Ralph Cowen, Private, Kings Royal Rifle Corps.

Captured 01/06/41, arrived Colditz 04/08/43, liberated 16/04/45.  

Above. Ralph drawn by Earl Haig, a member of the ‘Prominente’ whilst at Colditz.

 

Above. Ralph, seated on bench on the left.

   

 Above. The classic view of the Castle from the river meadow. A family postcard.

 

Above. Ralph, centre background, playing football down by the Mulde on the town sports pitch.

Above. Ralph, front row 3rd from right wearing white vest. Group seated by sorts pitch down by Mulde, by the grass embankment.

 

Above. A reference given to Ralph by Willie Tod, the S.B.O.

 

Above. An extract from Ralph’s journal.

Below are details from Ralph’s memoirs:

In the army, Ralph was in the King Rifle Corps. Ralph felt that he was well prepared for life because of his training in the Jewish Lads Brigade in Half Moon Passage in London’s Whitechapel. He had joined at the age of 12 and played basketball and other games there until he was around 15.

“I knew what drill was, I knew what camp was and to be under canvas. I knew about discipline and non-commissioned and commissioned officers. I knew how to march and form fours, so to me, I was prepared and accepted what it was. But one thing I hated was the Coal Fatigue. You had to get coal for the barracks with two big zinc baths. You had two men for each, a centre man and one on each end, the centre man had two handles and it was such a schlep(drag) to the coal shed and back to the barracks. It was bloody winter time, January when I went in there was snow. But the barracks were modern, just built for the conscription that started in June, 1939. It was just outside Winchester in a little place called Copten, there was nothing there. We had a boiler and radiators, and my bed was just up against it, it was lovely. It was alright, because you had sheets and blankets.”

After grueling field marches and ten mile runs in hob nail boots, Ralph appreciated the hot showers that were available for the soldiers.

“I was dead fit, I was jumping out of my skin in those years.”

That year, in November, Ralph was to have experiences that would be indelibly printed on his mind. Leaving from Liverpool on the Strathallan, a P&O boat, he knew that the games were over when the corps heard that Coventry had been razed to the ground. Ralph recalls that Britain had been criticised unfairly in his opinion for razing Koln. The troops believed for a while that their destination was Canada, when they sailed to off the New Foundland Coast.

“We got issued with tropical gear while on the boat, that’s when we realised we weren’t going to Canada. We wound up in Egypt, in a camp 60 miles south of Cairo. We moved to outside Alexandria. We knew we were making a sea borne move and embarked on small boats with our trucks and stuff. We were sent to Greece from there and arrived in Port Piraeus. We disembarked and went to a place just outside Selonica, for ten days and got kitted out. We started to move towards the Yugoslav border. It was rather a nerve wracking journey. The driving conditions were very bad. 1 was driving a ton and a half vehicle, full of ammunition. We wended our way up mountainous roads, with ice and snow until we reached the border.”

At the Yugoslavian border, Ralph’s troop dug in and waited for something to happen. Then they moved on to Shkidro, a little village, and on to FIorino Pass, that connects Yugoslavia with Greece, in the mountains. It was there, on Good Friday, 1941 that they went into action.

“It was some fun…..l was in a disused railway tunnel, It was blinking freezing and1was trying to get some sleep on a couple of ammunition boxes with a blanket draped over me and my rifle next to me. When I woke in the morning, my rifle bolt was frozen! I heard a lot of noise, bombarding and there was nobody else around and1 thought what the hell am I doing here? Next thing, a Major Lowe from C Company came running in and said, “What are doing here? The Jerries are just behind us. You better get the hell out! Nobody was around to tell you what to do. I was isolated. I started to make my way down to the field and there were bullets zipping around me from everywhere. When I got up to my Colonel, he said, “Cohen, do you think you can fire your rifle?” Because sticking out the barrel was a great big tuft of grass! But after I spoke to him, he got on the wireless truck and was never seen again, vanished off the face of the earth. As if he was swallowed up.”

At sixpence a haircut, cutting hair in the barracks became quite a lucrative sideline for Ralph while in the army.

“I used to have them lining up, and always made money, I was never short of money in the army. I always had enough for smokes and drinks, and had my army pay, which wasn’t much.”

