A few years ago, the Amicale asked me to publish in our newspaper some memories of one of the activities of the camp: the Post Office.  By negligence a little, by lack of time I deferred for a long time the writing.
I must confess that I was also shy, because so much could be said about this subject, and said well, I would not know, although I have many memories, how to tell them but very badly.
I apologise in advance, but since I have been invited to do so...

By post, in everyone's life, we mean a well-organised service that brings in its daily batch of bills, pleasant or unpleasant letters, tax forms, newspapers, in short, good or bad things that are filed, put away or thrown in the bin but which in the end are of little importance because they are part of a daily routine.
For us, it was the only tangible channel which, in our overcrowded isolation, provided a link - I won't say the hyphen of unfortunate memory - with Life, because it was indeed Life that the parcels from France brought us for 5 years, and without them, we would have had great difficulty in enduring the physical and even moral hardships of captivity. While a large majority of the French prisoners in Germany could probably find, at random in the good or bad Kommandos, possibilities to "get by", nothing similar was offered to us, and we were left naked on the sand or on the cement.

In addition to the lack of food, the feeling of receiving and owning nothing was a suffering on top of others. Hence the importance of the postal service and the interest we all took in it. I will speak only for the record about letters. Censored on the way out and on the way back, limited by the frame and by the fact that they were examined by our guards, they were for us simple bulletins of friendship and each one tried to put or find a little intimacy. The service was entirely in German hands and the French never had to intervene. On the contrary, for everything that concerned parcels, the Germans called on the French either to register and announce the parcels or to assist in their distribution. This way of proceeding, which I believe was obligatory under the Geneva Convention and which to my knowledge was not transgressed in our camp, the Germans exercising the right to check whether the parcel distributed did not violate one of the multiple prohibitions which struck it.  He carried out these checks in front of a French officer who witnessed the regularity of the checks, and was assisted by French officers or non-commissioned officers to carry out the material work of registration and distribution. As with all things, the framework, events and time influenced the way in which the checks were carried out, the principle of which did not vary for five years. First of all, in Gross Born. As early as September-October 1940, a few one-kilo parcels from the so-called free zone, in November from the occupied zone.
The distribution took place by block, in a friendly mess where nobody could see exactly what was forbidden or allowed, several parcels were distributed without being opened, others were broken open, at random and according to the laziness or the mood of the guard. The room was dark, cluttered and small. None of this mattered, nothing was dangerous (for the guards), we were all neophytes and didn't have all those "tricks" that old offenders must also have.  Everything is experience in life. We started to gain a bit of confidence when the Germans first allowed us to return parcels of clothes to France in the winter of 40-4I .  Our guards had been frightened by the quantity of clothes, linen, and various objects made by the artists or handymen of the camp and under the pretext of a change of camp always possible, of a repatriation of certain categories, veterans, sailors, invalids, railwaymen or others, or even of our massive liberation - there were so many promises and disappointed hopes - they had kindly invited the prisoners to lighten up and to send back what was not indispensable to them.  Which shipments were packed by a team of Frenchmen but checked before packing by German soldiers. What dangerous things would you expect poor people of our kind to send ? Old clothes - the Germans, poor by nature have always had a respect for clothes, a toy made from a tin can - they admire DIY - yes, but at the same time clandestine letters, precise indications for sending future parcels, reports and confidential photos and even a revolver, a souvenir of the campaign, which the brave warrant officer Théry carried in his pocket one afternoon before being able to pack it. A little folly which could have had serious consequences for the sender , but which made us realise that revenge is always possible and that nothing is ever taken for granted.

Soon, however, the cluttered room had become too small, and the Germans had a large office built in the central part of the camp, with a storeroom, wire mesh panels, and lighting on all sides. In short, something well aligned which was not from our point of view an improvement. A non-commissioned officer Wunknitz, a Prussian schoolteacher with hatred and integrity, organised the service under the general control of the famous captain known as "dark Sunday", "trompe la mort" and the like. Everything went pretty well, the censors were soldiers of the guard company, anxious to stock up on chocolate and having no profession: suitcases of civilian clothes, papers, letters and forbidden objects in a word passed through without too much loss!  The sending of parcels from France continued. It was the euphoric period of 1941 - the Germans, exhilarated by the successes in the East, were not sure what to do with us and did not feel that we should be treated with any rigour. It is true that the vignettes had been instituted, but once they had been used, they returned to France in the parcels and then there was the canteen of envisaged departures, fatigue, habituation, in short some carelessness, people let to themsvelses  without orders and without very precise directives.
