisdom, in which the traditions of all the Mediterranean civilisations blend together.’7 The sight of the starved men must have been a cruel foreshadowing. All the way here, thousands had given what little they had to help. The coming famine would kill as many as 450,000 Greeks from a population of 7,400,000.8
Sunburned, thirsty, lousy, malnourished, and in considerable pain, Ralph, Gerry, and Wal soon entered the barracks now renamed Durchgangslager, or Dulag (Transit Camp), 183. The Germans issued the prisoners with ‘new’ clothes – rags pilfered from the Greeks, and wooden-soled clogs to replace split boots.9 Many of the prisoners cast off or supplemented their uniforms to reduce the stench of their clothes. Ralph kept his greatcoat and slouch hat: they were almost all he had left to outwardly identify him as some sort of soldier. Unlike at Corinth, there was shelter at this camp: some red-brick buildings, and a few wooden shacks. Thousands crammed inside the wire fences, but anyone hoping for better conditions was disappointed – shelter turned out to be worse than sleeping in the open. Though there were no beds as such, bed bugs infested the buildings. The prisoners were already crawling with fleas and lice, but now there were so many bugs one could scoop them up by the handful – rolling over in the night would crush dozens of them. Their tiny corpses soon added to the appalling smell from the endemic dysentery and general filth.
Hardly any slept well in Dulag 183, and the few capable of work when they arrived weren’t fit for long. Able-bodied men were sent to the city port and were forced to load munitions; no longer needed in Greece, these shells were intended to soften up Germany’s next conquest.10 Food was still appalling: a daily ration was, at most, three-quarters of a biscuit, 110 grams of bread, a pint of watery soup and two cups of tea.11 Disease continued to run wild, with just five POW doctors and thirty orderlies for the whole camp.12 Gerry, Ralph, and Wal embraced all the actions best suited for survival, except violence, excelling in barter, stealth, and theft. There was no Greek market in Dulag 183 but the guards ran a black market and prised out the prisoners’ last valuables. For his mechanical pencil, Ralph raised the sum of two bread loaves and 100 Greek drachmae. Sixty drachmae bought 100 cigarettes; the other forty he stashed. Wal, despite his stature, proved an adept thief. He talked himself into cooking detail and purloined bread loaves from the German stores.13 The three shared all their gains to keep themselves alive.
In this hell on earth, the first escape attempts began. They did not go well. An Australian tried to scale the fence and was gunned down. A wiser group found an entrance to a sewage tunnel and climbed in. Guards spotted them and waited at the other end. The camp knew it had all gone wrong when they heard the gunshots. The leading man’s limp body went tumbling down the shaft, while those behind fled back the way they had come. Many never got out of the tunnel at all, suffocating down there.14 Escape attempts seemed doomed to fail.
After a week in Thessaloniki, Ralph heard the shocking news of Operation Barbarossa: Germany had invaded the Soviet Union. Wild rumours spread. There was a tremendous Soviet offensive into Romania. Yugoslavia and then Greece would soon be liberated. Turkey had joined the war and was advancing to Thessaloniki.15 It was, of course, all nonsense, but rumours persisted.