Colonel Booth's Prison Years

The Germans picked up Colonel Mary Booth near Ostend, in the first stage of their sweep through the Low Countries and France in May 1940. They thought the granddaughter of the Salvation Army's founder was a spy; the Qestapo grilled her for 24 hours. Then she was sent to Germany, to the Petershausen Camp for Civilian Internees in a large public school at Konstanz, the south German city on the shores of the Boden-See.

Mary Booth, still in her Salvation Army uniform, had no easy time at Petershausen. When she arrived, together with her short, plump secretary, the Gestapo men said disgustedly: "Ach, the Salvation Army's coming!" To them she was a constant source of ridicule; to her fellow prisoners--Poles, Frenchmen, a few Englishwomen and some British sailors--she was a source of fascination. She never took her Army bonnet off in public. In the thrice-daily exercise periods (two hours in the morning, four in the afternoon, one after supper) she strode determinedly around the schoolyard, her secretary always three paces behind. The secretary would advance to her superior's side only on a curt signal, when Colonel Booth had an idea she wanted to discuss. On one hot day, when the SS men gave the internees permission to put on their lightest clothing, Colonel Booth appeared in lemon-yellow cotton bed pajamas, her grey-peppered brown hair hanging almost to her waist, her bonnet still perched on her head.

Even in prison Colonel Booth kept up her work of saving souls. She would stop abruptly before a fellow internee and thrust out her finger with the words: "Do you believe in God? Do you believe you'll be saved?" Though for the most part her only answer was a look of astonishment, she did talk frequently with old men & women, tried in her way to ease the lot of some young British sailors, cabin boys from the torpedoed transport Orama who, still in their early 'teens, had spells of loneliness for home and mother. (Three of them tried to escape one night, got as far as the lake, were caught and put in solitary confinement for days.)

That fall, together with her fellow prisoners, Mary Booth was transferred to a permanent camp established in a nunnery at nearby Liebenau. There she remained for two years. Last week, released in an exchange,* she was in Cairo. Said she: "[The Germans] are a fear-haunted people, of which only the brutal and sadistic achieve pre-eminence and only the stupid have faith."

* Negotiations for her exchange began almost immediately after her capture. Petershausen camp gossip was that the Germans were willing to trade her for seven German women interned in England.

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