Postcards from camp

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/07/2015 (3209 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To most people, the YMCA stands for swimming pools and kids camps.

And that song by the Village People, energetically semaphoring the letters.

But in its history, the Young Men’s Christian Association has played significant international roles, including for troops and prisoners of war during the First and Second World Wars.

One of its services during the Second World War was to operate 50 tea cars that travelled the front lines providing tea, coffee, hot biscuits, religious tracts and stationery to Canadian troops.

Back at home, Canada’s YMCA was one of two organizations, along with the Red Cross, to visit PoW camps in Canada and ensure the federal government lived up to the Geneva Convention. The YMCA was an international organization — Germany was its second-largest chapter — and was torn during wartime, so it saw its Christian function to support captured enemies as well.

This manifested itself in many ways. In the First World War, the YMCA was one of the few groups to provide support to civilian Ukrainian internees in Canada, said Jonathan Weier, a Winnipeg native and history professor at the University of Western Ontario. Weier spoke in Winnipeg recently at the Civilian Internment in Canada conference at the Ukrainian Labour Temple.

In the Second World War, the YMCA helped boost morale of German PoWs held in Canada by promoting recreation. It provided games and sports equipment, plus musical instruments, including flutes, cellos, violins and upright pianos, to German musicians so they could form bands.

But the YMCA’s most influential contribution may have been stationery, Weier said. Numerous letters home from Canadian soldiers are on paper distributed by the YMCA and stamped with its initials.

As well, YMCA officials were on hand to dictate letters from injured soldiers at casualty clearing stations and front-line medical tents. “The YMCA man at the clearing station would offer to write letters to loved ones. He’d say, ‘I can help you write a letter to tell people you’re safe,’ ” said Weier.

Art imitating prison life

On the flip side, the YMCA also provided postcards and writing paper for the PoWs in Canada. But to provide recreation, and boost morale, the YMCA gave the PoWs the tools to create their own postcards depicting camp life.

Michael O’Hagan, of Ste. Rose du Lac, about 260 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg, has amassed a collection of about 400 PoW postcards. Most are government issued and sometimes included portraits of six to 10 PoWs in a photo, like a classroom picture. The PoWs would dress up in their military uniforms, instead of their day-to-day blue denim prison garb that had a large bright red spot on the back, and a four-inch red strip up one leg, to indicate their PoW status. These postcards were issued by Canada’s Department of Defence, and shot by a department-approved photographer.

But among O’Hagan’s collection is a unique series of 19 postcards illustrated by two German PoW artists, sponsored by the YMCA.

O’Hagan has been collecting Second World War military memorabilia since he was 11, after his mother came home one day with a Canadian Second World War helmet. “That kicked it off. I started collecting anything to do with the Second World War.”

O’Hagan, 26, is currently working on his PhD on German PoWs in Canada at the University of Western Ontario.

The series of 19 PoW postcards was produced by the War Prisoners Aid of the YMCA. It was part of the YMCA’s mandate to empowering prisoners through recreation. It provided stationary and art supplies and then printed the cards for the prisoners.

Two internees were designated as artists to draw up the cartoon postcards depicting camp life. The cartoons were subject to censorship.

O’Hagan amassed his collection on eBay. Most of the YMCA postcards came from families in Germany getting rid of memorabilia from a deceased spouse, parent or other relative. “People don’t know what they are and don’t list them properly,” he said. He has managed to buy up most of the postcards for less than $1, whereas he estimates they have a value of about $20 each.

He has three sets of the 19 postcards in the PoW cartoon series. One of the artists was a PoW named Karl Kafka. The other artist is unknown.

Internees could purchase the postcards at the camp canteen. O’Hagan has yet to come across one of the cartoon postcards with any writing on the back. Many soldiers merely brought the postcards home as souvenirs, he said.

O’Hagan doesn’t know if any of the postcards came out of Manitoba PoW camps. There were 28 internment camps in Canada — the prison-like facilities with barbed-wire fencing and watch towers. Manitoba also had 27 PoW labour camps — ranging from woodcutting to farming — where prisoners worked and were afforded more freedom.

In 1946, there were 1,000 working on Manitoba farms, and apparently loving it, according to Judith Kestler, with the Julius Maximilians Universitat Wuerzburg in Germany, who also spoke at the recent civilian internment conference.

Kestler interviewed 11 surviving merchant seamen interned in Canada, where 34,000 Germans PoWs were shipped. The marine PoWs had overwhelmingly positive accounts of their experiences, Kestler said. Many had been in PoW camps elsewhere in the world, like India and Britain. “Canada was the best in terms of living quality, food, and freedom,” Kestler said.

They were happy to get to work in either the wilderness or on farms. “It was a new and exotic setting where they had to learn new skills,” she said. “Many of them would have liked to have stayed in Canada, only that wasn’t possible.”

bill.redekop@freepress.mb.ca