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The following is Hal's story written by him for his family.  It is in the public domain at https://www.wamdl.com.au/WAMDL/index.php?title=FINKELSTEIN,_Harry_-_Memoir

IN AND OUT OF BARBED WIRE

My Story as a Prisoner of War

By Hal Finkelstein WX4637 2/7th Field Ambulance

19th Brigade 6th Division A.I.F. World War 2

FOREWORD

After I recorded the Oral History and had it transcribed I had to read it for editing and any other changes and I realised it told only half the story. So I decided to write it. Not a light decision. When I came home in 1944 I was asked to write a monthly series on my experiences for printing in a staff magazine, I did this without any difficulty at all, but I was very busy getting back into life, and I condensed the last few months into about two sessions. I came across the remains of this recently, and when I re-read it I could see that detail was obviously fresher in my mind at that time, but I was mainly struck by the difference in the way I described some events compared with how I thought of them now. I suppose the fact that I was 25 then and am 81 now would have some bearing on that. From time to time I have taken extracts from my 1944 writings and I have identified them as such. I hope you don't find it confusing, but I have written both stories.

Hal - June 2000

After a very difficult couple of weeks we were taken prisoner on 1st June 1941 at Sphakia on the south coast of Crete. We had been there for two days and nights but had been unable to tie in with the Navy, who were trying to evacuate us. Their problem was that they had to be outside the enemy aircraft range until dusk and then come in as fast as possible, pick up troops that were on the beach and be out of bomber range by first light. We had to stay up in the hills until dark as there was no cover on the beach. The Navy had only a very narrow window of safety, and there were many ships lost in this operation as it was. The gallant HMS Hardy, which took us off from Greece, was one.

We had walked across the island - mainly at night for safety's sake, crossing the Samaria mountain range, and we were not about to walk back again, with a greatly changed status. On the trip back we didn't have to worry about enemy action from the air or on the ground. We saw evidence of the fierce fighting that had taken place, grim reminders of those many young men who would be forever part of Crete. Some of the scenes were so graphic and horrific that a hush came over the long line of battle experienced prisoners as it moved past, and many may well have been thinking that but for fickle fate it could have been them. There was a man kneeling behind a slender tree in such a natural position that I went over to look at him. He had been firing through a fork in the tree trunk and a bullet had come through the fork straight into his forehead. The gases in his body were causing his skin to stretch within his clothes. We had to keep moving.

From 1944: And as we sat waiting, each with his own cup of bitterness overflowing to the extent of complete obliteration of all else, and each realising, with a start, that all possibilities ever considered in regard to the tossing of dice with Chance and Thor never included this present factor of being taken prisoner of war. And so began the first of a series of straggling processions. Weary men in a long line, like tired ants trailing along the road, with hollow cheeks and haggard eyes, hungry men in tattered clothes, with no hats, and broken boots and blistered feet, broken stoney roads and near broken stoney hearts, with a hazy dream of what might have been - only hazy because hope had not been re-born. Hope cannot live on gall and stone. Our motive force still remains a mystery. I can only ascribe it to some strain of self-respect that would not let us grovel, beaten before our captors. (Phew!)

We eventually came to an area near Canea, where a rough prison camp had been established. Here I saw rough discipline/punishment being administered, in line with the German policy of maintaining control by force and fear. A Greek man had his hands tied behind his back and his ankles tied together, and he was being forced to jump backwards and forwards, without stopping, over a strand of barbed wire strung about a handspan above the ground. We were going past and I don't know how long he was able to keep it up or what happened to him, or to the other Greek man who held a heavy stone in his outstretched arms and was doing full knee bends, with blows from a rifle barrel helping him go down.

