Horace Greasley - Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell?
A few words from Ken Scott, ghost-writer of 'Do The Birds Still Sing In Hell'.
I reluctantly agreed to meet up with an elderly gentleman in the spring of 2008. He was eighty-nine years old. I was desperately trying to finish off my third book and had another two projects on the go. I was notified that an ex-POW wanted to write his World War Two memoirs. “Oh no,” I said to my wife, “not another war story.”
It was a man called Filly Bullock who introduced the two of us in a small town called Alfaz del Pi on an unusually hot March day on Spain’s Costa Blanca, the White Coast. Filly had warned me I was about to stumble on the greatest World War Two story never told and that I would fall over myself to write it.
I secretly bet my bottom dollar that I wouldn’t. This old boy just doesn’t know how busy I am, I thought to myself, and anyway he’s eighty-nine, why the hell did he wait until now to think about getting his book written?
I sat in Horace Greasley’s well-kept lounge while his wife Brenda ferried in the coffee. I’ll talk to him for ten minutes, I’d decided, let him down gently. Anyway what was I doing here? I’m a fiction writer; sure I’d dabbled with the memoirs of a not so famous, not so exciting MP but the book never made it to print. I’d had no experience whatsoever of ghostwriting this type of book. I knew nothing about it, wouldn’t even know where to start.
I sat with Horace for over two hours as he relayed his condensed story to me, first through numerous cups of coffee and then through the beers. (Horace preferred gin). I sat with an open mouth as this old soldier took me through the dramatics of his unfortunate capture, the horrors of a death march and a train journey where the Allied prisoners fell dead every few hours. The story was only just beginning.
I listened while Horace ‘Jim’ Greasley spoke.
Horace relayed his near death experience in the first camp and then took me through his first meeting with Rosa, in Camp Two. There was an instant mutual attraction between the young German interpreter and the emaciated prisoner. Within a few weeks he would be having sex with her on a filthy bench top in the camp drilling workshops, under the noses of the German guards. It wasn’t love at first sight; that took the best part of a year. In fact, at the exact point he discovered how much he felt about Rosa and how much he actually loved her, the Germans transferred him to yet another camp.
He was devastated. It was at this point that Horace told me that the good bit was only just beginning. He would relay his time in the third camp at Freiwaldau in Polish Silesia in dulcet whispered tones for nearly an hour.
I sat in silence. The book was formulating in my head as I desperately fought the urge to take my pen out and begin scribbling right there and then. I had questions. Why wait nearly seventy years before writing the book? Why me? How’s his health? A book can take a year to write - is he going to hold out?
I never asked the questions as I didn’t want to hear any answers I might not like. I agreed to give it a go. For five months I sat with Horace while he relayed the greatest escape story ever. I thought back to my youth, the great Colditz stories and of course Steve McQueen in ‘The Great Escape’. Horace Greasley’s account of his time in the POW camps blows those stories out of the water.
What makes it all the more amazing is that every bit of the book is true. I attempted to exaggerate at times with a little poetic licence. Horace wouldn’t allow it; in reality I didn’t need to. The words in this book are not those of Ken Scott, ghostwriter, they are the words of Horace Greasley, ex-prisoner of war. Horace cannot write or type because of severe arthritis. I take no credit for this book; I have merely acted as his fingers.
Horace’s long-term memory and attention to detail is remarkable. At times reliving the brutality at the hands of his German captors would bring him to tears. I closely followed suit; it is one of my weaknesses. For me, tears are contagious.
I would like to think that this book has brought a certain closure for Horace on the horrors he experienced during the war. He has expressed on more than one occasion that this book is for his prisoner comrades - the men that suffered at the hands of their fellow man.
The experience of writing this book has made my life richer; meeting a man like Horace and hearing of his suffering has humbled me. I doubt whether my generation could have coped with the experiences these men went through. I relayed some of the stories to my children Callum, nine and Emily, twelve. They were fascinated and listened at times in disbelief as I described the prisoners’ suffering and the callous, barbaric acts committed by mankind. I think it is important that we never forget the suffering an ordinary individual goes through during war and remember that Horace was one of the lucky ones... he came home.
