So sometimes our Red Cross parcels would come to one town, sometimes the other. And that kind of brings me up to something that you won’t believe. I was out on an escape. I had been in this salt mine and out on escape, captured and brought back. I got some bad water while I was out so I had dysentery pretty bad. So I had to turn myself in. Now I was, now I don’t mean turn myself in escaping. In the camp itself, I was suppose to be an Englishman by the name of James Whitrick (Note: Unknown spelling) from the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, captured at Casa Forte in Italy, which is near Cassino and I was under his name. It was easier to get away from the work parties but I had too much rank to work so that’s what we do, we change our identity with someone else. He would stay in the camp. Any parcels we got from home, he got and many of these guys were in bad shape when they got there. Well they maybe just had been a prisoner 2 or 3 months. Some of them were banged up pretty bad when they came off the front. They could stay in the main camp, get our parcels, live under our name and maybe get some halfway decent medical treatment. I knew a lot of guys and this guy Whitrick, he’d been hit. He was banged up. I had finally turned myself in and told them who I really was and so of course they were sending me back to Muhlberg. Well of course they had Whitrick in jail, in the clink back in Muhlberg and that’s where I wound up. But there’s a town called Falkenburg, just north of this camp and the two rail lines, the main rail line from Paris to Brussels, crosses the main rail line from Berlin to Dresden but they cross at different levels. Well we came in on the upper level from Torgau, from Tuentenhall where the salt mine was to Torgau. We stayed overnight in Torgau and then on down to Falkenberg. I had gone down to the lower level. I had a guard with me and this woman walked up to me and in flawless English she says, well she asked the guard if she could talk to me and he said yes. “Are you from Muhlberg?” And I said yes. She said “Do you know Sgt. Barrington?” You could have knocked me over with a truck. “Barrington, yes I bunk right down the road from him.” I knew him real well. He was an RAF Flight Engineer in the camp. And this was a good looking girl. One of those “Peaches and Cream” blondes. So about that time our train came in. The guard is hollering at me “Roust, Roust.” I didn’t have a chance to find out what gives with all this. So when I get into camp, you always come through the vorlager and there you get your head shaved, you get deloused and get a shower. Then you stay one night in there and the next day they release you on into the main camp. I made it my business to look up Barrington. And I said “Hey Barry, just what is going on here.” I said “These good looking German girls calling for you by name.” Barry kind of grins and he says “Good looking?” I said “Oh yeah.” I said “She was a good looker.” But I said “What’s happening here? What are you doing at night that we don’t know a thing about?” He kinda laughed. “That’s my mother.” And I said “Yeah sure.” Who is going to believe that? Well it turns out that it was his mother. Before the war he studied Engineering at Heidelberg University in Germany. His father had died and she remarried a German. Now this guy, he had a string of photography shops all over Germany and so that was that. Well of course when the war, they knew the war was coming, so she sent him back to England and she stayed in Germany. They lived in Munich, in the city of Munich. Guess where Barry was shot down? Over Munich. (Note: Actually he was shot down over Belgium but the mission was over Frankfurt close to Heidelberg University.) Anyway that was the first time I saw her. The next time was between Muhlberg between the camp and Neuburxdorf, down in Neubruxdorf. The Germans wanted to have us give our parole and we said no. They told us back in England, “You don’t give parole, because you use up his man power.” If you give parole and you’re out tromping around the local countryside with no guard, that isn’t helping anybody. So you don’t give parole. The exception to this we would give parole for a burial party. If someone died, we took them down to the local area and buried them outside the cemetery, by the way. They wouldn’t have them inside. Then the other one was Red Cross detail. So here we’ve got this great big long two mile line coming and going. Going down to Nuebruxdorf. Getting two of these parcels, tying them together with rope, slinging them over our shoulders and walking back to camp. And we would turn it in to the Germans when we got in camp and they put it in the magazine. They wanted to control these parcels so we didn’t have any access to them except when they issued them to us. Well she was in between the lines. There was this line, endless line if you like. I made two or three trips hauling stuff back but she was walking up and down in between the lines with the guys. That was the second time I saw her. The next time I saw her was in a town called Bitterfeld. Now Bitterfeld is a pretty fair sized city. When I was working with the