Our group of medical orderlies offered for work at the aid post, and we were soon busy attending to the needs of the men. I was working on the blistered feet of one soldier and he told me he had walked several miles from his camp to get treatments there was no aid post there. I mentioned this to my friend Ken Sykes, who was acting in charge of our group, and the outcome was that we were sent out to this camp at Skines, where there were several hundred prisoners. We had a Scottishs doctor named Carmichael with us and we worked there for several weeks. We had a wide variety of complaints and illnesses, mainly stomach upsets and dysentery, some minor wounds and one Pommy soldier who complained about losing the feeling in his legs. Some time later we met up with him again and it turned out he had experienced a mild dose of infantile paralysis. We were lucky this did not run through the camp. Our guards were from an Alpine parachute battalion and as front line fighting men they were firm but fair. Our aid post was outside the camp fence and we had passes that enabled us to go in and out. We were well inside the guarded area. The Germans had their mess set up just outside the camp fence, done deliberately I believe, and it annoyed many of us intensely to see prisoners lined up at the fence watching the Germans eating their meals, hoping for something to be thrown to them. We were not starving and pride should have sustained them, even on light rations.

There was a German doctor attached to this Unit and he came in one day to tell us that Germany had gone to war with Russia, that it would take them about six weeks to defeat the Russians and then, with all equipment and material won in this offensive they would launch an invasion of Britain and the war should be over by the end of the year. He was not the only one sharing this view because two of the guards told us that they were going to try and get included in the guards escorting us back to Australia. This didn't make us feel any better, but we hung on in blind hope that things would come out O.K. A year or so later I met this doctor again in Germany, and he said I would be sorry to learn that his Unit had made another parachute attack and most of the men had been killed. Of course, I was not sorry at the time, but they were fine young men just the same. After some time the troops marched off and with few remaining sick we were taken by truck to a camp on the Beach near Suda Bay. This camp was organised and our services were not required. We were situated on an attractive bay and with a fence around the back and sides, and guards posted on headlands on either side of the bay we had access to the lovely clear water which we used for pleasure and hygiene. Groups were being marched out from time to time, and when our time came we were part of a few hundred marched down to the port and put on a grubby, old Italian freighter and set sail for Greece.

When we reached the mainland we hugged the coast to reduce the possibility of meeting any Allied naval forces. These had suffered severely in the battle and we didn't see anyone as we made our way north to Salonika. Conditions on this ship were less than basic. Most of the men were down in the hold which had its sides curving against the side of the ship and the propeller shaft housing down the middle of the floor. They were allowed up on deck about twice a day. Toilet action was over a plank on the side rail, with a rope slung to hang on to. I was lucky to be on deck the whole way, with my meagre first aid kit in full view. At one point, going between an island and the mainland was so tight that guards stood at the rail and fired a couple of bursts along the sides of the ship to discourage any potential jumpers. We had been given some hard tack, that is army biscuits, as we got aboard, but we were not fed on this trip. However, after three days we arrived at Salonika and we were marched through the city, a sorry looking, scruffy and bedraggled lot, on exhibition to the local people who looked on with no expression and without a sound. We went to a Greek army barracks now converted to a prisoner of war camp. This had been operating for some time and was fully organised.

We were lined up on the parade ground and a British Armoured Corp sergeant major took over. His first order was "All Jews out to the front" and in fatalistic mood I prepared to move. My friends urged me in a very positive manner to sit down, and I did, though in my own mind I thought they would catch up with me. Hanging on the barbed wire perimeter fence were three bodies, evidently men who had been caught out of the barracks after curfew and had been shot. Our sergeant major then bawled out "Can anyone identify this carcass". This brief introduction showed us what sort of camp it was and it didn't get any better. This sergeant major had been in the regular army of occupation in Germany after WW1 and had married a German woman. It seemed he thought Germany was going to win the war and he had decided to throw in his lot with them. I believe this man's name was Storer.