We must continue to teach our children about the futility and horrors of war. The politicians that instigate them must question their conscience. They never suffer; only the young men and women of their country and the countries they fight with.
My children have met Horace. We socialise with him and his wife Brenda. I count myself fortunate to have met such a man as Horace Greasley and take it as a great honour that he approached me to write his book.
I only hope that I have done it justice.
Synopsis
Horace Greasley was twenty years of age in the spring of 1939 when Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia. There had been whispers and murmurs of discontent from certain quarters and the British government began to prepare for the inevitable war.
In May 1939 the Military Training Act was passed and all men aged between 18 and 40 became legally liable for call-up. Adolf Hitler was testing the resolve of the Allies when he proclaimed later that year that Poland had refused the peaceful settlement of relations which he desired. He went on to say that Germans in Poland were persecuted with bloody terror and were being driven from their houses. He said that Poland was no longer willing to respect the frontier of Germany.
He was merely looking for an excuse to invade the nation as part of his quest to bring Europe under the control of the Third Reich.
Horace Joseph Greasley and his twin brother Harold sat listening to the news reports on the Empiric portable 4v wireless receiver, in the lounge of their 4 bedroomed cottage in Ibstock in the county of Leicestershire. Their parents Joseph and Mabel listened intently but nervously, knowing it was just a matter of time before their two sons would be heading off to the war. Mabel composed herself well and although her eyes had glazed over with a film of tears, neither of her older sons had noticed. She nursed her youngest son Derick, barely two years old, on her knee.
The twins’ letters arrived in due course and they were advised that they had been conscripted into the first draft. They were informed they would be allowed the choice to join the Army, the Air Force or the Navy.
Several days later Horace got the type of break young men at that time could only dream of. When cutting a client’s hair he casually remarked he was heading off to the war along with his brother. The client whispered that it just so happened he was responsible for the next intake of firemen in the town and over a nod and a wink the young Horace was informed that one of the positions was his if he so desired it. A fireman was a reserved occupation and meant picking up a fire hose during the war instead of a Lee Enfield 303 rifle. Furthermore, his wages would rise to the grand sum of £5 per week.
For reasons only known to Horace he politely declined his client’s offer and after seven weeks’ training with the 2nd / 5th Battalion Leicesters he found himself facing the might of the German army in a muddy field south of Cherbourg in Northern France with just thirty rounds of ammunition in his weapon pouch.
Horace’s war didn’t last long. He was taken prisoner on 25th May 1940 and forced to endure a ten week march across France and Belgium, en route to Holland, where it was rumoured the prisoners would be loaded onto barges and sent down the Rhein to prison camps in Germany. Horace survived, barely. Food was scarce; he took nourishment from dandelion leaves, small insects, occasionally a secret food package from a sympathetic villager, and drank rain water from ditches. Many of his fellow comrades were not so fortunate. Falling by the side of the road through sheer exhaustion and malnourishment meant a bullet through the back of the head and the corpse left to rot.
The Germans’ plan to send the survivors to camps in Germany down the Rhein was foiled by the RAF who bombed most of the barges and instead, Horace found himself incarcerated in prison camps in Polish Silesia.
It was there he embarked on an incredible love affair with a German interpreter living outside one of the camps. At Freiwaldau the only way to carry on the forbidden affair was to escape.
Silesia was a region surrounded by Germany and German-occupied countries on each of its borders. Because of its geographical location the nearest ‘neutral’ country was Sweden, 420 miles to the north.
Once outside the camp Horace had two choices. He could attempt the hazardous journey through German-occupied land or he could break back into the camp under cover of darkness and stick the war out, praying for an early allied victory.
Do The Birds Still Sing In Hell? is an incredible tale of one man’s defiance, of adversity and the lengths he was prepared to go to for brief, passion-filled moments, each time under a death sentence. This is the story of a young man’s outlawed obsession for the girl he loved, of man’s most natural sexual craving and of his determination to defeat her Fatherland. This story is about good over evil, how love can blossom in the most impossible of situations. It is a story about desire and hope.
