The war ended. That was the moment when everything changed dramatically.

It was still wartime, and occasionally I went with the ambulances to pick up wounded from the railway station, and had to help transporting them to their wards. The kitchen had always a jar of my favorite peanut butter available for me. It represented another means of survival for me, during those night shifts.

During kitchen duties, I quickly learned how to snatch a pancake from the POW cooking them. The guard was looking, but he never picked the trick, which only required a small tea towel.

An epidemic of diarrhoea happened twice. Can you imagine a camp of POW's, all having to use the limited facilities at once? That's what happened. I cannot describe the situation; it would turn you off, reading any further. Years later I found out, that some Yankee gave us extra meat, spiced with soap of some kind. One of the POW's working in the Hospital, said that he would kill himself drinking the alcohol, used for cleaning the instruments. He died shortly after. The Americans were not allowed to find out about it; his body was carted into the POW camp underneath some fire wood. What happened after, I don't know.

Then came the day to deliver lunch to a Yankee prisoner in the small jail building. Two armed guards with drawn pistols, carefully opened this prisoner's cell. There he was, a tall black fellow, both hands and legs handcuffed to the radiator in the rooms corner. I did not feel too good at that moment. But you see, I am still here; nothing happened to me. A piece of bacon to clean the bathroom hot water service, found its way into the camp. Here it was cooked and consumed.

I had some entertaining moments when a few Americans started to play a guitar and others were step dancing. They must have been professionals. So time went on; many other incidents came about. Some of them were not worth mentioning, others might be discriminating. Don't ever think that this was all as easy as reading about it. In my memory it remains a pretty unhappy time. All this time 'POW' marked uniforms. Nightly behind barbed wire fences, and armed guards about most of the time.

We wanted to go home, only home!

The war ended. That was the moment when everything changed dramatically.