13

Farmhand

Ralph, Gerry, and Wal were picked out for work as farmhands. On Sunday 10 August they went to Maribor railway station with nine other men, a mix of Scots, English, and New Zealanders. There they were joined by a German-speaking Welshman, Peter Anderson.¹ Guarded by a Sudeten German named Karl, they boarded a northbound service which crossed the Kozjak Mountains and the old border into Austria. Two stops after the border they alighted at Ehrenhausen, where a Herr Knaus was waiting. He was the Ortsbauernführer (village chief) of Ratsch an der Weinstrasse and wore stereotypical clothing – lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat with a feather – and a Nazi Party pin in his jacket. He also sported an impressive brush-like moustache and smoked a curved pipe. Owing to his resemblance to Joseph Stalin, the prisoners dubbed Knaus ‘Joe’. An Ortsbauernführer was the head of the smallest rural unit of governance in the Reich. If the state needed anything from his village, or vice versa, Knaus was the man.² Ratsch needed farmhands, so prisoners were sent.

Knaus led the party away. On either side of the Kozjak Mountains, villages and towns were the same: centred around the local Catholic church, whitewashed cottages with red roofs shining brightly amid lush green grass. Morning mass was over, so the locals were at the cafes and taverns, regarding the prisoners with mild curiosity as the party made its way uphill.

Ratsch turned out to be a handful of smallholding farms. An Arbeitskommando was supposed to be a prison camp in miniature, but this one was a homely cottage bearing little resemblance to a prison. Within were a dozen wooden beds lined with fresh, bug-free hay, a table and chairs, a small stove, and a large copper pot. Since Ralph had entered captivity, such comfort had only been a dream. Knaus impressed them further, offering four brand-new blankets for each man. The cottage would be locked each night by Karl, who slept in an adjacent room, but at least they’d be warm and well fed.

Knaus let his new workers settle down for the night. Gerry set to lighting the stove, and Peter filled the pot with water for tea. Ralph and Wal cracked open a few tins of sausage and skewered the meat on sticks. Once roasted over the fire, the oily sausage was smeared on the bread and washed down with tea. Though he’d been discharged from the hospital, Ralph’s stomach had not healed yet; he donated his sausages and nibbled only bread. He knew he couldn’t keep the heavier fare down.

At 05.30 the following day, Karl woke the prisoners to meet their new employers. Each man tidied up as best as he could. Ralph had no comb, but tried to slick his hair back. At 06.00 at Knaus’s house they were greeted by the man himself and a few other farmers. The eldest was a gentle-looking man with a shock of white hair and a wispy white moustache. Ortsbauernführer Knaus got the first and second pick. Peter Anderson was selected for his German, and Wal, for his size. Upon hearing Wal’s surname, Steilberg, Knaus exclaimed, ‘Ah, sie sind Deutsch!’

Wal got off to a flying start. ‘Ich nicht fucking Deutsch,’ he declared. ‘Ich bin Australian!’³

The other prisoners were then chosen one or two at a time until only Ralph remained. Smaller than his fellows and visibly malnourished, he was unwanted. He dreaded the prospect of being separated from his friends and returned to camp. Finally the old man, who had not yet chosen a worker, stepped forward. Through Peter he asked, ‘Would you like to work for me?’

Ralph lit up. ‘You bet I would!’⁴ This old man seemed no Nazi.

The new employees hired, each farmer peeled off to his home with a worker in tow. Ralph went with his to a stone cottage with an attached shed and pigsty. In a courtyard next to the house was a stone square with waist-high walls, a pile of congealing animal excrement inside. Over time it would decompose, and when planting season came it’d be pumped into a barrel, loaded onto an ox cart and spread across a field. Ingenious, Ralph had to admit, but in the meantime it created an awful smell. Uphill was a more stately, whitewashed two-storey building.

Inside the old man’s cottage was a homely scene. A large family were gathered for breakfast around a great oak table. The old man gestured for Ralph to sit. Ralph was asked to refer to his employer as Vater (Father) and his wife as Mutter (Mother). This was done in German, so Ralph believed the family were Germans. Mutter and Vater (their family name was Menhardt) had five children: three adults – Jakob, Maria, and Theresa – then sixteen-year-old Ferdinand and finally Friedrich. Ralph attempted an introduction but went astray. Somehow the family heard ‘Konrad’, so Konrad he was.