Prologue.
It was early February 1945; the war was all but over. The Red Army had already liberated Auschwitz and other death camps and the shocking stories of what they had found there were relayed to an astonished world. And at Belsen, the news reports sickened civilised people as images of dead and half starved men, women and children were beamed around the world. Even the civilian German nation as a whole could not, or perhaps would not, believe what they were seeing and hearing. At Belsen the British liberators found over thirty thousand inmates dead or dying. The skeletal figures that had survived the gas chambers gazed into the cameras with hardly the energy to stand or comprehend that they had been freed and their physical suffering was over. A few inmates talked of the unbelievable conditions they had been kept in, of the torture and brutality at the hands of their captors, and one man hung his head in shame as he explained that some of his fellow countrymen had turned to cannibalism simply to be able to see the next day.
The camera crew focused on a sickening pile of dead, naked, emaciated women that had been located at the far end of the camp. Naked young girls, women, mothers and grandmothers - no one had been spared. The pile of decaying rotting flesh was eighty yards long, ten yards wide and four to five feet deep on average. The images were shown on cinema screens around the world. When the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, General Dwight Eisenhower, found the victims of the death camps, he ordered all possible photographs to be taken, and for the German people from surrounding villages to be ushered through the camps and even made to bury the dead. He said, “Get it all on record now - get the films - get the witnesses - because somewhere down the track of history some bastard will get up and say that this never happened.” His words were prophetic.
Two Russian soldiers of the 332nd Rifle Division sat in a makeshift camp ten miles from Polsen on the German Polish border in an area known as Silesia. Their comrades had entered Austria some weeks before and had also captured Danzig. The British and American forces had crossed the Rhein at Oppenheim. It was clear Germany was under attack from all sides.
The younger of the soldiers was named Ivan. A mere nineteen years old, he was thrown into the war as a sixteen-year-old conscript and already battle-hardened beyond belief. Nevertheless, even he was horrified at the some of the tales he’d heard filtering through from the rescuing Allies and, although he was looking forward to liberating the camps he had been assigned to, he was unsure as to what new horrors his young mind would encounter.
He had a phobia - one thing that shook him up more than anything else. What was it about a child’s dead body? You’d think he’d be used to it by now. He remembered vividly the first child’s body he had seen as his division had fought in the defence of Stalingrad. Why? he had asked himself. The young boy, no more than four years old, had clung to his mother’s dead body until he had simply frozen to death in the bitter winter climate. His mother’s skull had been torn apart by a piece of shrapnel from a German mortar shell as she’d made a desperate attempt to find sanctuary deep into the city.
She’d died instantly.
The sweet child would never know what it was like to pick up a book and read, never experience his first tender kiss from a girl, never know the joy of fatherhood.
His comrade sensed his fear and was trying to convince him it was culmination of what they had fought for.
“Comrade, we will be seen as heroes. We are there to liberate our Allies who have spent many years at the hands of the Nazis. The poor prisoners have been brutalized for five years. We will give those German dogs a hell they will never forget.”
Ivan gazed into the flames of the fire. He should have felt warmth but all he could feel was a numbness of mind and body.
“Will we see children’s dead bodies, Sergei?”
The older soldier shrugged his shoulders.
“Perhaps, comrade. Perhaps even worse.”
“Nothing could be worse, Sergei.” He shook his head and drank the dregs from the now cold cup of tea that had been freshly brewed a short while ago. Even in spring this part of Poland was deathly cold when the sun went down.
“The Nazis are capable of anything, comrade. They razed a French village to the ground. They rounded up and shot every man and boy then herded the women and children into the village church.”
Ivan wanted to cover his ears; he didn’t want to hear what happened next.
“No, Sergei.... no.”
“They set fire to the church, burned the women and children alive. The screams of the poor infants could be heard for miles around.”
Ivan wiped a tear from his eye. His comrade grasped at the sleeve jacket of his ill-fitting uniform.
