Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Traveling exhibit brings POW story to PRCC

    POPLARVILLE - A traveling exhibit brought the story of thousands of German POWs interned in the United States during World War II to the Pearl River Community College campus Monday.
    "Held in the Heartland" details the capture of 370,000 German soldiers in North Africa, their transport by troop ships to the U.S. and life in the 660 prisoner of war camps across the country.
    Four base camps and 19 branch camps were in Mississippi, including Camp Shelby where approximately 7,700 POWs were housed and a branch camp near Picayune.
    "This is pretty cool," PRCC student Erica Rubio of Picayune said. "It’s very interesting. I like all the artifacts."
    Rubio said she didn’t know before Monday that German POWs were held anywhere in the United States, much less in Pearl River County.
    But the exhibit brought back first-hand memories for Lamont Jarrell of the Pine Grove community in Pearl River County. A 10th-grade student at Henleyfield School when World War II was declared, Jarrell found himself working German prisoners just a couple of years later.
    As manager of a tung oil farm in the Henleyfield community, he hired prisoners at harvest time and when workers were needed.
    "You paid the government $2 a day and the prisoner got 80 cents of that," he said. "We never did work but 12. They’d send one guard with them."
    The branch camp was at a dairy farm between Carriere and Picayune near the present-day Anchor Lake, he said.
    "Their quota was to pick up 20 bushels of tung nuts a day," Jarrell said. "On a good crop, they’d get through about 2 o’clock but you couldn’t take them back ‘til 4 or they’d raise the quota on them."
    Communication with the prisoners was difficult since most spoke only broken English.
    "There was one old gentleman, every day when they ate their lunch, he’d take something out of his pocket and look at it," Jarrell remembers. "One day I asked what it was. It was a picture of his wife and child."
    He remembers the POWs had one cheese sandwich and one baloney sandwich for lunch. They could spend the money they earned only at the camp PX or store.
    "Out of that 80 cents, they could buy whatever they wanted at the PX," he said. "But they weren’t allowed to have ready-rolled cigarettes."
    Although the "Held in the Heartland" exhibit focuses on camps in the Midwest, Jarrell found a lot to remind him of the POW era in Mississippi.
    "When you live through something and experience it, you never forget it," he said.
    The exhibit is part of the TRACES Center for History and Culture in Saint Paul, Minn., where a traditional museum tells the stories of both Germans and Americans in the camps, the effects of Nazism before and during World War II and Midwesterners’ responses to Nazi persecution, refugees and the Holocaust.
    The museum director interviewed 50 to 60 former POWs while living in Germany and artifacts in the bus exhibit were donated by them, said Irving Kellman, bus exhibit guide.
    Kellman has toured 10 states since leaving Saint Paul in August. He will be in Mississippi another week or so, then go to Alabama, Georgia and Florida before heading up the eastern seaboard. He will return to Saint Paul in June.
    He enjoys meeting people who tour the exhibit and hearing their stories.
    "People come by and give me their oral histories," Kellman said.
    The stop at PRCC was sponsored by PRCC Museum, Phi Theta Kappa honorary society, the Department of Humanities and the PRCC Development Foundation