“When we got out there, we fought a rear guard action, that was something! We went through burning forests and bombardment. But it was funny, because you never really got face to face with the enemy. It was like remote control. We were lucky because the weather was so bad that the German tanks couldn’t move through. And the air force fields were bogged. The severe winter was our salvation. At the southern tip of Greece, troops were being taken off early in the morning. The soldiers were told to take their trucks far down onto the beach and drain the radiators and seize the engines. We put pick axes through the tyres and destroyed as much as we could so they could not be used. Then we waited on the beach for Greek fishing boats to come in. We had to get aboard the boats. I had to wade out up to my armpits with my rifle above my head before I could get on. We were trying to get further out to destroyers. But there was a big swell that carried you level with the deck and you had to jump. As I jumped, the sailors grabbed me by the braces of my equipment and dragged me aboard. If you missed, you got crushed between the two. I just lay down on the deck, and I could hear the pom pom of the stukers attacking us. Then they decided not to head for Alexandria (Egypt), but Crete. And that was the umlik (luck), getting on Crete. At that time it had garrison troops.”

The Brits fought alongside Australians, many of whom were taken prisoner there. There were 30,000 non-combative troops. The warm weather in May meant that the soldiers could sleep outdoors on ground sheets. But a dose of dysentery hospitalised Ralph who was prepared three times to go back on the hospital ship to Egypt. On the day of his discharge, the whole hospital was cleared out. One more day would have found Ralph back in Egypt.

“Then the parachutists came and dropped in amongst us and we were knocking them off like flies. Suddenly, for some unknown reason, the blinking island capitulated. That was June 1941. I remember the colonel who gave the capitulation, Colonel Young, the little fart. I can’t understand war and tactics at times. That was where we were captured. But by that time, I had got to the other side and they were taking troops off. They were only taking ANZAC troops off and you had to take your army pay book and they wouldn’t let us on the bloody barges.! I saw General Fryberg arriving to inspect the troops and he said that the only troops to be evacuated were the ANZAC troops. No British troops at all. Then started the long trek back. They marched us back for about 50km. Sleeping out in the open, no food - tough times, tough times.

There was no way we could get off the island and the hospital I had been in for dysentery was used as the prison. It was like an anti-climax, a zero, nothing to it. They just said pack up, throw your arms away’ and that was it. No melodrama or anything, it was empty, a non-event. We were all tired, battle weary, we didn’t get much food because supplies were ‘get what you can, where you can, when you can, how you can’. It was chaotic. “

“British prisoners of war were taken back to Selonica, Greece by sea. For five days they were kept in the bowels of an Italian coal boat, with life jackets, little food and covered in coal dust. I looked like a bag of bones. When we got back to Greece, we were put into Greek barracks that were, oh, shocking conditions. No beds, mattresses, blankets, nothing. But the weather was good and I had tropical gear. All we had to eat was rice and rice and rice. And there I got dysentery again, pretty badly. The only medication I got was charcoal, which was not pleasant to take. So I went to the sort of hospital and there, fortunately, I had a bed. We moved off to Germany in cattle trucks, just like the holocaust victims. Whenever I see that, I can’t help recalling how we travelled -forty or fifty of us to a cattle truck. Nowhere to relieve yourself. We were given a can of meat, a small loaf of bread for the trip which took five days. We went through Greece and then stopped in Yugoslavia, Belgrade. The Red Cross had tables set out and the guards let us out, wagon by wagon. They gave us a box of Polish Cigarettes and they were shocking. We arrived in Bavaria, in Mooseburg.”

Above. Ralph, 2nd from right, dark shirt, at Mooseburg.

Ralph avoided the work camps by securing job in the camp tailor shop, even though he had no idea how to use a sewing machine!

“Finally I did get out to the working camps in a gang that worked in the west cemetery.”

The work was not too bad and the he boiled water for the workers tea breaks. At that stage POWs were getting good Red Cross parcels, with good tea and coffee and were quite well set up.

“The rations in the working camps were totally different to the other camps’ rations. We got good substantial meals and had our own cooks in the camp. “

Ralph didn’t find life in the work camp too difficult, and finishing work early most days, the prisoners would play volleyball. His knowledge of Yiddish enabled Ralph to talk to the guards, even if some of it was made up. Although some of his friends may have known of Ralph’s Jewish identity, it was generally kept secret.

“Finally when I was in Colditz, no-one there knew I was Jewish. One day in Greece, when I went to bathe in a river, I took everything off. And later I left it on the bank of the river and forgot the dog-tags that said I was Jewish. We knew at that time what Hitler was doing to the Jews.”

 

Above. Ralph, right, at Mooseburg.

In order to make Red Cross deliveries easier, Ralph changed his name from Cohen to Cowen. He felt that Cohen was too obviously Jewish. But the Red Cross worked out the connection and in fact had telegrammed Ralph’s mother to report him missing in action.

“About nine months later she got the telegram that said I was a prisoner of war in Germany. So she went through a hellish time. I was an only child, what an umlik (luck). After the war, when I went to the Red Cross to get my ration card and coupons (I got extra for being in the war), they said that they realised what my religion was, because they had the army id number.”

