A Russian POW leaning on a shovel or other tool. A drawing by Wilhelm Hartmann dated September 22, 1915.
Im Felde, den 22.9.1915Lieber Hermann!
"If someone had said to me, 'One day you're going to eat soup made from dirty potatoes', or 'You're going to fight over a swede', I would have said 'What nonsense!' But nothing surprises me here — like today, I saw a soldier rummaging in a rubbish pit, picking out potato and swede peelings and eating them slowly to make them last. The hunger is dreadful: you feel it constantly, day and night. You have to forget who you once were and what you have become.Our people resent the fact that the French, Belgians and English live so well and are not forced to work. They don't go about hungry like we do. They boast that their governments send them bread and parcels from home. But we, Russians, get nothing: our punishment for fighting badly. Or, perhaps, Mother Russia has forgotten about us."
Excerpt from a diary by Russian POW Alexei Zyikov, captured in Russian Poland in 1915, and held in a POW camp in northeastern Germany. Russian POWs did not receive food parcels from the Russian government.
Intimate Voices from the First World War by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, page 268, copyright © 2003 by Svetlana Palmer and Sarah Wallis, publisher: Harper Collins Publishers, publication date: 2003
1917-01-27, 1917, January, hunger, POW
