ROSER: Five times.
M. DUBOST: Five times. You were transferred finally to a disciplinary
camp?
ROSER: Yes.
M. DUBOST: Will you indicate the regime of such a camp? Will you
indicate your rank, and the treatment which French people of your rank
in those disciplinary camps had to submit to, and for what reasons?
ROSER: Very well, I was an “aspirant,” a rank which, in France, is
between a first sergeant and a second lieutenant. I was in several
disciplinary camps. The first was a small camp which the Germans called
Strafkommando, in Linzburg in Hanover. It was in 1941. There were about
thirty of us.
While I was in that camp during the summer of 1941, we attempted to
escape. We were recaptured by our guards at the very moment when we were
leaving the camp. We were naturally unarmed. The Germans, our guards,
having recaptured one of us, attempted to make him reveal the others who
also had sought to escape. The man remained silent. The guards hurled
themselves upon him, beating him with the butts of their pistols in the
face, with bayonets, with the butts of their rifles. At that moment, not
wishing to let our comrade be killed, several of us stepped forward and
revealed that we sought to escape. I then received a beating with
bayonets applied to my head and fell into a swoon. When I recovered
consciousness one of the Germans was kneeling on my leg and was
continuing to strike me. Another one, raising his gun, was seeking to
strike my head. I was saved on that occasion through the intervention of
my comrades, who threw themselves between the Germans and myself. That
night we were beaten for exactly 3 hours with rifle butts, with bayonet
blows, and with pistol butts in the face. I lost consciousness three
times.
The following day we were taken to work, nevertheless. We dug trenches
for the draining of the marshes. It was a very hard sort of work, which
started at 6:30 in the morning, to be completed at 6 o’clock at night.
We had two stops, each of a half-hour. We had nothing to eat during the
day. Soup was given to us, when we came back at night, with a piece of
bread, a small sausage or 2 cubic centimeters of margarine, and that was
all.
Following our attempted escape, our guards held back from us all the
parcels which our families sent to us for a month. We could not write
nor could we receive mail.
At the end of three and a half months, in September 1941, we were
shipped to the regular Kommandos. I, personally, was quite ill at that
time and I came back to Stalag X B at Sandbostel.
M. DUBOST: Why were you subjected to such a special regime, although you
were an “aspirant”?
ROSER: Certainly because of my attempted escape.