Military government after I got out of the prison camp and went back to work with the American Army in the city of Leipzig, and while I was there, these two British Officers arrived and they had orders to pick me up and take me up to Bitterfeld, to Halle, to this Air Drome. We were a Supreme Headquarters Rear team. Now Rear was Versailles, outside of Paris. And of course we were on the Elbe River, but we were actually working out of SHAEF Headquarters back in Paris. So what we were doing, we had a yellow form we called IS-9 form. It was a SHAEF form and this was to, while it was still fresh in the guy’s mind, get as much of it down on paper as you could. Well we were particularly interested in War Crimes and things like that. We wanted to know about these things. Well these guys would come out and each one of us had a card table. They would come out to the card table. We would give them this form. Tell them to go back up to the barracks, the Luftwaffe barracks. They must have got out of there in a hurry because the bunks were still made. They still had blankets and pillows on the bunks. We would tell them to go up there, fill out this form as best you can. Come back down tomorrow morning. We would check the form and if it’s ok we’ll give you a ticket on the aircraft. Now the Americans were flying to camp Lucky Strike, which is outside of Cherbourg and the British were flying into Brussels. Well anyway, I am sitting there at my card table and these people keep coming up. Passing out these forms, telling them what they had to know. And this guy says “Hi Pat.” I looked up and it was Barry. “Hey,” I said “You made it over here.” Now Muhlberg is on the east side of the Elbe River. The bridge at Torgau and the bridge at Riesa, the two towns that had a bridge across the Elbe, those bridges had been blown. So the guys coming across, now the Russians had liberated Muhlberg. They put their own guards on. They didn’t want our people, the way they say it. They didn’t want uncontrolled people running around in the Rear areas. Now that didn’t bother the British and Americans but it did the Russians. Well anyway, these guys are getting to the, they weren’t guarded to well because they were getting away from camp. Coming across the blown bridges, sometime swimming across the Elbe River into the American’s sector. And there were signs up all over the place. “Go to the Air Drome in Halle.” So anyway, “Hey” and it hit me you know and I thought, I said, “Hey Barry.” I said “What about your mother?” He goes like this (pointing over his shoulder) and I look at this little, tiny British soldier behind him. Got burnt cork all over the chin you know, and he’s standing there looking at me and Barry says “Am I going to have a problem?” I said “Not from me you aren’t.” So they took there IS-9 form and went up to the barracks and the next morning they come down and I handed him two tickets and away they went. Now that was the last time I ever saw either one of them. He got a job with a British Overseas Operation in Kenya after the war. Years later, I was in England and the Daily Mirror, a large newspaper there, national, much like our USA Today. They had a column in there called “The old Codgers.” People wrote in, you know and all kinds of crazy stuff. And somebody wrote in there and said “I was a Prisoner of War in Stalag 4B at Muhlberg and don’t I remember one of the prisoners whose mother was living, an English mother was living in the town nearby.” And of course I read that and I said, ah ha. So I wrote “The Old Codgers” and “Yes, you certainly do remember the English lady whose son was a prisoner in Muhlberg, whose name was Barrington. And of course, that was, I described Falkenberg and up and down the Red Cross lines and the deal at the Air Drome at Halle. So they researched and some woman wrote in, I have all these clippings at home but I couldn’t find them when I got ready to come up here. (Interviewer – I’d like to see them.) Anyway some woman wrote in and said she had been following this story in “The Old Codgers” and it struck a familiar note and then she remembered a woman that was in an old folk’s home in Cornwall. That’s the extreme southwestern corner of England. And when she was a young girl she use to sit there and listen to this woman tell about her experiences in wartime Germany. And they finally tracked her down, she was still around. I have a picture. They invited her to the British Ex-POW Association Annual get together they have. They always hold it in the Albert Hall in London. And they invited her. She showed up and they took a picture of her. She still looked pretty good. Now she had to be up in her 80’s for crying out loud, when this picture was taken. That was the last that I have. I have no idea what eventually happened to her or him. I didn’t make the reunion. I wasn’t able to get to that one. The Air force had me off in some unpronounceable place. I couldn’t make it so I couldn’t get to see her. (Interviewer – That group was called “The Old Codgers” did you say?) The Old Codgers. It’s a column in the Daily Mirror. I don’t know if they even still have it. They still have a Daily Mirror, I know that.