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Background history
The POW’s odyssey of Private Arthur Weston began during the French campaign. He was taken prisoner and found himself in the Wehrmacht captivity on 11 June 1940. It was then that the last English division on the Continent was surrendering on the coast of the English Channel, at the beaches near Saint Valery. In Stalag VI A Hemer, he was assigned his POW number 36138/VIA. In October 1940, he was transferred to Stalag VIII B (344) Lamsdorf, where he worked at the camp cobbler’s workshop in Neisse (Nysa) repairing POWs’ boots. In 1941, he started working in the camp hospital, at the side of Second Lieutenant Henry Wilson – the chief camp physician. It was upon the inspiration of the latter that Arthur Weston commenced his trials to make prostheses of amputated limbs of British soldiers who were wounded in 1940. In this way, joining the frontline experience of taking care of wounded soldiers and the shoemaker’s craft, he organized a genuine prosthetic workshop which functioned using materials provided by the camp authorities and humanitarian organizations, primarily the International Committee of the Red Cross. We know from his relations that during the whole time of his stay in the camp he assisted at 180 amputations and made 96 pairs of surgical shoes in total. He left Lamsdorf with the rail transport on 3 March 1945, as one of the last POWs. That was six weeks after the dramatic evacuation of the British from Silesia. Arthur Weston was a member of the medical staff in the hospital which accommodated POWs who were unable to march on their own. The end of the war saw him in the American occupation zone in the west of Germany. For the rest of his life, Arthur Weston tried to overcome the trauma of his POW’s reminiscences. In contrast to the majority of ex-POWs, he decided to revisit the place in which he had spent nearly five years during the war. With time he became an organizer of pilgrimages of former British POWs to Łambinowice (1978 and 1989). In the combatants’ environment he was well known and respected. Because of the authority he held he became a depository of the remembrance of Lamsdorf, for years gathering a collection of photographs taken by POWs in the captivity. Apart from a large number of group photos, it includes also ones documenting the cultural activity of the POWs, among others, theater performances, concerts of the camp band, dance and symphonic orchestras, educational, sports and religious activities, including funeral ceremonies. The series of shots which illustrate the functioning of the camp hospital and show POWs at work, both within the area of the camp and outside, as members of labor units employed in Silesia, are among those attracting particular interest. When Arthur Weston revealed that he was in possession of the collection, an employee of the Museum managed to persuade him to give it over to us. The collection consists of 350 photographs which are still being analyzed and studied. They make the basis of scientific research, educational and exhibiting activity. At present, some of them are displayed on the permanent exhibition entitled “The Camps in Lamsdorf/Łambinowice (1870-1945)”.
Prepared by: Anna Wickiewicz
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Photographs from the collection of Private Arthur Weston
Source of acquisition
Arthur Weston’s donation.
Description of the item
Black and white photograph of 14cm long and 9cm wide, showing two men playing a game of chess. On the right – Arthur Weston. The state of preservation: good.
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