From the Manning to Majdanek

I never did meet Max although he was known to my parents. Max was often discounted as “odd” but after reading what he endured during WWII I understand why – it was horrific.

Ernest Maxwell Sawyer was born 7 May 1920 at Tinonee, son of Ernest Wiseman Sawyer and Minnie (Wynter) Sawyer.¹ He joined the 2^nd Australian Imperial Forces in 1939 and saw action in North Africa before being captured in Greece in April 1941.² He was sent to a German Army prisoner-of-war camp where he worked on various Austrian farms.

In 1943 Sawyer was unfairly arrested on a charge of ‘insubordination’ and was sentenced to a prison camp at Graudenz in northern Poland – a breach of the Geneva Convention.³ This imprisonment was the start of a “harsh and cruel episode…that would last effectively until the end of his life.”⁴ In 1944, Sawyer escaped Graudenz, and sought shelter under a farmhouse in the Polish countryside. Unfortunately he was seen and local police arrested him and took him to the nearest Gestapo office where he was interrogated and tortured.⁵

Sawyer was then imprisoned in the death and concentration camp Majdanek, Lublin. No official records document Sawyer’s incarceration, but this is not unusual as only a small proportion of the camp files survive.⁶ It is believed that 360, 000 people were murdered at Majdanek with a third of those Jewish.⁷ Sawyer undoubtedly saw many horrors which haunted him for the rest of his life. He physically survived the war, but his medical records and memories show a slow decline of a man who suffered trauma consistent with imprisonment in a concentration camp.

I urge all to read this thesis which illuminates the horrors of war and man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.

Author: George Sawyer based on the thesis by Paul Damian O’Shea, “From the Manning to Majdanek: The war history of Private Ernest Maxwell Sawyer NX1488.” Master of Arts, Macquarie University, 1997.

Available online: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ed4e/b9db51cb1751782956ca11c00d9bdf16fe02.pdf