No ownership of the Hogan's Heroes characters is implied or inferred. Copyright belongs to others and no infringement is intended.

----- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----

Never having been captured before, I didn't know what the normal set up was, and I didn't know how long they'd be keeping me here before sending me on to the transition camp at Wetzlar or a normal Stalag Luft. There were two other people in the cell I was finally brought back to, one Frenchman and another Englishman. Corporal Andre Villiers and Sergeant John Dickson had been shot down in the last few days and were also waiting to be transferred. Dickson looked okay, but Villiers looked like he had been roughed up a bit. I didn't think I should ask him whether he got that black eye and cut lip from being shot down and captured, or from someone here at the Dulag, and he never told me, so I never found out. Dickson was pretty chatty, said he was out on maneuvers when the Jerries shot down his reconnaissance plane and he was out on his own for a bit longer than he would have liked. We didn't share much information, though, because you never knew if the Germans were listening on the other side of the wall, and after only a couple of hours, it seemed, you became savvy enough even to think that perhaps someone being too chatty was actually a plant in the cell to get you to talk. So we stuck mainly to the weather in England and the Battle of Britain, and, just for good measure, said a few nasty things about the enemy, so if they were listening they got quite an earful.

Villiers was pulled out of the cell just before midday, and judging by the fight he put up on the way, I think he knew that he was headed for trouble. I didn't see him again for two days, and when I did he looked pretty bad. Shattered, mentally and physically. He must have really made them mad, although it didn't take much to do that. Dickson and I tried to help him by letting him have the least thin bunk and making sure he stayed warm and his cuts didn't touch the dirty floor. But that hardly seemed like enough, and after two more days, he was taken from the cell and we never saw him again. I like to think they took him off to the hospital or finally sent him off to Wetzlar, but I can't say I'm really confident about that, and someday I may actually write to the French government to ask about him. Right now I don't really want to know yet.

As for me, they left me alone for a day and then made up a new rule: no sitting down during the day. From sun-up to sundown, it was standing room only, no leaning, no squatting, no bending. Just standing. Now if I was at the Palladium doing a magic show or performing some amazing feat before thousands of mesmerized fans, that wouldn't be a problem. But I didn't have any of me trick cards with me, and besides my legs were still a bit sore and I was dizzy from lack of food, and staying on my feet for twelve hours was about as good a torture as they could have come up with for me. I tried pacing a little bit at first, but that was just as bad as standing still and it made me dizzier so I stopped that. Dickson wasn't even in the room with me any more to pass the time, so I had nothing to occupy my thoughts except a gnawing hunger, cramping legs, and fear. Eventually I decided that if I was going to stand here all day, I would try to make the most of it, so I worked on my "act," going through a repertoire of stories and songs fit for the King. Once, when I was feeling the hunger so badly that my stomach actually ached, I started singing all the louder, and when I reached the absolute climax of "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square," the guard opened the door as if he was checking that I hadn't had a fit or something, and when I simply looked back at him and kept singing, he shook his head like I was a poor, misguided fellow, and then locked the door again. The blighter didn't realize how lucky he was to get a free show like that. A fella'd have to pay good money nowadays to get a song and dance routine of like quality.

I don't know if it was part of the day's plan or just to shut me up, but shortly after the guard checked on me, someone brought me more food. I wasn't allowed to sit down to eat it, but I didn't care, as the sight of something to eat took my mind off my sore legs and I ate the watery soup and the stale bread like it was a feast. After that I decided against launching into "The Beer Barrel Polka," which, looking back, was probably a good thing for both the Krauts and for me, as it was never one of my better pieces. I went back to standing in the middle of the room and gave an oration, did imitations of Churchill and Bogart and even Charlie Chaplin, although there was no one in the room with me to watch that one. I must have sounded insane, but it was a way of surviving, and I was going to hang onto hope for as long as I could.

I must say I wasn't treated terribly badly at the Dulag. Other than not being allowed to sit down and not having a lot of food or water, they didn't ask much of me. I was pulled out of my cell every day and brought back to the room where the neatly dressed officer would ask me the same questions: What unit was I with? Where did I come from? What was my job? Where was my family? Every day I refused to answer, but I never got hit over it. And one day when my legs were particularly tired and I was singing my lungs out, I could swear I heard that officer at the door. I should have charged him admission.

Eventually I was shipped over to the transition camp at Wetzlar, and I finally got the treatment I had expected and feared all along. The Captain in charge there was a small, psychopath of a man, whose idea of keeping order was to keep us all on our toes—literally. If I thought standing all day at the Dulag was bad, I was in for a shock. This blighter kept us not only walking and standing, but working. Hard work, too: digging, pushing rocks around, building huts and repairing barracks—back-breaking stuff that yours truly was never meant to do. We got up at four in the morning and didn't get to go back to our lice-ridden beds till after sunset. And when we were rationed out some meager soup made from water and rutabaga, I could barely stay awake long enough to remove the crawlies from it before I gulped it down and fell asleep till the next day. I don't know why I was picked to be part of that work group; certainly not everyone had to do this. But I made the most of it, using the voice God gave me to start the boys singing and get their minds off what was going on. It made me a hero of sorts at the camp, but I didn't do it for them. To be perfectly honest, I did it for myself. Singing songs from home made me miss it just a little less, and I learned a few new tunes in the process, that I used while at my permanent camp during the next three and a half years.