We were allotted to barracks. These were badly built brick buildings with concrete floors and toilets at one end. We slept on the floor, fortunately we were into the Mediterranean summer. I would guess the barracks would have held 50 men if they each had a bed. We had no beds and there were several times that number of us, and if anyone got up at night to go to the toilet he had to pick his way over legs and bodies. The toilets were all concrete, with a wash trough with taps above and a urinal gutter with a tap at one end and a row of circular holes in the floor about eight inches across (30 cm) opening into a gutter, and with a couple off raised foot places in front of each hole. Waste clearance was by gravity assisted by a tap at one end. In these gutters and underground lived the largest and ugliest rats I have ever seen. There was an after-dark curfew, enforced by patrols that would shoot first and not ask afterwards or at any time.

A couple of days after our arrival my mate Sykes and I were pondering whether to report sick at the hospital. He had sandfly fever and I was coming down with what we then called yellow jaundice. One of our Unit who had not got out of Greece was working in the hospital and he came down looking for us. Two of the hospital orderlies had been shot and we were required to work in the hospital. Surrounding the camp there was a high barbed wire fence where there was no brick wall, and inside this fence there were rolls of barbed wire filling in a space of about ten feet (3m) to a low fence. At one place there was a trough with taps, and one of the orderlies had done some washing and hung his clothes on the low fence. The other orderly was there talking to him. The high outer fence was covered with hessian. Apparently the guard on outside patrol had called out to the men to move away from the fence, he could easily see them through the hessian. They either did not hear him or did not understand him, and did not move. So he shot them, as it happened, with one explosive bullet. We know all this because the English doctor in charge of the hospital, Archie Cochrane, spoke fluent German and he complained about this incident to the commandant. The commandant had the guard in and heard his story and said "Good shooting Schmidt (or whoever) that's two less of the swine.

From 1944: Here the men had check parades every morning at six and every evening at six. After the morning parade they had compulsory physical training. As breakfast had consisted of a cup of ersatz (artificial) coffee or mint tea, with no sugar or milk of course, this was an exhausting process and it was not unusual to see a man faint on the parade ground or at PT. The meal was at midday and men were lining up an hour and more before it was due. Not that it was worth waiting for if there had been any choice, as it was a watery mess with a promise of beans or lentils or barley with a dash of raw olive oil which floated on top of this and gave it a nauseating smell and sickening taste. The Englishmen reckoned they were 'horse lentils' in the soup, and they went through us showing they were quite impervious to any digestive process. The reason they lined up so early was that on odd occasions the supply ran out before the last in line were served so no-one wanted to be last in line. In the afternoon we received our daily ration of four men to three large hard army biscuits and eight men to a flat circular loaf of bread. In the evening we were able to say grace over another cup of tea or coffee. At one time the tea was made with pine needles which the Germans claimed were rich in Vitamin C. It may have been so, but they tasted like pine needles. The Germans rated Salonika as a transit camp and therefor on part rations.

At this time we were all lined up to give our names and numbers for official registration as prisoners of war. Until now we had been merely so many bodies. There were several tables attended by a British prisoner and watched over by a German guard. Obviously it was done this way to manage the language problem. When I reached a table and gave my name and number the English sergeant looked up quizzically at the guard and repeated my name in a questioning manner. The guard just shrugged his shoulders. I had to remain quite calm and indifferent, I realised quickly tht I couldn't say or do anything which would have exposed me to risk. As it was, nothing happened. When I told my friends about this incident there was some talk of taking this sergeant to a quiet spot to meet a sudden end. I discouraged them and the heat died down. After this I got rid of my army identity disks, which showed my religion, and kept only my new German one with the number 8172. Sometimes German patrols came through the barracks at night and I could hear their tread as they came towards where I was. I always feared they were coming for me but I lay quietly and feigned sleep and thankfully they went past. As time went on I became more confident. One day I met a man from Perth whom I knew quite well. He used to come and watch us play soccer. He was a Jewish man, and he had been in WW1, and when he left home this time he arranged with his wife that if he was taken prisoner he would change his name, but she would know it was him. He was the only man I ever heard of who took such steps. This poor fellow was having trouble with his eyes and I had some sun glasses which I gave him. After he came home I was embarrassed by him teling some story that I saved his life.

