Category: World War II

Stroud and WW2

“AREA EIGHT”
IN THE WAR AGAINST HITLERISM
BEING AN ACCOUNT
OF THE CIVIL DEFENCE SEVICES AND A.R.P.
IN STROUD AND NAILSWORTH
By
P.R. SYMONDS
With a Preface by General Sir Hugh Elles, K.C.B., K.C.M.G.’
K.C.V.O.’ D.S.O.,
A Foreword by Bramwell Hudson, Esq., J.P.
And 34 Illustrations

“Your path of duty has been the way to glory
and amidst the glorious records of the war
the story of Civil Defense will take a high
place.”
H.M. THE KING
PUBLISHED BY
THE STROUD (Urban and Rural) AND NAILSWORTH (Urban)
DEFENCE COMMITTEE
R.D.C. Chambers, John Street, Stroud
1945

WAR

The first week of the war saw the arrival of 1,200 evacuees from Birmingham, the opening of public air raid shelters, the sandbagging of selected public buildings, the closure of cinemas, and the black-out, while ‘most people carried respirators, and there was a general air of expectancy.’

‘On Friday, November 10th, the first Preliminary Air Raid Warning, known as the “Yellow Warning,” was received at 11.20 a.m. Yellow Warnings were confidential warnings for A.R.P. Control, and were not for issue to the public, so that no sirens were sounded. On this occasion the warning message was passed up to a meeting of the R.D.C. Committee, that happened to be sitting, as several of the members were engaged in A.R.P. A year later, when the number of “Yellows” received amounted to an average of three a day, nobody would have even troubled to inform the Committee, but on this occasion (the first for this Area) the members picked up their respirators and left. (It is reported that the staff spent the rest of the morning gazing through windows at the sky watching for the approach of a German armada!)’

“AREA EIGHT”
IN THE WAR AGAINST HITLERISM
BEING AN ACCOUNT
OF THE CIVIL DEFENCE SEVICES AND A.R.P.
IN STROUD AND NAILSWORTH
By
P.R. SYMONDS
With a Preface by General Sir Hugh Elles, K.C.B., K.C.M.G.’
K.C.V.O.’ D.S.O.,
A Foreword by Bramwell Hudson, Esq., J.P.
And 34 Illustrations

“Your path of duty has been the way to glory
and amidst the glorious records of the war
the story of Civil Defense will take a high
place.”
H.M. THE KING
PUBLISHED BY
THE STROUD (Urban and Rural) AND NAILSWORTH (Urban)
DEFENCE COMMITTEE
R.D.C. Chambers, John Street, Stroud
1945

WAR

The first week of the war saw the arrival of 1,200 evacuees from Birmingham, the opening of public air raid shelters, the sandbagging of selected public buildings, the closure of cinemas, and the black-out, while ‘most people carried respirators, and there was a general air of expectancy.’

‘On Friday, November 10th, the first Preliminary Air Raid Warning, known as the “Yellow Warning,” was received at 11.20 a.m. Yellow Warnings were confidential warnings for A.R.P. Control, and were not for issue to the public, so that no sirens were sounded. On this occasion the warning message was passed up to a meeting of the R.D.C. Committee, that happened to be sitting, as several of the members were engaged in A.R.P. A year later, when the number of “Yellows” received amounted to an average of three a day, nobody would have even troubled to inform the Committee, but on this occasion (the first for this Area) the members picked up their respirators and left. (It is reported that the staff spent the rest of the morning gazing through windows at the sky watching for the approach of a German armada!)’ read more

Kindertransport

Remembering

You were a deep mid-winter baby, Harry,
Born in Vienna, the home of art and culture,
Just two years after Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch.

But there was nothing to worry about
In those early years before memory,
When your mum and dad held you in their arms,
In mid-winter afternoon twilight –

Until the Wall Street Crash and depression
Meant the resurgence of fascism,
Militarism, the Third Reich,
Lebensraum, and a Greater Germany,
With a visit to Vienna from Hitler
(The city-birth of his fascism),
After Anschluss in 1938;

Remembering

You were a deep mid-winter baby, Harry,
Born in Vienna, the home of art and culture,
Just two years after Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch.

But there was nothing to worry about
In those early years before memory,
When your mum and dad held you in their arms,
In mid-winter afternoon twilight –

Until the Wall Street Crash and depression
Meant the resurgence of fascism,
Militarism, the Third Reich,
Lebensraum, and a Greater Germany,
With a visit to Vienna from Hitler
(The city-birth of his fascism),
After Anschluss in 1938;

read more

It Came Upon a Midnight Clear

It came upon a midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
When angels bent down to the earth,
And changed machine guns into harps,
And turned leaden bullets into golden carols
That drifted across no man’s land,
And choirs of soldiers joined the angels
In a cease-fire of exultation,
While all the bloodied uniformed citizens
Of heaven above watched as silent knights,
As helmets and caps and whisky and schnapps
Were passed from frozen side to frozen side,
When a Tommy kicked a football up into the air,
And there it stayed, suspended high up in the sky,
Shining for ever in a continent’s memory;
A star of peace in a bleak midwinter’s century.

