Cataumet, Massachusetts

b. 1921

 
Adjust and Adapt

“Let's face it, we knew we were prisoners,” says Roger Hughes.  “There was no way we could lick the system.”

So in Stalag 17, he learned to adjust and adapt.  It wasn't easy, no sir, getting along in close quarters, taking your share without making a grab for it.  Ignoring the glares and sharp comments of depressed and angry POWs.  Thank goodness for the letters Mary wrote and wrote—about 50 made it through.  Roger loaned the letters to men who received no mail.  This happened, that happened, miss you so, honey.  The poor souls touched the paper she had touched, and they breathed in her love as if she meant it for them.  

One letter included a black-and-white photo of Mary sitting on the granite windowsill of a building in downtown Boston.  She wears a conservative dress, but her legs are crossed and dangling a la Rita Hayworth.  It got past the German censor, who stamped the back of the snapshot with a row of black numbers.  The guys without mail really liked that photo.  Roger still has it.     

The camp, what a dump.  A tarpaper village with a 48-seat outhouse stinking to high heaven.  You couldn't get clean no matter what.  And you couldn't be alone, except for tramping around for exercise. Oh boy, things were tight: ten bays per barrack, six triple-deckered bunks per bay, two krieges per bunk.  That's krieges as in Kriegsgefange, German for POW.

All in all, Roger explains, it was best to keep it to yourself.  The fear, the sadness, the physical aching—best to roll it up inside because you wanted to be a regular joe, a them's-the-breaks kind of guy.  So you walked the yard and played cards.  Maybe you dug collapsing tunnels.  You read your letters, or you read the other guy's.  You put up with a thousand aggravations and watched your bones emerge against yellow skin as the weight flew away. 

You made do.  You waited.

“I learned how to live with the masses,” says Roger. He hesitates to say it, because some of his old kriege buddies might not understand, but the awful, suffocating conditions at Stalag 17 made him a better man.