It was here that we met up again with the Friends Field Ambulance, whom we were first associated with in Greece. They were a group of British Quakers and were conscientious objectors so far as war was concerned. However, their sincerity motivated them to set up and run a field ambulance. They were captured in Greece and were treated as ordinary prisoners of war. At Salonika they were employed in the hospital and were staffing the hospital kitchen. They were excellent young men.

The patients' food was a little better than the general rations. They had more vegetables, mainly through the good offices of the Greek Red Cross, who were allowed to bring stuff in. The cookhouse would give us only enough serves for the patients we had. In my case the top floor was in my care, consisting of five or six rooms with up to about six patients in each room. We served with a ladle from a large cooking pot, an army dixie, and sometimes I added water to the dixie so that I could give my patients a ladle and a half instead of just a ladle. The cook would have been critical but I thought it was psychologically worth while. I had a patient who had been a New Zealand military policeman, a big man. He had collapsed out in the yard and had been brought to us. He had no determinable illness but he continued to lose condition and a couple of sores on his hands would not respond to treatment and spread rapidly. He was a bad patient and would not cooperate or eat or do what he was told. I told him frankly what would happen to him if he went on in this way but it didn't make any difference. As his condition deteriorated we put him in a small room on his own. We had to go back to our own barracks at night, and on arriving at the hospital on morning after the check parade I found this man in extremis. I told the doctor but we had nothing to do anything for him and he quietly died. He was just skin and bone, and lying on his backbone made a hump down his empty belly. He had a photo showing him with his wife and two children. I'm glad they had not seen him in his final stage.

From 1944: The resistance of the men to disease having been so weakened by dietary deficiencies there was a high incidence of dysentery, closely followed by jaundice. Malaria and sandfly fever were recorded in large numbers, and to a slighter extent diphtheria and fortunately still lighter pneumonia and typhoid and tuberculosis and infantile paralysis, and we had one case of blackwater fever. He died. We had a very busy time, but as a hospital it left much to be desired but nothing better was available. Many men lie in a cemetery up on a hill outside the town, in company with men who died, in the same cause, generation before.

From the second story we could see over the wall into the street outside, and one day someone noticed a couple of Germans beating up a Greek civilian in the street. Several of us were watching this when one of the soldiers noticed us at the window so he whipped up his rifle and let go a shot at us. It hit the wall alongside the window but we had vanished as soon as we saw his movement.

Groups of prisoners were being moved out from time to time, and were sent to Germany in a train made up of cattle trucks, closed in except for a small window high up one side and covered with barbed wire. As the train moved out of the town it went through an area known as the "timber yard" where the track required slow speed, and it was usual for the men to have got the barbed wire off the window by this time and a few would take the opportunity to escape out of the window. There were guards in a sort of sentry box attached to the back end of each truck, but these were up high so the guard could see both sides of the train, so the escapees crouched down close to the moving train until they had a chance to duck in amongst the stacks of timber. Some years later after I came home I was briefly in the Repatriation Hospital and a bloke was brought in and put to bed and he looked in a bad way so I went up to him to see if he would like a cup of tea or something. I recognised his name, and it turned out he had been one of my patients in Salonika who had got over his problem and had been one of those who left the train in this manner and had spent a couple of years with the Greek resistance until his health went bad and they brought him out through Turkey. He was only with us for a day and they took him off to headquarters in Melbourne where Intelligence wanted to talk to him.