It came upon a midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
When angels bent down to the earth,
And changed machine guns into harps,
And turned leaden bullets into golden carols
That drifted across no man’s land,
And choirs of soldiers joined the angels
In a cease-fire of exultation,
While all the bloodied uniformed citizens
Of heaven above watched as silent knights,
As helmets and caps and whisky and schnapps
Were passed from frozen side to frozen side,
When a Tommy kicked a football up into the air,
And there it stayed, suspended high up in the sky,
Shining for ever in a continent’s memory;
A star of peace in a bleak midwinter’s century.

read more

My visit to Auschwitz

 

Sliding Doors
So, it was a simple twist of fate:
Rivers near Auschwitz, railways at Auschwitz,
Junctions at Auschwitz,
Trains from Berlin, Warsaw, Prague and Vienna,
So that’s why it was there.
I mean, here.
But Art imitates Life – or is it Death?
The buses ferrying people into the concentration camp,
People idly fagging it, sending wreathes of smoke into the air,
Some have scrawled felt tip penned graffiti on to the red brick walls;
Others firmly inhabit the 21st century,
They memorialize the day with confectionery and souvenirs from the gift shop,
Industrial Death and Industrial Tourism,
People have worked hard for their day out,
“Arbeit Macht Frei”.
Photography makes you free too,
The iconography of death,
Electric fences, execution spots,
The corpses of prisoners,
The Orchestra,
Music while you work,
‘Keep in step while we count you’,
The alphabet and abacus of death,
There’s block 24D,
The soulless logic of number and letter,
The bureaucracy of extermination,
The relentless productivity of extermination,
The understated tone of our guide,
“The Final Solution of the Jewish Question,
Now we go into Block Number 4”,
The lamps outside the blocks,
Redolent of Dixon of Dock Green,
A blue lamp for more than blue murder,
The No Smoking sign outside the block,
Inside, George Santanya:
“The One Who Does Not Remember History is Bound To Repeat It”;
The understated monotone continues,
“It was easier for the Nazis to transport the Jews here.”
We had a loo stop, we didn’t have to pay,
We just had to say the word, “London”,
(“This is the BBC and this is Alvar Liddell reading the news”)
Then the walk through the blocks,
The art deco recreation of some ovens,
“So now follow me please”,
Past the typewriters and the fountain pens,
The documented numbers of the production line,
80 prisoners a wagon,
2,000 victims crammed into the chamber,
The 15-20 minute death schedule,
The black smoke,
“You can see model of crematorium and gas chamber”,
The undressing, the shower, the Zyklon B crystals,
The Hydrogen Sulphide, the evaporation,
The suffocation, the display, just like a Tracy Emin,
Massive display cabinets,
1kg human hair sold by the S.S. for 50 pfennigs,
All neatly parceled up,
The rendering of humanity,
Like an efficient abattoir.
We step outside,
There is a young family with a baby in a pram,
Relaxing in the sunshine, stretching in the warmth,
But we carry on,
Past the cabinets of spectacles and eye glasses,
The combs and brushes, shaving brushes,
The children’s shoes, the dolls,
The adult shoes, brogues, sandals, dainty shoes, sensible shoes,
Dress shoes, fashion shoes, heavy boots,
All echoing down the corridors of my head,
Then the prosthetic limbs,
The enamel bowls, the cheese graters, the rolling pins,
The suitcases with the names and transportation numbers,
L. Bermann, 26.12. 1886, Hamburg, V1/11/42,
“Do I find it hard to work here? Yes.
It is not a nice place. But someone has to do it.”
Then past the emergency exit signs,
The bakelite light switches,
The desks, the files, the index cards,
And on to Block 10, the Human Sterilisation Experiment Block,
Then the “Wall of Death”, where political prisoners were shot,
Outside, a man saunters by, with his tee shirt:
“Where the hell is Esmeralda Beach?”
Then the Gestapo Block, 28 cells,
The starvation cell,
The pre-execution washrooms,
The spyholes (why did we look through them?)
The chill in the basement,
The screams that should still echo,
Block 20: “Chemical injections into the heart”,
The scaffold where the women were hanged,
“Now we are going behind the watch-tower
To see crematorium and gas chamber.”
The gas chamber made me feel physically sick,
It was impossible to stand in that place and not feel the past,
Sense and sensibility meant that a visceral reaction was the only
rational response,
At which point the phrase about the banality of evil becomes banal
itself.
I noticed a chimney had a lightning conductor attached to it,
“The electrified wire made it very difficult to escape from
here.”
The tour ended.
Some birds were singing.
We were all stunned.
The atmosphere was tense.
Electric.
You couldn’t say,
‘Cheer up. It might never happen.’
How can the holocaust deniers deny?
 
 

Porrojmos: the Great Devouring

“Porrojmos”
Is what the Roma call the Holocaust –
And it came as no surprise
To experienced Roma eyes,
This “Great Devouring” –
For Nazi racial ideology
With its delusory biology,
Had already said the only way
In the bright new day,
Where
“Tomorrow belongs to me”,
In a thousand year Reich,
Where Might is Right,
For ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer,
Was to stop Gypsies, as they put it,
Breeding.
For re-creation and miscegenation
Was misleading,
To a society based upon racial purity
And doctrinal probity,
So this meant concentration camps
And sterilisation, with the lamp
Of fascist academia acting as a beacon,
For eugenics was the guiding reason,
And the way for doctors to get on,
Until petrol replaced the needle,
The spade, the scalpel,
Flames, the knife,
As gypsies were burned alive:
Lists ticked with no pity nor error,
Despite the screaming terror;
But Zykon gas was so much cheaper,
Than petrol ditches dug ever deeper,
And so horror itself was soon surpassed,
With 250 Roma children gassed –
Buchenwald guinea pigs in 1940,
Another beacon for the Holocaust story.
And while the winter rains,
And the chambers’ drains,
Choked on the smell of gas,
The death trains danced
To the tune of the Final Solution’s
Finely-tuned
Timetables.