“We must avenge those women and children, comrade. We must do what we have to do, we must avenge the deaths at Kharkov and Kiev and Sevastopol and we must remember every Russian man, woman and child slaughtered at the hands of the German filth, murdered in the huge death factories. At Stalingrad they cut off our lines of supplies, deliberately starved our people to death because they couldn’t defeat us by fair means. We ate dogs and cats and even raw rats, we ate the glue from bookbindings and industrial leather. It was whispered in certain places that our countrymen ate the flesh of our brothers and sisters.”
A few minutes’ silence ensued while Ivan took in the magnitude of Sergei’s statement.
“They are truly inhumane, comrade Sergei?”
The older soldier sighed and nodded his head.
“They are, comrade, they are.”
“But they will flee, Sergei, no? They know we are coming. Surely they will run?”
Sergei smiled.
“They will run, comrade, but we will run faster and harder and for longer. We will hunt them down and catch them like rats and we will have our fun with them.”
Sergei reached across suddenly and gripped roughly between his comrades’ legs, taking his testicles in a vice-like grip.
“These will be emptied of their stagnant milk by tomorrow evening, comrade. I can guarantee it.”
Ivan struggled with his friends’ firm wrist, tears in his eyes and a puzzled look on his face.
“We will fuck their Frauleins while their fathers and brothers watch, then we’ll kill them one by one. They’d better run, comrade; they’d better run like the wind, run into the hands of those soft Americans.” He sighed again. “But those Americans haven’t experienced what we have, comrade, those Yanks came into the war too late.”
The young soldier looked at his comrade, his mentor, the man who had looked after him like a father since their paths had crossed what seemed like years ago. He looked at the man who had saved his life on the battlefield on more than one occasion. He looked at a man whom he loved and respected as much as his father and was now advocating behaviour no different from the filthy Hun, the Nazi.
And young Ivan was confused. The fire before them crackled and spat out its tune. The embers were dying but still glowing brightly. Ivan reached across to the stockpiled wood and threw two large logs into the heart of the fire. The glow seemed to dull for a moment but Ivan and Sergei watched as slowly but surely a gentle flame began licking at the bottom of the new wood. The heat was instant. Ivan felt nothing.
“Tell me, Sergei…”
“Speak, child of the Union.”
“These camps of death, do the birds still sing in these terrible places?”
Sergei frowned, unable to give an answer.
“I mean… the birds, Sergei… surely they have witnessed everything? Do they still sing?”
Sergei let out a sigh.
“You are becoming soft like the Americans, comrade. You’ll be writing poems next.”
“I will wake early tomorrow and if the birds are singing everything will be fine. The birds Sergei… the birds... they will tell us.”
“Be quiet.” A voice cried out a few yards away. “Let us get some fucking sleep before tomorrow; we need to save our energy for the German bitches.”
Sergei smiled. His teeth shone in the pale moonlight, and Ivan wondered how he had managed to keep them in such good condition given their diet and vitamin intake over the last few years. Hell, there was a time when they were battered down by the Germans without a crust of bread passing their lips for days.
“You see, comrade, it is to be expected of you. Tomorrow you must do your duty. We must eradicate the Nazis off the face of the earth and keep going until we reach Berlin.”
“Yes, the Nazis, Sergei, I agree, but all Germans can’t be monsters. Our comrades are acting like animals now; they are turning on defenceless villagers and old men and women.”
“Revenge, comrade. Who can blame them? Who can blame us? The German civilians, those old men and women sat back and let it happen. The Russian people revolted when we were unhappy with our leaders; why didn’t the Germans?”
Ivan had heard enough. He had a feeling he wouldn’t sleep well that evening. He pulled his sleeping bag tight around his head, nestled a little closer to the fire. He was exhausted after the relentless march and just beginning to doze off when Sergei leaned over and whispered in his ear.
“Tomorrow, comrade… and for many days and weeks after, we will show the German nation, the soldier, the civilian and the man, woman and child in the street what bad really is. The German will wish he’d never been born.”
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