As the numbers in the camp went down a fence was erected which cut the grounds down to a quarter of what it had been. Our hospital was moved into an ordinary barracks building in the new enclosure and the staff was considerably reduced. Dr. Cochrane kept Sykes and me saying that he needed at least a couple of good orderlies. 'The Colonials' as he called us. We were being paid a German mark a day for working, as required by the Geneva Convention, and as the pressure had eased off a bit and the general atmosphere was not so oppressive, two of us were allowed to go under guard, with a little pushcart, to buy fruit and vegetables in the local market. I went on this expedition only once and I was amazed and impressed by the courage and compassion and generosity of the Greek people who pressed food and gifts and money on us, taking care not to aggravate the guard. One day a group of prisoners arrived from Athens and it included a number of our own Unit who had been moved from Crete to Athens and were now with us on their way to Germany. Two of our doctors, Colonel LeSouef and Captain Gallash were amongst them and both were unwell so we admitted them to our hospital. Our friend Peter McRostie was acting as the Colonel's batman, and so that he would not be sent on to Germany with the next group going out we admitted him to hospital too. We put him down as having dysentery, and whenever the German doctor came in Peter was in the toilet. In any event, the German doctor never saw him, and when it was alright to do so he recovered and was discharged, and, in fact taken on our staff. The Colonel and Captain Gallash both recovered and the Colonel became the Senior British Officer in the camp.

Our work continued. If a patient developed complications or had a serious illness the chances were he would die. Though we looked after our people to the best of our ability, we came to accept death as a fairly commonplace event. I recall trying to fit a tall man into a coffin that had been sent in and it was too short for him. So distressing to have to do that to dead people. No dignity, even in death. There were no night patrols in this smaller area, just gate guards and searchlight towers and machine gunners at each corner. One night I was late finishing work in the hospital and the curfew had already come into effect when I had to go back to our own quarters, so I put a red cross brassard on my arm and walked across the yard. As I have said, the situation was a a bit easier now than it had been, and when I was picked up by the searchlight I just kept walking steadily. The guard behind the searchlight could not see my rapidly beating heart, and with no machine gun making the night noisy they let me complete my short journey. The building we were in had interior plastered walls, fairly poor standard with lots of cracks and so on. We had ordinary iron frame beds, a blanket but no mattress. The place was over-run with bugs, and we would bump the beds on the concrete floor to dislodge them. At first light the bugs going home back up the walls were like a lace curtain, and they were so thick you could not have thrown a basket ball at the wall without hitting a few of them. Body lice were also a problem, particular with men who had dropped their bundle and were not looking after themselves. A patient was admitted to hospital and we could see a patch of lice actively moving under his skin.

Our barracks had an outside wall that was part of the perimeter, and one night a group of Australians and New Zealanders decided to have a try in the outside world, so they carefully and laboriously made an exit through the wall and with careful observation of the light cycles off they went. As medical personal we were obliged not to escape. When this sort of thing happened we were subjected to a period of strict security and discipline, which relapsed after a while.

From 1944: One day something happened, something tremendous in our lives, something that I could not creditably describe with mere words other than to say - we each received a Red Cross food parcel. It was most of all like a dream Christmas. Men's eyes were shining with joy and happiness was bubbling from their lips in all manner of expressions, and suddenly their eyes glistened more and they were silent because they could not speak. The activity that followed would have put an anthill to shame. The brewings of tea, the biscuits, the jam, margarine, the lovely lowly bully beef, tins of meat and vegetables, herrings and whatever. It was a glowing finish to a dark chapter because a few weeks later we were preparing to leave Salonika, luckily escaping the winter which was fast closing in.

As prisoners moved out our numbers went down, and one day the German doctor in charge us Dr. Pfeiffer, came in to tell us that the remaining 80 patients, we 8 orderlies and cooks and doctors LeSouef and Gallash would shortly be going through Germany on a hospital train. This was a very lucky break for us or maybe it was a reward for having worked under such difficult conditions for those months.

From 1944: The immediate prospect of leaving Salonika threw into a kind of retrospect the time that had already passed, nearly six months, since we became prisoners of war. We looked back on what we regarded as the first phase of an indefinite period. Shadowed at all times by an unrelenting grimness, it had, however, some brighter flashes which already began to dominate very vivid memories. We could think of the first camp on Crete where our men were going out through the fence to join mates and Cretans up in the hills, to spend months and in some instances years, making as much of a nuisance of themselves with the Germans as they could. We remembered them.