Lives in Cricket No 28 - Keith Carmody

51 Keith, further into their journey in Venlo, where ‘a doctor and nurse attended our wounds.’ Keith made no mention of Docking’s snatched glimpse from the train of Cologne cathedral ‘in a vast cityscape of bombed and smashed buildings and rubble’. And he reported that the next interrogation took place near Frankfurt, not Cologne, as Docking recalled. But from this point on, as his friend’s account moved them speedily from ‘a closed army truck to Bonn and from there by rail to Stalag Luft III’, Keith’s ‘Log’ provides the only reliable insight into a journey more physically and psychologically challenging than Docking’s jaunty memoir suggests. From 18 to 22 June, just outside Frankfurt, Keith was locked in a room without ventilation and spoke to nobody except German interrogators. On 23 June he was questioned again but moved to better accommodation ‘with the other bods, mostly Americans … we were so happy to be able to see and talk to each other that one would have thought the war was over.’ Movement to a transit camp at Wetzlar, some 100 kilometres north of Frankfurt, brought further improvements: his first shower in two weeks and the chance to write a postcard to ‘Elsie’, doubtless Elsie Edwards of Mosman. While the prisoners relaxed in tents from Sunday 25 to Wednesday 28 June, Keith gained strength, thanks to better food – ‘Red Cross parcels a life saver!’ His morale improved further when his Mosman friend ‘Peter Pearson discovered me on the Tuesday morning.’ After being shot down, captured and spending a night in a local gaol, Peter had been ‘put on a train and travelled down the Rhine to somewhere near Frankfurt.’ The next day, wrote Keith, the group was despatched to Stalag Luft III at Sagan – now Zagan in Poland but then in the German province of Lower Silesia, some 150 kilometres south-east of Berlin. They travelled in ‘special prison carriages which were rather cramped but we made the best of it and rather enjoyed the trip’, even though a ‘[Flying] Fortress crashed on the line ahead of us’ during an American raid on Leipzig. * * * * * * * Countless books and movies have depicted the tension-charged atmosphere in prisoner-of-war camps: Allied prisoners creating their own world of entertainment, sport and education, while secretly disseminating information about the war and plotting escapes from ever-suspicious captors. While German control involved nocturnal curfews and early-morning roll-calls, Allied Prisoner of War