But serious incidents in the camp, the escape of general Giraud and it is Arnswalde. The hobo life of Gross-Born was succeeded by the new, clean, easy to keep Prussian barracks. Everything lent itself to order, and nothing is more detrimental to the prisoner than order. Only in anarchy he has some chance of finding himself, especially if the prisoner is Latin and the guard German. In Gross-Bonn, an attentive and intelligent non-commissioned officer, who could only be assisted very poorly by amateur researchers, in Arnswalde, a whole organisation, a whole staff - a captain Mushal, 2 warrant officers, 2 non-commissioned officers and civilians, a sort of agent supervising a few soldiers who sometimes came as reinforcements. All of them knew the instructions and seemed to be willing to apply them, and were given instructions from time to time. In addition, there was letter censorship in conjunction with package censorship.Fortunately the captain was short-sighted, deaf and narrow-minded. He successfully cultivated a great resemblance to Hitler, moustache, wick, everything was there, and he seemed especially concerned to keep the photographic fidelity to his boss. We had to endure a Captain Rittmeiyer, who in other circumstances was obnoxious, a Lieutenant Schneider, very calm and as if absent, always correct, but the boss remained Mushal whose only failing was to utter impressive roars; Moreover, in 1943 his son was a prisoner of the Allies in Tunisia and that earned us - everyone learns from history - to find him for long hours prostrate in his office, not caring about the service.
The warrant officers and a few old or wounded soldiers did not want to hear the story.  As for the magnificent civilians, they were the physical faces of the methods: Assimil. A fat man called Otto, thick, enormous with small eyes, born certainly under the sign of the pig, this one had to exist in the German zodiac, he was a salesman and always by mimicry told us his antics and stories of the same caliber learned at the time of his French captivity of I4-I8, next to him an idiot of the village, Paul, relatively young, the worst of the band, thief, breaking everything, fearful as not; a skinny old man with a huge goitre, a tall man, a former sailor who was decorated with the name of Monsieur Heinz and who greeted me without laughing for 2 years, after a cultural conversation during which I had told him my profession of Herr Doktor Ingenior Hochundtiefbauunternehmer GUILLOT, and finally one or two others of lesser importance, but above all there was JOUHAUX, the whole camp knew Jouhaux. His real name was Otto Lewandowski, his nickname, a rather pronounced resemblance to the trade unionist leader. A big, strong man in his sixties, with a little goatee and a slightly pear-shaped head, a big model. But above all he was a good man, fundamentally good, doing service, certainly because it paid, but also for pleasure and for sport. I never heard from him a word of hatred or even anger against the French. He considered the prisoners he had to control, not as officers of an enemy army, but as men suffering from hunger, distance and exile. He was a communist and our one-on-one conversations in the parcel storeroom, in the toilets or other secret places had led me to express all my sympathy to him. He was well worth it because he was the linchpin of the postal service as we obviously understood it. His departure in January 1945 in the Volksturm, despite his age and his ideas, had surprised me and I had told him about it like old friends. He answered me very simply and I believe very sincerely that his fatherland being his fatherland, he had only to defend it. All in all, he was a good man who deserves to be remembered. Opposite this colourful and picturesque team, which had to carry out a mission that was unpleasant for us, a team of Frenchmen did the work. A massive influx of parcels unloaded by us at the station under the supervision of 2 or 3 guards, the registration and numbering in view of making up the call lists - this work was done entirely by us, the Germans simply glancing at it - the announcement by the block vaguemestre, and finally the distribution. One by one the addressees were called up and behind the counters they watched the package being torn apart. The papers and packaging were thrown away and carefully collected by French people still under German control and put in the press. The problem was to pass the dangerous parcels at the right moment. Starting from the principle that a control cannot be constant, it was a question of arranging the distribution work in such a way that there was a minimum of breakage, instead of carrying it out mechanically, as was the rule and as the Germans understood it. It was also important that the Germans did not notice at any time that a small deviation had been made in the course of operations planned by them and that they did not leave any possibility of fraud. The problems were multiple, first of all there were the vignettes. The Germans having regulated once and for all our supply according to data certainly very studied or the number of calories had to intervene according to very Germanic considerations, had decided, in principle, that we would receive 2 parcels of 5 kg per month covered obligatorily at the beginning of the stickers which they delivered to us, alas the number of parcels increased unceasingly, in number and in weight, and that posed to the poor captain Mushal an inextricable