ROSER: In the course of the winter, 1941-42, the Germans wanted to
intimidate, first, the noncommissioned officers who were refractory in
labor; second, those who had sought to escape; and third, the men who
were being employed in Kommandos (labor gangs) and who were caught in
the act of performing sabotage. The Germans warned us that from 1 April
1942 onward all these escapees who were recaptured would be sent to a
camp, a special camp called a Straflager, at Rawa-Ruska in Poland.
It was following another attempt to escape that I was taken to Poland
with about two thousand other Frenchmen. I was at Limburg-an-der-Lahn,
Stalag XII A, where we were regrouped and placed in railway cars. We
were stripped of our clothes, of our shoes, of all the food which some
of us had been able to keep. We were placed in cars, in each of which
the number varied from 53 to 56. The trip lasted 6 days. The cars were
open generally for a few minutes in the course of a stop in the
countryside. In 6 days we were given soup on 2 occasions only, once at
Oppel, and another time at Jaroslan, and the soup was not edible. We
remained for 36 hours without anything to drink in the course of that
trip, as we had no receptacle with us and it was impossible to get a
supply of water.
When we reached Rawa-Ruska on 1 June 1942, we found other
prisoners—most of them French, who had been there for several
weeks—extremely discouraged, with a ration scale much inferior to
anything that we had experienced until then, and no International Red
Cross or family parcel for anyone.
At that time there were about twelve to thirteen thousand in that camp.
There was for that number one single faucet which supplied, for several
hours a day, undrinkable water. This situation lasted until the visit of
two Swiss doctors, who came to the camp in September, I think. The
billets consisted of 4 barracks, where rooms contained as many as 600
men. We were stacked in tiers along the walls, 3 rows of them, 30 to 40
centimeters for each of us.
During our stay in Rawa-Ruska there were many attempts at escape, more
than five hundred in 6 months. Several of our comrades were killed. Some
were killed at the time when a guard noticed them. In spite of the
sadness of such occurrences, no one of us contested the rights of our
guards in such cases, but several were murdered. In particular, on 12
August 1942, in the Tarnopol Kommando, a soldier, Lavesque, was found
bearing evidence of several shots and several large wounds caused by
bayonets.
On the 14th of August, in the Verciniec Kommando, 93 Frenchmen, having
succeeded in digging a tunnel, escaped. The following morning three of
them, Conan, Van den Boosch, and Poutrelle, were caught by German
soldiers, who were searching for them. Two of them were sleeping; the
third, Poutrelle, was not asleep. The Germans, a corporal and two
enlisted men, verified the identity of the three Frenchmen. Very calmly
they told them: “Now we are obliged to kill you.” The three wretched men
spoke of their families, begged for mercy. The German corporal gave the
following reply, which we heard only too often: “Befehl ist Befehl” (“An
order is an order”); and they shot down immediately two of the French
prisoners, Van den Boosch and Conan. Poutrelle was left like a madman
and by sheer luck was not caught again. But he was captured a few days
later in the region of Kraków. He was then brought back to Rawa-Ruska
proper, where we saw him in a condition close to madness.
On the 14th of August, once again in the Stryj Kommando, a team of about
twenty prisoners accompanied by several guards, were on their way to
work . . . .