Despite the warm welcome, Ralph had issues. A pot of žganci, or sterz, was on the table. Usually based on buckwheat flour, not quite a dumpling, not quite porridge, with lard, crackling, or sour milk (if these were available), it was substantial and efficient fare. Father said a long prayer, and the children sank their spoons into the bowl. But Ralph was in a terrible bind: he knew he couldn’t keep the thick žganci down, but he wanted to stay out of the camp. If he couldn’t eat, however, he couldn’t work and would be sent back for sure. As he attempted to explain with sign language, he could see Vater was concerned.

From the kitchen wafted the smell of Ralph’s salvation. Fresh bread. That he could handle. A chunk of steaming black bread was handed over, and Ralph gnawed at it. It wouldn’t be much, but it would help his stomach get used to eating again. As the family talked among themselves, Ralph’s ear told him his hosts were not speaking German. They were speaking Slovenian. The language was alien to Ralph. Eventually, he would realize that they were bilingual, speaking German in public and to Ralph, and Slovenian in private.

When breakfast ended, Maria and Theresa set to helping Mutter with housework. Vater, Jakob, Ferdinand, Friedrich, and ‘Konrad’ prepared for the working day. Jakob handed Ralph a rake and they headed to a sunny field to pull scythed hay. Given Ralph’s condition, it was hard work, but he felt liberated, almost a free man. After a few hours, Jakob called a break and handed out more chunks of bread and a water flask. Ralph went to take a hearty swig, and instead fainted.

When he came to, he would have been forgiven for thinking he’d gone to heaven. He awoke to a soft bed and a kindly, well-dressed aristocratic woman leaning over him. Her hand on his forehead, she said, in soft Austrian-accented English, ‘Is there something perhaps I can do for you? The master tells me you have malaria. No? You are very sick, you must go to the hospital.’

The prospect of leaving his present company shook Ralph awake.

‘I’ve been very sick, but I’m getting better now. Please don’t let them send me back to Stalag – I will be much better here.’ Ralph’s English was not as accented as his fellow prisoners’, and his carer smiled.

‘I understand your English very easily. Where are you from?’

‘Australia.’

‘How sad for you, so young and so far from home. I will see what I can do.’

She went to leave. Ralph was confused. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I am Frau Barta. My sister and I live with our mother in the white house across the road. Rest now – I go and get you something.’⁵

Frau Barta returned a short while later with some quinine. She was well connected; it was resourceful and kind of her to find malaria medication in rural Europe during wartime. It turned out that her mother owned the land that Vater farmed, so Ralph was working for the Barta family. She returned with another blanket and said she would check on Ralph again in the morning. Ralph thanked her and reflected on his stunning good fortune. He had found the kindest people he could have wished for, and they were well resourced and fluent in English!

Karl came to check on him, and Ralph feared the worst. But it was a courtesy call; Frau Barta had already interceded on his behalf. When Ralph scraped himself out of bed for dinner, the family too showed the utmost kindness. They gave Ralph valuable soft-boiled eggs and some bread, and a beautiful herbal tea to wash it down.

Ralph returned to his quarters later that evening, where Wal jokingly accused him of loafing, but they all knew Ralph was still not well. Wal was the subject of gossip himself. He’d immediately started trying to seduce Knaus’s daughter. His fellows feared that he might succeed – and that the wrath of ‘Joe’ would descend and they’d all be back in Maribor, or worse.*⁶

Wal failed, or at least was not discovered, and over the following days and weeks Ralph regained his health. With Frau Barta, Vater, and Mutter’s help, he received regular quinine and good food, which banished his malarial episodes. Father spared Ralph the most demanding work, giving him lighter tasks instead, to let the Australian build up his strength.

Settling into a routine, Ralph would begin his day at breakfast talking to Jakob, the eldest child and a bit of an odd one. Jakob was pro-Nazi, but also illiterate, which was unusual for a Slovenian at that time.⁷ Ralph suspected Jakob might have learning difficulties. Jakob knew German as well as Slovenian, though, and helped Ralph to learn German. Ralph began reading the newspaper aloud to him while Jakob mimed the meaning of the words. Ralph took to the language like a natural. German verbs were intuitive for an English-speaker. To see: sehen; to feel: fühlen; to hear: hören. After a month, Karl announced that the prisoners would be going to visit the main camp to collect ‘winter’ clothing – until now they had only had the clothes on their backs, without even a change of underwear. The POWs walked back to Ehrenhausen and boarded a train to Maribor. When they arrived, things at Stalag XVIIID didn’t seem to have changed much: still poor conditions, still dull. The clothing distribution had not been sent by the Red Cross or their government, but was a motley collection of summer uniforms from conquered Allied armies. There were grey Yugoslav, Polish khaki, French, and a few British uniforms – cries of celebration went up when someone bagged a British kit. Each man also received a pair of underpants, a singlet, and some rags for foot bindings.⁸ It wasn’t much, but beat wallowing in your own filth. Ralph also got his hands on a green beret. He’d kept his precious Aussie slouch hat, but wanted to save that for special occasions. A camp tailor and a cobbler were operational by now, both well run, with men lining up to get their boots and clothes fixed or to have new shoes issued.