problem which upset the little mathematical conception which he could have. I sincerely believe that he was never able to solve it.He had triumphantly found a dozen parcels with a crudely imitated label for a red sticker on a package containing foodstuffs, but really, given his short-sightedness and congenital unintelligence, the imitator deserved to be punished, it was only fair and the work was too badly done. I believe that in most cases the diplomacy of Lieutenant PICARD transformed the confiscation of the parcel into the reimbursement of a real sticker this time. But the dozen or so discoveries did not compensate for the thousands of frauds coming from real fake stickers perfectly imitated - the Hitler crow included - from those already used and sent back to France, from additional stickers obtained always through diplomatic channels under the various cultural activities of the camp and some of which, it must be admitted, fed the body more than the mind. But as the Romans and my father used to say, "primum vivere" or an empty bag does not stand up... The supplements also came from thefts or freebies if the term frightens people, either in whole packages and their distribution was then semi-official at least on the French side, or at the different levels of the German censorship. It was then the object of a not very brilliant traffic, but this is another story. At the distribution level, it was necessary in any case to make the litigious parcels disappear or go unnoticed, to smear them with ink, to tear them if necessary. 
When the Germans decided to cut out the vignettes to examine them in detail, it was enough to remove, in agreement with the censors, those which could not withstand serious examination. They then had to be buried quickly and unseen at the bottom of the paper bags and this was the invisible but very useful work of the French sweepers. The problem of cutting up the cans posed other questions. In principle, the cans were opened and decanted. This was a vexatious measure, especially if they were commercial cans, but there was also the risk that the guard would build up stocks of clandestine reserves. So we let it happen, since a reserve was allowed and in most cases we were able to get canned food as we went along. More complicated was the removal of the forbidden products. The work was then more meticulous and sometimes the whole team was needed to complete it. It was essential to be warned of the presence of a suspicious parcel; it was a matter of memory and habit, to give it to the censor when the surveillance was relaxed, and above all not to provoke it in order to pass it on to the appropriate censor. It was a rather curious mixture of method and opportunism. I had asked to be notified the day before about the suspicious parcel with its origin, sender and any useful information. There were some free-riders that I got to know, who never had anything forbidden, or who hoped to have something, or who simply wanted to move on to the more accommodating. Others, on the other hand, were more dangerous, remembering the danger at the last minute and punctuating their despair with large gestures in the post office, which had the certain result of attracting the attention of the supervisors and making the task more difficult, sometimes impossible. Then it was necessary to avoid the clutter of suspicious parcels and to reserve time for the 2 or 3 possible censors, while taking into account their position in relation to Captain Mushal or the 2 adjutants. It was necessary to ensure that a parcel did not remain too much in arrears and that it followed more or less its order of call, the Germans supervising the distribution with the help of the established lists, and finally, according to the importance of the prohibited object, to choose the censor. Jouhaux could do everything. When the situation became too complicated, it was necessary to clear the air and to draw the attention of the Staff to some incident and to provoke  it. Lieutenant PICARD asked the old Mushal in all the required forms for his opinion on a more or less important statement to be completed in order to lead him into his office, where my good comrade ROGER, in charge of the forwarding of the packages in arrears, always kept in reserve a difficult case that only the lights of the Hauptmann could solve. For the adjutants, we had the laughing cow. Benjamin Rabier has always ignored the services he was able to render us in such cases. I don't advertise and the serious cow had the same use in this case or at least its container.  The joke - renewed a hundred times and always crowned with laughter - of all our guards consisted in attaching a box lid of the famous cow to the back of the most stupid of the censors; there were generally two of them, a box lid for each of them. Gathering,  confusion, It was the ideal moment for Jouhaux, duly chaperoned in advance, to pass on whatever he wanted. As for alcohol, I left him alone, only a word to warn him when it was a question of whole bottles (one day 3 Armagnac 1893). For letters, I told him honestly, for medicines it was according to the circumstances and I could not count on him too much, because he did not believe in them, having never taken any himself, However, one day a comrade received a certain white powder which made me pass into the drug dealers. I had difficulties this time, the other cans passed, but given the risks, Jouhaux demanded substantial compensation, 2 cans of sardines.
