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Captured on camera...
This weekend saw the anniversary of the D-Day landings when Allied soldiers fought the Germans on the beaches of France – but other soldiers faced a different fate during the Second World War. Leeds man Bill Lawrence risked death to record life inside a prisoner of war camp, and now the airman's remarkable photographs form the centrepiece of a major new exhibition. Grant Woodward reports.
WHEN RAF gunner Bill Lawrence was shot down over Germany in 1941 he knew he would be spending the rest of the Second World War behind barbed wire.
The trained engineer from Leeds, then in his early twenties, broke both his legs and suffered serious head injuries when his Wellington bomber crashlanded in enemy territory.
After receiving treatment in a German hospital he was sent to Stalag VIIIb, a grim Allied prisoner of war camp in Silesia, now part of modern-day Poland.
Realising his injuries were too severe to attempt escape, Lawrence decided to keep a secret photographic record of life in the camp and the mistreatment he and his comrades suffered at the hands of their captors.
He set about building a small camera which he housed in a Red Cross box he carried under his arm, with a small hole cut for the lens.
Lawrence was aided in his mission by a pair of Australians who stole x-ray film and processing chemicals from the camp hospital.
He went on to take several hundred photographs of camp life, processing them under a blanket on his bed after lights out.
The negatives were concealed within the soles of the shoes of fellow PoWs.
The images, which feature in a new exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, give a rare insight into life inside camp, showing overcrowded huts where conditions were just as hard in the baking hot summers as they were in the icy depths of winter.
"Bill was a true son of Leeds," said Hilary Roberts, head of photographs at the museum, who became friends with Lawrence after he donated the negatives to its collection.
"He was a very determined man and hugely resourceful.
"I went to visit him at his home and he showed me his pantry. It was filled with tins and he told me old prisoner of war habits died hard.
"He said that in the camp you became used to hoarding things because you never knew when you were going to need them."
In one of Lawrence's photos, the PoWs watch a daylight US air raid on the nearby town, delighted to see it but worried about the bombers missing their target because they have no access to air raid shelters.
Another shows a summer football match, probably staged in 1942, which was part of a larger sports tournament and festival permitted by the Germans to raise morale and demonstrate compliance with the Geneva Convention.
The fact that the image is on a slant is testament to its clandestine nature – at the time it was taken Lawrence was under observation from the guard tower on the left.
Other photographs show prisoners eating meals with their wrists bound.
They were kept manacled for months in revenge for the Allied raid on Dieppe and alleged mistreatment of German PoWs.
Another, much happier photo, shows some of his comrades opening Red Cross parcels, which had been withheld from them for a year.
Lawrence ran considerable risks to get the images – he would almost certainly have faced execution had he been discovered.
"He was very brave," said Hilary Roberts. "He kept the camera in a hole in the window frame of his camp hut.
"Eventually he had two cameras. One he built himself and a second that was stolen from a German guard towards the end of the war."
As it was, when he was caught copying escape maps he sustained a beating at the hands of a particularly brutal guard he had dubbed Ivan the Terrible, which eventually resulted in the total loss of his sight.
Lawrence was still recovering in the camp hospital when the Germans forcibly evacuated Stalag VIIIb in the face of the Russian advance in early 1945, leaving him behind.
As well as saving his life this also saved his photographs.
Among the final images he took were those of the prisoners being forced out of the camp in the snow. Many died in the subsequent march.
After his release, Lawrence gave his photos to military intelligence.
Details of his life after that are few, but it is known he married and worked as a professional photographer until he went blind.
In retirement he lived in Guiseley, Leeds, but was killed in a road accident in 1993.
Captured: The Extraordinary Life of Prisoners of War is running at Imperial War Museum North in Manchester until January 2010.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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