For the second year we have two students from York University working with collections from our Archive. Josie has chosen to look at the ‘Alice Smales Diaries’; click here to access a previous Blog post about these diaries and Leah is reading the Charles Readman Prisoner of War letters from the WWII box. In late April/early May they will be giving a talk in the library about their findings. If you are interested in attending send an email:
claire.marris@whitbymuseum.org.uk
However, Charles, our Archivist, catalogued the Charles Readman letters and found them, at times, quite captivating yet emotional reads. With the 80th anniversary of VE Day coming up in May these letters share a memory from WWII…
Charles Readman joined the armed forces in November of 1939, originally as a Territorial/Reservist, but was soon moved to the Regular Army in a support unit for the Royal Engineers. As he had been a postman in his civilian life, and was a qualified and experienced driver, he worked as a delivery driver for the Royal Engineers (while it wasn’t nearly as rare as it had been in WWI, being a driver at that point was still seen as a ‘specialist skill’ in the armed forces). He was deployed to the North African campaign (date unknown), and was captured while making a delivery to a front-line unit (area and date unknown).
We know from the correspondence his wife Agnes had with the British Red Cross that he was confirmed as a Prisoner of War by the BRC on 30/07/1941. In this letter ‘J. M. Eddy’ of the BRC confirms that Charles is alive, has been reported as a POW, and is currently being held at the Italian POW camp ‘Campo 78’ in Sulmona (Abruzzo region, central Italy). He goes on to specify that this is a transfer camp where POWs are held until a place can be found for them in one of the permanent camps.
From Charles Readman’s later letters sent home from the Italian camps we know he was eventually moved to a camp near Rome, he mentions being near ‘Cinecitta’ – the centre of the Italian film industry, described as ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’.
He was put to work there repairing damage to Italian homes caused by Allied bombing raids, and was paid by the Italian government for the work he did. He describes this work as ‘easier than the work he did on his fathers farm as a child’, as they got Sundays off, worked only a half day on Saturday, and were also given Catholic holy days off work as well. He describes the climate as wonderful, notes that he likes the food being served there, and that he seems to be getting on well with the guards. He describes playing football with them and being taken on ‘escorted’ walks through the hills around Rome. He remained at the camp near Rome until late 1943.
He was transferred from Italian camps to ‘Stalag VIII B’ near the village of Lamsdorf in Silesian Germany (now Łambinowice, in Poland). He was assigned to one of the Arbeitslager (labour camps) associated with the Stalag VIII B camp as part of the Arbeitskommando (Nazi policy of slave labour, originally focusing on civilian populations in conquered nations, but expanded to include ‘lower ranking’ POWs by this point). The Arbeitslager were run by the SS, rather than normal German Military Police units, and the ones associated with Stalag VIII B are particularly notorious for the stories of abuse, suffering, and criminal treatment of POWs in the war.
It should be noted that the Arbeitslager where POWs were used as slave labour were not the same as the infamous Concentration Camps, even though they were run by the same SS units, and the goal was to get as much work out of the prisoners as possible at the lowest cost rather than to exterminate them.
In his letters from this period in the story he also describes the shortage of food, proper clothing, heating in the winter, and the absence of medical care provided to the Prisoners; and always ends them trying to reassure Agnes that the war will be over soon and they’ll be happily reunited any day now. It’s clear that he’s doing his best to ‘keep a good face’ on the letters he sends home, meaning that it can be reasonably concluded that the conditions/experiences he actually endured would be significantly worse than described.
The letters from this period also show the only example of military censorship in this collection, with a section of his description of life in the camps being blacked out and completely inaccessible. It’s uncertain if this was from the German military censor not wanting that particular piece of information to be read by the Allied powers, or from the British military censor who would also have read the letter not wanting upsetting information about POWs to get into civilian hands at this point in the war.
From a letter sent to Charles by a T. van Scheltinga (a Dutch civilian held by the Arbeitskommando at the same camp) we know that Charles was working alongside civilians there, and that he made friends with them – as TvS thanks him for the sacrifices he made, addressing him as ‘our Liberator’. The letter ends telling him that he is always welcome to visit TvS and the other Dutch prisoners he met in the camps in the Netherlands.
Considering the rather small collection of letters that survived the Readman collection tells a powerful, and personal, story of a single man’s experience during the Second World War; and contains a great deal more information and implications about the society they lived in.
By Charles Graffius
Archive Manager
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