Above. Ralph, bottom row middle at Mooseburg.

The prisoners of war were causing a disturbance in Munich and Ralph, with the others was shifted.

“Wherever we went, we threw cigarette and chocolate wrappers in the gutter and the Germans said that the parcels we received were propaganda that made Germans believe there was lots of food around.”

The prison was relocated to Lamsdorf, near the Polish border, where 30,000 prisoners were housed. The work there was ‘crumping’ -packing stones under the railway sleepers. Ralph didn’t care much for that work and managed to get back.

“I complained of a hammer toe and the doctor said in German that it would have to be cut off, in order to frighten me back to work. So I called his bluff, and said ‘ok’ because I had understood more German than the interpreter. In the end they sent me back to the convalescent hospital at the main camp and they kept me there as long as they could It was great! You got special food and the dietary Red Cross parcel. .It was “terrific. While I was in there I used to cut the hair of the British regimental sergeant major. One day he said,”would you like to leave this camp and go on special assignment? A position has cropped up where they want cooks and hairdressers. I don’t know where it is.”

Colditz

Hoping that the secret destination was not Berlin, Ralph decided to take a chance, along with ten others and arrived at Colditz Castle on August 4, 1943. He worked alongside an Australian in a barber shop set up in the lower floor. Colditz was a castle that dated back to Medieval times and was used as a mental asylum in the first world war. “It wasn’t bad there, it was quite an experience, with the tricks that the officers used to get up to. Finally there were 200 British prisoners there. It took a battalion of Germans to look after us -1000 men that could have fought the enemy and we kept them of that. So we performed some small donation to the war effort.”

  

Above. The loction of the Barber Shop as identified by Ralph.

Above.  The Barber Shop, not Ralph wielding the razor.

It was the creme de la creme of the British Army that were there. There was airforce, army, and navy. They built a glider in the attic, it never took off. They used to have ‘ghosts’ -hide people and make out that they escaped, but they were still in the camp. Then if somebody could really escape, there was a spare to stand in his shoes on the count. They also had a dummy there. They never called out names, just numbers. They had all day to think up schemes. They made uniforms from blankets, using boot polish as dyes.

The prisoners also had a theatre to help them pass the time. All the prisoners roughly knew what was going on. They also listened to a news broadcast that was picked up. At the beginning, times were difficult for Ralph as the other prisoners thought he was a spy planted by the Germans. It was something he was not aware of at the time, and discovered later. Gradually his innocence was established when Ralph was easily able to answer questions put to him casually by the others. It took a couple of weeks before Ralph was cleared and accepted.

Just before Colditz was liberated, surprisingly, the castle was being shelled, with shells bursting in the courtyard. Only when the white flag and union jack were hung out from the top of the castle did it stop. But by then most of the Germans had left. “I remember it was about 9 or 10 in the morning and the gates were open into the courtyard. The first guy in, I read later, was Jewish. And the guards there handed over their weapons. Later I slept in the German quarters outside because it was more comfortable. The American troops had bottles of peach brandy and I got shicker (drunk) that night and slept it off. We were allowed into the Village and I think I went there a couple of times. This was in the last few weeks. After about five days, a whole lot of wagons came and took us to a German airfield, Weimar, a Luftwaffe station and we were flown back to Britain, with 15 in each Dakota.

Colditz contained mostly officers and important prisoners and was promised by the International Red Cross that it would be one of the first camps to be liberated.

The War ends

Coming home, although happy to see his parents, was an anti-climax for Ralph. The Cohens were there to greet me. “It was like, where do you pick up the threads? How did I feel when I was a prisoner of war? I .felt nothing, there is a certain emptiness that you feel, but it’s remarkable. You used to lie on your bed and think, ‘when the war’s over…. ‘ and yet, you get back and they say ‘hello, how are you?’ Well, what the hell do you say to people? It’s like a passage in your life that’s been wasted you come back, to what? To look back and say, ‘well thank god I survived? Naturally, but what did we all achieve by it? Millions got slaughtered and that was the worst thing of all. Innocent people went to their death. Both in battle and city, bombarded on both sides. Not all Germans were bad. So there was a chasm and how to bridge it? I don’t think in those days it was a question of trying to understand My attitude to life had changed a lot, I never attached a great deal of importance to smaller things. I had grown away from that family. I went away a young man and I came back an old man, after what I had been through. That chasm can never be filled, and because of ‘that your whole attitude can change. But I just began to get into things, I began working and picked up the threads of life and I met my dear wife Sonja and we got married in September 1946.”

Ralph and Sonja will have been happily married for 62 years this coming September and have three beautiful daughters, four gorgeous grandchildren and live in Melbourne Australia.