Finally, there were the serious parcels, papers, maps, compasses, pieces of a radio set, etc. The control was then preceded by a long conversation in the toilets, during which Jouhaux was informed. While telling me that I would have his head cut off, he complied, knowing that I would not make him take any unnecessary risks and that I would put all the chances on his side. Emptiness and inattention could also be created in the room at the right moment because one of our team, and this was a feat of strength that always intrigued the Germans, would crack nuts by throwing them with force against the large windows on the courtyard. Paul, the idiot, who dismantled everything sadistically, was also useful. When I wanted to liquidate a parcel quickly, I managed to find another one containing either rotten eggs or spoiled boxes and gave it to him to butcher. A stab in the fermented cans always caused a great mess when the gas was released, the felbwebels and the captain ran away (bitter screams), the posts were abandoned and everyone looked disgusted. The discomfited comrade, beneficiary if I dare say of the spoiled parcel, not suspecting that his misfortune, arrived or chosen at the right moment, had made it possible to release, without examination, all the parcels that had been waiting without control. OTTO, the pig trader, was more fearful and venal. We had to haggle, sardines, chocolate, tell him bawdy stories, which he loved. It was he who once confided in me: "Tell them not to give me any more American soaps, all the women in Arnswalde know it and I am 65 years old... The former sailor, who was called Mr. HEINTZ, occasionally passed on forbidden products, but his attention had to be diverted by a series of talks on the sailing navy or on the serious problem posed to the English navy by the ever-increasing destruction of U BOOT, in return for which he did not look at all at what he gave. The disadvantage was that the conversation had to be carried on beyond the point of usefulness, and as he was a talkative man it was long. But he saw this as good manners between educated people, which the vain people of his colleagues could not follow. He accepted little as a reward, while the old man with the goiter was constantly eating chocolate and biscuits from the parcels. He had to be given work, and above all we had to make sure that everyone got a little something in the flood of wealth that was unpacked before them. Not so demanding, as simple people, a few shelves of parcels would settle many a grudge and appease jealousies or denunciations that were always possible. All this was the daily work. All it required was a little memory, timing, camaraderie and a real team spirit. Some moves required more boldness. One day we borrowed a civilian's exit card from a hanging jacket and took his wallet. We were then able, in the room, with the Germans among us, to copy this card, including the size of the letters, reintegrate the original and entrust the copy to a team of forgers from the camp for I don't know what purposes. It was possible to extract pieces of cloth, books and photos by negotiations rarely supported by a little real coffee. A lot of persuasion was done. Others than me have done it and would know better how to talk about it. In order to keep the confidence of our guardians, we avoided taking unnecessary risks.  The results would have been detrimental to all. Our own parcels were in general very regular and we had them checked openly by the hardest, by the adjutants, by the captain himself. This was an opportunity to go out with arms full of regularly opened packages and sometimes others. A T.S.F. post, I believe, was taken out one day in circumstances where, having distributed to each of our censors, some chocolate, some sardines, some coffee, we were able to pass in front of them with our heads held high and with goose bumps, making us say "schmek gut" and other jokes from the whole gang, including the captain. What we were able to do was only possible with the team spirit that animated us. A team of friends where the result was the only thing that counted, apart from the function or the rank. Everyone, from Lieutenant PICARD or Captain ALLAIRE who succeeded him, to the paper sweeper, had their own role which could only be fulfilled by everyone playing their part. It was simply necessary for all the action to be synchronised, for everything to happen with the minimum of words and gestures, the surveillance being constant. We did not always succeed, so may those we displeased forgive us. May those to whom we were able to render some service not thank us. I mentioned games earlier. There was an exciting one, playing good tricks on the guards, how amusing, and, I tell you in confidence, we had a lot of fun...

Yves GUILLOT