One thing I haven't really talked about is roll call. Roll call was a very tedious process, mainly because the guards couldn't seem to count properly. I learned German numbers really quickly, and I soon discovered it was a real treat to watch the Krauts stumble over each other if they were saying "seben" and you said "drei." This usually got them confused enough to start over again, and by the time Captain Happiness came out to receive the report, the guards had counted us two or three times, but never came up with the same total. The prisoners, of course, did not feel compelled to help the poor sods by standing still, and most of the time one or two of us would move from the already-counted end of the line to the still-to-be-counted end, and back again later when someone else showed up to confirm the count. This served to boost our morale no end, although it did mean we ended up standing outside in formation for sometimes up to four hours. We never ever did this when it got too cold, but somehow they still couldn't get the count right and we would stand there till we thought our noses and our ears would fall off.

Most of the men at Wetzlar were pretty scared, since being there meant you had no permanent home yet and you were never sure if someone was going to come back for you to take you back to the Dulag, or worse, throw you in a camp with a sadistic Kommandant who would treat you even worse than you were being treated now. I tried not to think about it. After all, I was just a small part of a Blenheim crew; I didn't have any sensitive information, and I wasn't in such fantastic physical shape that the Krauts would want me for much more than a laughing stock. Sure, I'd started out a as a pretty fine physical specimen, but after a prolonged time without regular meals and a good night's sleep I was no Mr. Universe, that's for certain. I'd lost a fair amount of weight and my skin had lost some of its normal healthy colour, replaced instead by a pale complexion that did not complement my baby blue eyes. It took me about a month of Le Beau's good cooking to get that back—though if you ever tell him that I loved his culinary creations, I'll deny it.

We were supposed to be able to get mail and Red Cross packages while we were at the camp, but the whole idea was laughable. You were wet behind the ears when you first got there, and some men were still shell-shocked from their bail-out or their stay at the Dulag to do much more than walk around like zombies. A couple of prisoners spent their days in tears, moaning and carrying on like they were at the bleeding Wailing Wall. At first I thought it was a bit of a bad show, really; after all, I was taking this like a man, I thought. But one night I had a dream about home that mixed with pictures of what was happening here, and the next day I walked around in such a daze and so full of grief that I didn't think those poor blokes were so feeble any more, and I wanted to get right down on my knees and join them, even if it meant I got the lashings that went with it. I guess those other fellas just had more dreams than I did, and a lot worse memories. Either that or they had a lot more to lose.

In any case, most of us were in no shape to argue about our lack of Red Cross packages, and on the rare occasion when they did appear, there were never enough to go around, so the Krauts would keep them, saying they didn't want to start trouble in the ranks by giving to some and not to others. If you ask me, it was just a nice excuse to keep the goodies all for themselves. We certainly didn't get to see the stuff, no matter how many times they said they were going to keep the parcels in a safe place until there was enough for everyone. How could there be enough for everyone, when prisoners kept coming and going? As for mail, by the time we got enough strength together to write, we were shipped out, and we had to wait even longer for anything to reach us. I didn't get anything from Nan or Louise till about a month after I'd been moved, which for me meant about two full months with no contact from home, and even then all the news was out of date, and the letters were full of holes and black lines, so all I could get out of Nan's first letter was: "Your father is ---, which is more than I can say for your sister. Every time he hears a ---, he says ' that German ---, and God bless ----!'" I felt like I was playing a game of Hangman where I had to fill in all the missing bits or get hung at the gallows!

Well, my dearest, this has turned into quite a narrative, and not always a very pleasant one at that. I suppose when you're talking about being shot at, fished out of freezing water, and thrown in jail while forced to endure the humiliations that so many prisoners did, then it's bound to get a bit melancholy. But as our fellow Englishman Charles Dickens once said, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." I had never been so scared in my life before then, but I've sure been a lot more scared since then. A lot of water has passed under the bridge, and I've done a lot of growing up. In some ways I think I've grown old. I don't do as many magic tricks any more, and even though I still sing, I don't sing the old songs quite the same way—I had a real need for those songs back then; they gave me a lot of hope when I thought I was losing it all. But now, most of those songs bring back memories that I would often rather forget, or at least move to the back of my mind for awhile.

I saw the worst of mankind during my time behind those barbed wire fences, both from the Germans and from the people who were supposed to be on our side. Some of the stuff I saw would make your skin crawl, but as I sit here, having a bit of hair of the dog, as it were, those things are starting to fade into the background for a time, and you don't need to hear about them, not yet anyway.

One thing I did learn is that bad and good are not determined by the type of uniform you wear, even though I used to think so, like every other naïve kid who ever walked the earth—cowboys and Indians; black hats and white hats: good versus evil was always clearly marked. But it didn't happen like that in Germany. I have some pretty good memories of mankind, too: men joining together against a common enemy. Trying desperately to triumph over their fears. Trying to simply survive from day to day so they could get back home. I found myself with four new brothers by the end of the war, and I tell you, love, I wouldn't trade them for all the tea in China, even if it meant having to go back to that Hell on earth. What we created was special, and all five of us know it. And so I suppose that's what I got out of this second "War To End All Wars": a family.

Happy New Year, my dear one. I am still slightly tight after last night, and today I am planning to call the Colonel, Carter, Kinch, and Le Beau, and tell them how much I love them. They'll laugh and tell me I'm drunk. And they'll be right, but I'll still love them.

War is Hell. But brothers are forever.

Love,

Peter

PS—I'm not allowed to talk about what I did in the war yet. But I want you to know that being shot down wasn't the end of ol' Peter Newkirk. I thought it was, but it was really only the beginning. Had I known then what I know now, I might not have been so scared when I was at the Dulag and at Wetzlar. And I would have laughed out loud when they told me that I was going to Stalag 13.