Work Camp  2056 L

Location: Gullinggraben

Type of work: Roadwork

Man of Confidence: Sgt Maj E Hodson

Number of Men: 36 approx.

Known to be present

December 1941	Deer feeding expedition

The following extracts are taken from 'Arbeitskommando' by Elvet Williams

On first arriving:

The building was a wooden construction, lower and much smaller than the huts in Stalag, with narrow windows running across under the eaves. Where the hut left off framing the road, a solid wooden fence, topped by a strand of barbed-wire, took over for a few yards before turning inwards towards the steep hillside.

The door (of the building) opened into an L-shaped passage whose longer arm led away to the left and the guards' quarters. The room to the right occupied the greater part of the hut. Down the centre of the room ran a line of four strong, planed tables, each flanked by matching benches, the line broken in the middle by a tall, round, iron stove.. A continuous slightly-sloping shelf, projecting six feet into the room at a height of about five feet, stretched almost the entire length of each side wall. The outer edges of the shelves carried low footboards, at right angles to which shallow, parallel dividers, running up to the walls, carved the shelves into bedspaces. The same arrangement was repeated at floor level to give a choice of top or bottom bunk.

There was virtually no outside. The stockade fence, crazily staggering an up-and-down course never more than ten yards from the hut, enclosed a wilderness of brushwood, hummocks, rocky slopes and boulders. What little flat ground there might have been originally was taken up by the latrine shed behind the prisoners' end of the hut. About three yards from our back door a wooden trough caught the steady stream of crystal water fed into it by an iron pipe whose length could be traced back up the mountainside.