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A story of wartime survival
By JON WILSON
© St. Petersburg Times, Minutes earlier, the two Americans had broken away from a forced POW march and were running from their German captors. In the middle of an open field, one of them stopped.
Asked his buddy Robert Keith: "Now?" Searle answered nature's shout. Then the soldiers resumed their flight, beginning an odyssey that led the two Americans, accompanied part of the way by an English spy, to their freedom during the closing months of World War II. Keith, now a St. Petersburg resident, and Searle had been prisoners at Oflag 64, a POW camp in Poland in the way of a Russian advance. A PBS documentary about Oflag 64 airs Sunday at 6 p.m. on WEDU-Ch. 3. Keith appears in the one-hour special and shares rare photographs that he was able to take at the prison camp. They are thought to be the only existing images made there. The program, which recalls the Allied landing at Normandy on June 6, 1944, focuses on Oflag 64 and the 300-mile forced march during the bitter winter in January 1945. Many of the prisoners, including Gen. George S. Patton's son-in-law, Lt. Col. John Waters, were taken during and soon after the D-Day invasion.
Now 82, Keith recalled Thursday how he and Searle escaped on the first night of the march. Their guards had carelessly left them alone. Keith knew of some useful items still hidden at the camp, so the pair headed back toward Oflag 64, away from their captors' route. Keith found a crystal radio set that wouldn't work, a British gold coin, some chocolate and a "GI Kodak" he used to take the pictures used in the documentary. A Russian patrol surprised the Americans while they were still rummaging. "I tried to tell them we wanted something to eat," Keith said. "They brought us four or five live cows." Hitting the road again, the Americans stopped at a Polish farmhouse, where a woman thawed Searle's frozen ear. Soon after, they ran straight into the arms of some Germans still prowling the ever-changing front. "We were back in the bag," Keith said. But not for long. A skirmish between German and Russian patrols allowed the pair to escape again. They managed to hop a convoy that took them through Warsaw, to Majdanek, Poland, a former German concentration camp. Keith saw a crematorium, dissecting room and the gallows, where Poles and Russians had hanged the German camp commandants. At some point, Keith contracted pneumonia or flu and wound up in a Russian military hospital. After Keith recovered, the Americans met Jane Walker, an English intelligence agent working with the Polish underground. With Walker leading, the three got on a railroad boxcar to Odessa, in what was then Russia. From there they took an English ship to Port Said, Egypt. Then it was on to Italy and finally to repatriation at Camp Miles Standish near Boston. "You start thinking, "These guys are in their 20s,' " said Robert Galloway, producer of the documentary. "It was a different kind of America, when they learned to survive and know what human hardship is." Galloway, who is married to Patton's great-granddaughter, spent two years making the documentary. A resident of Charleston, S.C., he is working on a sequel about the Patton-ordered raid on a prison camp near Hammelburg, Germany, where the general's son-in-law was being held. Members of a 300-man task force and many of the prisoners the group tried to liberate were killed, wounded or recaptured after the raid. Keith and Searle had escaped weeks before. A retired Martin Marietta engineer, Keith eventually lost track of Searle. But Keith's wife, Vivian, and Walker corresponded, and the Keiths were able to visit Walker before she died in 1962 at 85. Keith learned that she had been raised and educated in Germany, where her father had been a military attache even before World War I. During World War II, the Germans offered 10,000 marks for the capture of the woman they called Maria. Today, Keith stays busy in a bedroom converted into an office, where he is surrounded by books, papers and a computer. Though she has heard it before, Vivian Keith marvels at her husband's story. "He's of Scottish descent," she said, "but he must have had the luck of the Irish."
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Keith's own story is as gripping as that of other prisoners from Oflag 64, where Keith was imprisoned for more than a year.
