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Remember Christmas 1943 and 44 at Stalag XVII-B?

There is something about shopping during the Holiday Season that gets me into the Christmas Spirit. It is about people hurrying to buy gifts, the colorful signs, Christmas decorations, and of course, those timeless Christmas songs, like Noel…Silent Night…Hark, the Herald Angels Sing…Joy to the World…and all the others.

But especially last year, in the shopping centers, I was very disappointed. It just isn’t the same. You hardly see any of those large, Merry Christmas colored signs, and you do not hear many of those old Christmas songs, like, Little Town of Bethlehem anymore.
I am really not very religious, but I was a little sad, and a little angry, too. Damn, I thought. They are stealing our Christmas!

Then, I started to remember some of the Christmas we use to know. as I often do at this time of the year, especially the two Christmases 1943 and 1944 in a German prison of war camp.

It was a cold Christmas Eve in Barracks 39-B. Many of us were huddled around our little wood burning, pot-belly stove digesting some old potato skins for our Christmas dinner. Most of the other guys were laying in their bunks dreaming how things were back home, and wondering what their loved ones were doing. Stalag XVII was not a happy place, especially on Christmas.

Hey, someone said. I hear singing.

Then we all heard it. Someone was singing Silent Night. Then the whole American compound joined in. Soon it caught on all around us, from the English Compound, the French, each in their own language. A few minutes later, even the German Guards joined in – and with a little music in the background. I guess it had really started in our home made Chapel, where Father Kane (Our Irish Chaplain) gave a memorable sermon:

* Father, I know you will excuse me language, but I need to speak to me boys with the words we all share at Stalag 17. Well now, ‘a fine thing to have such a full house," he said in his thick Irish brogue. "Nice to see your shinin’mugs it is. And I know that not all of you are here just to celebrate the birth of the Savior, but everybody’ has his own memories of this night, whatever your faith. And if God does not mind your reasons, who am I to argue? So welcome."

That was a beautiful night for a few thousand American Prisoners of War, who all slept that night, in Heavenly Peace.
* This paragraph quoted from the book our own Ned Handy’ wrote about Stalag XVII-B: "The Flame Keepers."

P.S. This happened in a Nazi prison camp near the small town of Krems, Austria. Most of us were flyers - Luftgangsters, as they called us .We had killed many of them, and they us. Yet, that night, some of us shook enemy hands in the name of Peace.

It’s hard for me to realize how, after more than 60 years later, not in Nazi Germany, but in the United States, we can allow these wonderful songs of peace, and good will toward men be taken from us, here in America, the home of Freedom..

Roy & Dorri Livingstone

Merry Christmas

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