Joseph Conlon Recounts Christmas Eve as a POW

A man, who over the years touched the lives of many young people in the central Morrisons Cove, spent some of the most formidable of his years living under conditions one can barely imagine.

Joseph Conlon, best known for his teaching at Roaring Spring High School and Spring Cove School District, touched thousands of lives, few of whom may be aware he spent one very lonely Christmas Eve as a prisoner of war in a German detention camp.

The prolific writer died in 2015 at the age of 90, but he penned an account of that Christmas Eve and today we, with the consent of his children, are reprinting this compelling time set aside by most for family and celebration.

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It was Christmas 1944, and the world was at war. It had been at war for six years and would continue to be at war for almost another full year.

Men were dying in battles in the Pacific, in Asia and in Europe. Great cities with their cultural treasures of art and literature lay in ruins. Families all over the globe suffered the numbing feelings of separation from loved ones and from the deadening knowledge that some of their loved ones would never come home.

Germany had just initiated a winter offensive in Belgium, a bloody thrust made in desperation and destined to fail but only after much terrible carnage. Russian and German armies were executing each other in large scale artillery and tank battles which took out entire divisions piecemeal. In the slow and painful march toward the Japanese homeland insignificant Pacific islands were being purchased at exorbitant costs in dead and wounded. Yet in spite of the madness which is war, all the bloodshed, all the inhumanity, Christmas 1944, came just as Christmas always does.

This would be the last Christmas of World War II; it would be among my most remembered.

Christmas of 1944 was my 19th and my second consecutive one away from home. I spent it as a prisoner of war in Stalag Left III in Sagan, Germany, now Poland.

We had the barest of necessities and even those were in short supply. No material trinkets get in our way to insulate us from the spiritual meaning of Christmas. There were no gifts to exchange within our prison family beyond the simple expression off Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Yet just vocalizing those sentiments became gifts of hope, of courage of optimism. They marked the sharing of a human spirit that transcended our difficulties and brought us up to a deeper appreciation of the plight of another dreamily with its own hardships as they sojourned in an equally harsh environment and who, like us, were prisoners, not behind wire, but prisoners, nevertheless less, of a strange destiny they would begin to play out on this night, a destiny which had its genesis centuries earlier.

We had been sky warriors but, blasted out of that sphere by enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire and rendered immobile and impotent, we were now confined in a foreign place brought here, not by Caesar’s taxes, but by war.

In our camp on that Christmas Eve, the Germans relaxed the strict routine that prevailed and permitted us outside the barracks all night, Always before, we ere locked in at night and the lights off so that only the search lights from the guard towers probed the shadows and illuminated our plight.

The night was brilliantly clear, star filled and cold. No bombs fell on nearby German cities to desecrate with an un-holy light that night sky. The camp lights, including those in the guard towers, were turned off. Yet the camp was bright - moon and star lit.

Groups of prisoners strolled about the compound, some singing carols at barrack windows to be answered by other prisoners huddled within the barracks, who were conditioned by the usual regimen to remain inside and who were awed and frightened by this sudden, strange freedom.

Sometime before midnight the singing stopped but men in small groups or singly continued to walk about.

Gradually the walking also stopped and most of the men went into their barracks and crawled into their bunks. A few of them however, sat outside most of the night - awake, alert and expectant. I was one of them.

Caught up by the tremendous quiet of the star and moon bright camp and filled with a kind of happy loneliness, I sat on the barrack step, looking skyward.

In the forest bordering the outside perimeter of the camp, moonlit pines stood in almost perfect regimental ranks, line by straight line all wearing white epaulettes pinned to their green shoulders by a recent snowfall.

I felt comfortable, very alone but somehow secure, safe and at peace with myself. I felt a part of something tangible, yet mysterious and vague. A part of what I felt was a sense of the great Christmas verities: Virgin birth, Divine promises, made by ancient prophets to be kept by a new kind of king - a God made man.

Part of what I felt was a sense we human beings are one with nature’s fundamental forces and the grand rhythms of changing seasons, their purpose, their promise, their fulfillment. I glimpsed how truly insignificant we humans are in the total universal scheme. In spite of our sophistication, our technology, our aspirations, achievements and endeavors, we remain minor particles of a most vulnerable substance.

Also, a part of what I felt was a strong sense of community with my family at home. Paradoxically separated by thousands of miles, nevertheless, I felt that night, under shared stars, a profound physical and spiritual connection with my mother, father, sister and brothers, one of whom was fighting his own war in the Pacific.

The hush, the solitude, the prevailing sense of great expectation, stripped away my individuality and, for a brief time, there was born in me on that Christmas morning a new appreciation for, and an understanding of, another birth that took place some two thousand years earlier.

I was, for a moment, one with all mankind, no longer a prisoner behind barbed wire or of my own frailties. That feeling doesn’t come very often anymore, sometimes on Christmas, but never as forcefully as it came to me on that Christmas of 1944.