Prisoner B-1941

The First Day At Work

The next day we get woken up really early by the soldiers. Hastily we find our wooden shoes and make our straw-mattress bed making sure the blanket is completely covering the straw, which is nearly impossible but in the end we did it! My sisters and I run to the wash room to quickly wash ourselves before it gets too crowded.

Running to get food, I see Eadmund. He doesn’t see me as he is beating someone. I am appalled at the sight and it does upset me but I know that he has to do it. It’s good to know that he doesn’t believe it is our fault for the loss of World War One.

We pick up our mess-tins and quickly get our food, which includes about ten ounces of bread and a tasteless ‘coffee’. I decide to keep my bread for later and luckily today as its Sunday, we get a small slice of salami, so I eat that instead.

Straight after we are told to go to the morning roll call. Again we stand in lines of ten in the correct order. Beside me isn’t the girl who was there yesterday. What happened to her? I don’t have time to wonder and look around; I have to focus all my energy into being completely still and silent until they finish doing roll call.

We then are barked by the soldiers to follow them to where we will be working today. I look around for my sisters and much to my luck they are both there. We walk in our hard wooden shoes to our ‘work’. Before we get inside, we are stopped by a gate which reads ‘Work will set you free’. Maybe that means if we work hard enough, they will let us go! We must work hard!

The soldiers shout insults at us as we go through the gate. They probably are doing this to get us to work harder as we want to prove them wrong! So the soldiers want us to be free!

We walk past a bench where a pile of tools are laid out. A soldier behind the bench passes everyone a tool to use. For some people I notice that he doesn’t give them anything to use. Luckily for me, I am given a shovel.

The soldier points at me to start digging a trench with a few other people, including Rebekka. I notice that that the soldier didn’t give Anne a tool and so she is forced to carry very heavy sandbags. An older woman helps her with the bags without being too conspicuous which is good as I know a thirteen year old girl would never be able to pick up such heavy objects as she is having to do.

We are then told we can eat some of the bread that we might have kept, but for the people that didn’t keep some can’t have anything to eat until dinner tonight.

I’m aching all over by this point, how will I be able to do this everyday? I look around to Anne, but I can’t seem to find her. Pretending to start digging from the other side of the trench, I peep round the corner to find her being beaten. I gasp. I know if I react to it and try and help her, they will beat me too.

Luckily they decide to put her back to work. All over her she has cuts and bruises, but not anything too bad. I carry on working putting all my effort into digging a trench quickly, so the guards don’t decide to beat me. After hours and hours of hard labour, the whistle finally goes off for us to walk back to the barracks.