Bio. 6 A Displaced Party

Bio. 6 A Displaced Party

I was drafted into the British Army just after WWII ended. After a horrid year of basic training and the Royal Artillery, I passed some tests and transferred to the Royal Army Educational Corps. It was formed after the war to improve the education of soldiers in occupied countries and keep them busy enough to stay out of trouble.

We trained at the University of Göttingen in the British zone of Germany. It is a lovely old town, and the university is where Schiller and Goethe taught. I bought a German grammar, studied the language and learned enough to interact with the locals, including a lady who worked at the Toc H, a local bierstube which had been taken over for British soldiers.

        

There was a huge camp of Displaced Persons (DPs) near town, where families brought to Germany as forced labor were assembled before repatriation. The DPs were terribly poor, so I persuaded the men in my unit to put on a Christmas party for the children. I had organized socials in Romford and this seemed a worthwhile project.

           

Through my lady friend, we rented the Toc H for an evening. We needed decorations, toys and party favors and the favored currency was cigarettes. One cigarette was worth 5 marks and stores preferred them to marks. We received 50 free cigarettes each week, and non-smokers like myself had previously refused them, but not now. We collected several hundred cigarettes and the buying team went shopping. Our quartermaster was sympathetic, and promised us foodstuffs, oranges and other Christmas goodies.

           

One problem was a lack of balloons. The shopping team was discouraged until someone thought of condoms; could they be blown up and used as balloons? They could, so a team of condom blower-uppers was organized. I persuaded five other soldiers to join me as dancers in a clodhopping “fairy” ballet, to classical records. A local fraulein sewed costumes and wings of diaphanous material, all paid for by cigarettes as money. In our army boots, rehearsals were chaotic fun.

           

When the great day arrived, instead of the 50 kids we had expected, more than 100 showed up. There was frantic phoning to the quartermaster, extra food and packing of goodies. The kids were a great audience. They thought our fairy ballet was wildly funny, with soldiers prancing around in tutus, fairy wings and hobnail boots. It ended as a pile up on stage and they loved it. We also hired a juggler and a magician. The most poignant and unexpected part of the evening was when one kid came on stage and led the others in “Tannenbaum” and “Silent Night’. I still remember those beautiful children’s voices. There wasn’t a dry eye among the soldiers and our helpers.

           

After the food and the show, as the kids were leaving, they each received a package with cookies and an orange. We also gave each a bar of soap, which was in short supply, a book or toy and a “balloon” on a stick. As we watched them walking through the snow back to their camp, it gave us a great feeling that this was the true spirit of Christmas.