I brought presents for each of the one hundred and fifty who had no family connections, and enough oranges and apples for all the four hundred and fifty prisoners—which was a special treat, because fruit is not on the prison diet and may not be sent in from the outside.

The women’s packages contained flannel nightgowns, soap, toothpaste, and other practical articles which they lacked completely (toothbrushes, underwear, and the like). The men’s parcels contained shirts, underwear, socks, toothpaste, and so forth, according to their individual needs. For the twenty-nine British there was Christmas fruitcake. To get this I had given a baker two litres of my own supply of olive oil, which he traded for butter to bake a cake large enough so that each man could have a good-sized piece, When I gave it to them their joy and surprise were unbounded, for none of them had dreamt of having even a crumb of the cake which to them so represented an English Christmas.

I asked the guards on each floor to help me, and by five o’clock everything had been given out. Then I went dorm to one of the big dormitories for the ‘party.’ It was along room with double-decked blinks down either side and a rather wide passageway through the middle. In the centre of this were a table and some benches. As we came in the sergeant in charge of the room shouted, ‘At attention!’ and the eighty men in the room sprang to their feet in two rows down the centre. It was a grim beginning for a festive occasion. They were ordered ‘at ease’ and stood stiffly during the ceremonies.

The plan had been for the officer in charge of the prison to speak, as well as the Minister from the German Embassy, and they had also asked me if I wouldn’t say something. I could not imagine what one could say to a group of men in a Gestapo prison on Christmas Eve. I looked at the men and saw only hopelessness and despair in the eyes of every one—and yet I was to bring them ‘cheery’ greetings. The Lieutenant had confessed to me that morning how much he hated his job, how much he wanted to be home with his own two children for Christmas. Now he hesitated, cleared his throat, and finally began:—

‘Men, we are all of us away from our homes tonight. I am away from my wife and children, and you are away from yours. It is an unfortunate circumstance that has brought you here, but tonight is Christmas Eve, and we must all join together and each one of us remember what Christmas means to him. You have done wrong—that is why you are here. I hope you will never again have to spend a Christmas Eve in jail. However, we must all be gay tonight and make each other happy.’

He concluded by thanking me for the work I was doing in the prisons, for the Christmas trees, the packages, the fruit. The French prisoner who was ‘chairman’ of the room thanked the officers for the permission to have the party, the Lieutenant for the kind words he had spoken, and me for the things I had brought. There was a dreadful, awkward pause after this. The Minister from the German Embassy had not arrived, and so I realized that I was next. I swallowed, gulped, grabbed hold of the table nervously, and blurted out a few incoherent phrases, everything I had wanted to say dying on my lips.