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Red Cross supplied the order of the day 9 · OAKVILLE BEAVER Friday, April 10, 2009 WARNING! Please don't try this at home Tax Reduction And Preparation Services Continued from page 1 On Tuesday, Eggertson was served his first boxed lunch in more than 50 years at an Oakville luncheon celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Red Cross in Canada. "I'm here today to tell you why your lunch is being delivered in a box today," said Eggertson, noting the Red Cross has identified the delivery of the food parcels as one of its most important accomplishments during the war. "It was not just one of their accomplishments, but the most important one," said Eggertson. Peter Zulauf, president of the Red Cross in Ontario, and his wife, Sandy, invited the luncheon guests, including many Red Cross officials, to trade the sandwiches, fruit and sweet in their boxed lunch with their neighbours if it was not to their liking -- just as the POWs did in their prison camps. Eggertson outlined how the POWs set up a "store" where the food parcels containing canned fish, oatmeal, sugar and more would be divided up and monitored by store "officials" appointed by the POWs. The POWs could then buy or exchange their goods for points. Eggertson, who hailed from a family of seven, was a student at the University of Manitoba during the outbreak of Second World War. He explained he used to see streetcars full of armed forces personnel near the university daily. As a geology student, he had applied for various summer jobs in the busy mines, but came home one day and announced he had joined the war effort. That was 1941. "My mother asked me which job I was going to take and I announced I wasn't going to take any, that I'd just joined the air force. She wasn't very happy with that, but she understood," said Eggertson, whose twin brother Ted (Carl) was also with the armed forces, but never travelled overseas. Eggertson joined the Royal Canadian Air Force bomber command. He was trained as a navigator, but became a front gunner on the Halifax Bomber Squadron. On the return trip from his third mission, his plane was shot down by a German night fighter. Eggertson parachuted out over Holland. He was captured the next morning -- Oct. 6, 1942. "It's strange, I don't remember ever being scared, it was just something you do. We were bailing out in the night time, it was what we were taught to do," said Eggertson. "For two and a half years I was a guest of the German Reich," he said. Stalag Luft III was a German Air Force prisoner-of-war camp that housed captured air force servicemen. It was in what is now Poland, southeast of Berlin. He solidly asserts, too, that he was never mistreated while a POW. The camp contained four compounds of roughly 30 acres each with 15 wooden huts. It housed about 6,000 Allied prisoners. "The huts were cramped. There were 14 rooms with eight to 10 people per room," said Eggertson, noting there were double or triple decker cots for sleeping. There was a kitchen, however, it was meagerly equipped and German rations were suitable to a non-working senior citizen, he said. Breakfast was two slices of bread. Lunch was bread and meat or soup. Dinner was much the same. "We absolutely relied on the Red Cross food parcels to supplement," said Eggertson. Each POW would receive a parcel a week, occasionally half that and sometimes, nothing at all. "The distribution of parcels was important business," said Eggertson, noting a prisoner was appointed to oversee distribution. Meals were planned and made to stretch out. Eggertson said at the "store" a pound of sugar was worth 120 points and a can of salmon could be traded for 75 points while oatmeal could be obtained for 70 points. While Stalag Luft III was the site of The Great Escape, Eggertson was not part of that famous escapade. He remained in the camp until the waning days of the war in Europe when he and other POWs were marched out to flee the oncoming Russian army. Before midnight on Jan. 27, 1945, as Russian troops approached, POWs were marched out of camp headed for Spremberg. After a 55-km march, they rested for 30 hours and then marched the remaining 26 km. "I had a good pair of shoes. I don't know where I got them," said Eggertson who, after the war, eventually settled in Burlington where he enjoyed a career in industrial water treatment and now has nine grandchildren. Tuesday's luncheon also announced the Sprott Foundation Centennial Matching Gift Challenge. Juliana Sprott, president of the Oakville-based Sprott Foundation, was on hand to explain that for every $1,000 contributed to the Red Cross in its centennial year, the foundation will match the donation (to double the donation) up to $100,000. 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