Student video tells war stories

HOULTON – Rudy Richter was just a teenager when he enlisted to fight in World War II, battling for his German homeland. He was captured and held as a prisoner of war at camp here from 1944 to 1946.

After his release and subsequent return to Germany, he found that his hometown was little more than a memory. Among the bombed-out ruins, Richter couldn’t find the home he once shared with his parents, so he stopped an old man on the street to ask for directions.

He didn’t realize until a few seconds later that he was talking to his own father. And his father did not recall the boy who had left years earlier and returned a man.

Richter’s story was one of many that eight students from the video production class at the Caribou Regional Technology Center preserved on a documentary, “Don’t Fence Me In,” which premiered in the education center at Houlton Regional Hospital on Sunday.

Residents from throughout the state packed the hospital on the 60th anniversary of D-Day to view the stories of four German prisoners detained at the former internment camp. The students spent nearly a year making the film, which included interviews with the former POWs who returned to Houlton for a reunion organized by the Houlton Historical Society in September 2003.

“When we got to the camp, we helped pick potatoes and got paid a few cents per barrel,” Richter, one of the four prisoners who returned last year, recounted on video. “We used most of our money to buy books, candy and cigarettes.”

The students, with assistance from instructor Brenda Jepson, also interviewed several local residents who rehashed memories of the prisoners. The film was flooded with images from the reunion and spliced with music from the World War II era.

Kay Bell, curator of the Aroostook County Historical and Art Museum in Houlton, said residents were originally “apprehensive” about the prisoners. Bell was a young housewife during the war.

“But we were told that we needed to grow more food for the Allies,” Bell recounted on video. “We had a huge crop of potatoes that year, and the prisoners helped us harvest them. Once we got to know them, our apprehension vanished. They looked like neighborhood boys.”

Bell told the students that she treated the prisoners humanely at a time when she knew her 19-year-old brother, Louis Brown, had been shot down over the Baltic Sea.

“Before he left, he promised us that he would bring back Hitler’s mustache,” Bell recalled. “Those boys were just like he was, and I hoped that if my brother had been captured, he was being treated as decently as we were treating our prisoners.”

Bell’s brother, a pilot, never got a chance to fulfill his promise. Shot down while returning from a bombing mission, he died shortly before his 20th birthday.

“My mother, to the day she died, would never accept that he was gone,” Bell said. “And my siblings and I still remember him as the boy that he was. His birthday was just last week. … We still call each other up and say, ‘Today’s Louis’ birthday.'”

The documentary, presented by the students as an “example that enemies can become friends,” will be a part of the permanent collection in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the History Museum in Bonn, Germany. It is also scheduled to be shown on Maine Public Television.

“Most people have witnessed the best and worst of the behavior of mankind,” Milton Bailey, the camp’s historian, told the students. “A prisoner is a unique person. They have suffered the worst kind of deprivation. … A POW looks at the world through wiser eyes.”

For more information about the video, e-mail Jepson at bjpeson@mail.caribouschools.org.