I was always telling jokes, playing practical jokes and seemed to have a happy outlook on life ... maybe just because I still had it. I knew a lot of jokes from the days with the old gang back at home and every night just after the lights went out and we were all in our bunks, I would tell a joke. I told a different one every night of the eight months we were in this camp. It got to be like a bedtime story and they expected it.
Murphy was another boy in our room and sometimes he would get a package from home with cigars in it. He would be so happy he'd put two cigars in his mouth with a cigarette between them and smoke all three at once. When he got letters from his girl back home, who was receiving all his allotment checks, he would hear of all the things she was buying with his money to furnish their home when they got married. I remember there was a piano bought along with all the other furniture. When we were back in Atlantic City waiting for discharge, I met him standing on a street corner looking very dejected. His girl had married someone else and used his money to furnish their home.
I can't remember receiving much mail but I must have gotten some. About once a month we were allowed to send a letter home through the Red Cross, but I didn't know whether they went through or not. My father sent me two cartons of cigarettes every week but I never received a single one of them. I imagine that they were taken by the Germans as they opened our parcels before they came into camp. There was so much dehydrated food that seasoning was one of the things we missed the most. One time the two higher ranking officers in our barracks had received a parcel with some dried onion flakes in it. When they cooked with them about a 100 guys would go stand in the hall outside the room to enjoy the smell. It was almost as good as eating them!
It was too bad that there was no way to tell the people back home about the things that we would really like instead of cigarettes, soap and other non-essentials. The parcels had to travel so far with so much handling that very few ever reached the camp. By this time the German people were so short of everything, including food, that they must have made off with a lot of it.
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.
At one of the camps we were in one of the guys bribed a guard to get a camera and film. He took several rolls of pictures and also took orders for $5 and I signed up for them. I received these without any problem after the war. Another fellow had a real business going. He melted the solder off the bottom of the cans which held the "church key'. He made a smal1 ball of this solder and took a three inch piece off your dog tags chain and soldered it to your pilots wings, then soldering it to the ball. This signified your inability to fly with the old ball and chain symbol. He would do this for a certain number of D-bars in payment. This way he had more to eat or to sell for IOU's to collect later.
The making of the athletic field was a major accomplishment which we undertook in the early summer. This large area at one end of the compound was Just the way they had left it after clearing away the forest. Hundreds of stumps of pine trees in neat rows covered the entire area. The Germans gave us one ax, a telephone pole and one guard with a rifle. About two thousand of us each took an empty powdered milk can and we looked like a colony of ants digging the dirt away from the stumps and roots. It was sandy soi1 and dug quite easily. Wt took turns using the ax and cut all the roots from each stump as fast as we could. Then, with the guard watching us, we put the telephone pole under each stump and all the guys that could get onto the pole would Jump on and pry the stump out of the ground. I don't remember what happened to the stumps, but we had no tools to cut them up for firewood so the Germans must have hauled them out of camp.