Bill’s Camp Two
Bill arrives in a cattle truck
Stalag VIII B
built for ten thousand
housing seventy thousand
men sleeping in shifts
gruel they called food
the spectre of hunger everywhere
latrines overflowing
typhus, dysentery
bitter winter
teeth like a knife
stealing life
summary executions
the strongest are forced
to exhausting labour
death walks among them
depression
a solitary scowl
anxiety
now Allied bombs
this is the bare bones
Bill won’t speak of life here
not even to Amy
This is the 7th and penultimate of a cycle of poems charting my grandad (in laws) wartime experiences from what we could piece together from records. He spent two years at Stalag B until he was eventually liberated by the Red Army.