Pte. Victor Albert Thomas
British Army Royal Army Service Corps
from:St. Leger Crescent, St. Thomas, Swansea
Victor Thomas joined the Army Service Corps when he turned 18. He was sent unprepared and almost unarmed to Crete aged 23 he was captured and spent the rest of the war as a POW in Eastern Germany. In his words: "We didn't have anything at all to defend the island, we were using rifles from World War One with two rounds each. They captured us and put us in cattle wagons and took us to Germany."
He caught Diphtheria in the camp and became so weak that he couldn't walk or work. He was looked after by New Zealand-born doctor and officer Earl Stevenson-Wright. He was taken to Berlin with one guard to the hospital. When on the Berlin underground a lady gave him her seat as he could barely stand. She told him that her son was a POW in Canada and hoped people would do the same for him there.
The Germans were going to shoot Uncle Vic due to his repeated escape attempts. Dr. Stevenson-Wright stepped in and told the Germans that Vic was his batman and therefore shouldn't be shot. It worked and he became Dr. Stevenson-Wright's batman from then on until they were moved to separate camps.
He was in the following camps:
- Stalag VIII B (Lamsdorf, Silesia) in October 1941
- Stalag III D (Steglitz, Berlin) in 1941
- Stalag IV G (Ostritz, Saxony) in 1944
He witnessed many things, including seeing a barbed wire compound in a wood where the Germans had herded Russian POWs and left them to starve to death. He saw the destruction of Leipzig by RAF carpet bombing and told me of the terrible effect it had on the camp guards who lived in the city with their families. The German guards, despite being short of food for themselves and their families, always passed on the Red Cross parcels to the POWs whenever they occasionally made it through. He also received food parcels, which arrived addressed from The Cafe. They were really sent by Miss Cascarini in St. Thomas, who did not put her name to them for fear of persecution of her family in Italy.
Almost at the end of the war they were marched Westwards, guarded by very jumpy Hitler Youth. He managed to slip away with another POW and head towards the Western Allied lines. Whilst hiding in a barn an American plane strafed them, killing his companion right at the end of the war.
Upon being liberated he spent many months in hospital recovering from his ordeals and severe malnutrition.
After the war he re-visited Germany several times, to meet some of the Germans who despite everything had been kind to him. He never had a bad word to say about Germans in general, just specific people there who behaved extremely badly.