The Zollschuppenlager had ceased processing British Empire prisoners once the last batches captured in Crete had filtered through. The ‘Slavic Section’, though, was continuing to fill up with Slovenians, and now Soviet prisoners were arriving at the customs shed, though none had been processed to the camp yet. No one had seen any Soviet-crewed Arbeitskommandos.

Having returned to Ratsch, the farm crew laboured through the autumn. Ralph was getting twitchy. He resented both being captured and finding himself back doing farm work, though the scenery and the work practices were different.

His spirits were lifted by a new arrival, Frau Barta’s niece Karla Todt. In her late teens, Karla was visiting for a fortnight, on a break from studying English at the University of Vienna. She asked Ralph if he would be happy to talk with her in English. From the start they conversed with unexpected frankness. Practising her English with Ralph, Karla could air thoughts which in Vienna could get her imprisoned. She confirmed that, as Ralph had suspected, her relatives thought Hitler was a jumped-up nobody. Karla taught Ralph German grammar. During her brief stay, their conversations were Ralph’s primary source of recreation. When she left, she gave him a pocket-sized English–German dictionary,⁹ which he used to look up the words in the newspaper, before embarking on a regime of learning a dozen new German words a day.

Most farmers in the region owned stills to process fruit into schnapps or slivovica. Father’s family instead tended a small vineyard for the Bartas, and Ralph joined in the grape picking. Mostly Riesling grapes were grown. Ralph had had only a brief acquaintance with wine during his time in Renmark and Wudinna, but he soon got up to speed in generous ‘sampling’ sessions. This nurtured a lifelong love affair.

Wages also began to be paid. Under the Geneva Convention, POWs were entitled to the minimum wage, which in Nazi Germany was fifty pfennigs a day.* The money was entered into an account run by the camp authorities: real currency could only be issued with the commandant’s say-so; otherwise, the wages had to be converted into Lagergeld (camp money) coupons which could only be spent in-house on a handful of goods at inflated prices. Bottled beer could be purchased for a day’s wage, while a hairbrush cost an entire week’s earnings.¹⁰ Ralph splurged on a hairbrush during a trip to Maribor to collect Red Cross parcels.

Autumn turned to winter, and brought hardship for all. Not long into autumn the first snows fell. Ralph was raking leaves for fertilizer when he heard young Friedrich cry out, ‘Ach, schnee!’ Ralph smiled at the novelty. Though he’d seen snow up in the mountains in Greece, he’d never touched it before. The novelty wore off. Many of the Australians hadn’t seen snow before the war, but now it reminded them of their bitter retreat from the Greek mountains. Though Ralph had retained his greatcoat, many had not, and they were all wearing summer uniforms. There were no scarves or gloves, so they improvised by cannibalizing the spare uniforms they’d been issued, and wrapping blankets around their torsos under their clothes before going outside. Wal and Gerry had more significant problems. Their shoes were falling apart, putting them at risk of frostbite. The two of them returned to Maribor to be issued new shoes by the camp cobbler; their replacements were uncomfortable, wooden-soled beasts, though at least now their toes wouldn’t fall off.¹¹

November rolled around, the snow piled up, the days grew shorter, and work ground to a halt. Soon they would have to leave their small cottage and move to a new Arbeitskommando. Ralph said heartfelt goodbyes to Vater, Mutter, Jakob, and Frau Barta. He could not have had better care. He was back to health, well fed and fit. Even Jakob’s baffling Nazi thinking had helped Ralph grasp German. He hoped he’d be able to see Karla again and learn more of the language. There were promises from the family to ask for Ralph’s services again come the spring, but he knew in his heart he would not return. Ralph cared about them and owed them much, even if the farm reminded him of what he’d tried so hard to leave behind. His mind returned to the same thought he’d had all those years ago roaming the paddocks picking wool from the wire: escape.