Teenage Deportee, Part 2

Dorsten Transit Internment Camp, formerly known as Stalag VIF was situated on a flat sandy area with a valley on one side of the camp and the Dorsten-Ems shipping canal on the other side. The camp was below the level of the canal and the great lock gates, which were near the entrance to the camp, had been damaged in an air raid only a couple of days before our arrival.

The camp was in the middle of the heavily industruialised Ruhr Valley and the air was full o sulphur and other fumes from the factoties that surrounded us. As the weather became wet and cold, the sulphur fumes became a thick yellow fog the settled on us and was difficult to get rid of.

The camp comprised some decent concrete buildings which housed the camp guards, some better barrack blocks with central heating which housed the women and children, and some old broken down wooden buildings, which may have been the remnants of a WW1 prison camp, in which the men and teenage boys were housed. These huts were heated by slow combustion stoves which burnt coal dust bricquettes. The tiolet faciklities for the men were even more primitive as they consisted of a slit in the concrete floor of a hut which we had to straddle in the half light of a poorly ventilated or illuminated shed.

© Copyright of content contributed to this Archive rests with the author. Find out how you can use this.