George Hammond

Rightous Among Nations (from the UK): Stan Wells, George Hammond, Tommy Noble, Alan Edwards, Roger Letchford, Bill Keeble, Bert Hambling, Bill Scruton, Jack Buckley and Willy Fisher.

The story:

This is an extraordinary story of the rescue of a 16-year-old girl by ten British prisoners of war.
Sarah Matuson (later Hannah Sarah Rigler) was among the inmates of Stutthof concentration camp who in January 1945 were taken on a death march headed towards the Baltic coast. The group of 1,200 women, including her sister, Hannah, and her mother, Gita, was staggering in the snow, dressed in rags, with only wooden clogs on their feet, with no food and under the heavy blows of the SS guards. Hundreds of women perished on the way and only about 300 reached the village of Gross Golmkau (Golebiewo in Polish) 30 kilometers south of Gdansk.
Sarah decided to try and find some food for them. She succeeded to leave the line of prisoners unnoticed and found refuge in a barn where she collapsed. It was there that she was found by a member of a group of British prisoners of war who had been captured in 1940 in France, and who were transferred to the east, interned in a camp close to the Baltic coast, where they were engaged in various tasks in the German farms of the area. Finding Sarah who was starved and totally exhausted, he gave her some food and then brought her to the other prisoners wrapped in an old army coat.
Shocked by her poor physical condition, they decided to help her. They smuggled Sarah into their prisoner of war camp – Stalag 20B in Gross-Golmkau, where they hid her in a hayloft. In view fragile state, they took turns in caring for her and nursed her back to health. The danger of discovery was great as Sarah was hidden in the hayloft above the police horses. However soon the British POWs were also to be moved. On the eve of their evacuation into Germany, Sarah’s British benefactors arranged for a local woman to take of Sarah untill the liberation by the Red Army.
For many years she tried to find her rescuers, but only 25 years after the end of the war was she able to locate them and renew the contact.