For most of human history, depending on the culture of the victors, enemy combatants on the losing side in a battle who had surrendered and been taken as prisoners of war could expect to be either slaughtered or enslaved.
Roy Shenkel survived a German rocket attack on April 7, 1944. He survived a Gestapo interrogation, arriving in the solitary confinement facility at Dulag Oberursel on D-Day, June 6, 1944. But would he survive the prisoner of war camps?
Roy had known hard times and hunger, being a child of the Great Depression. But he had never known the brutality and starvation he would experience in the German prison camps. He had already seen one prisoner shot dead by the guards, only a few days before the visitation from the stranger.
While the above summarizes the primary content of this book, there are many other stories within these pages:
-Featured throughout are German railroads and the role they played in the transport of prisoners of war.
-We scratch the surface of the mass evacuations of prison camps as the German-held territory shrank, the Russians pressing forward from the east, and the Allies from the west.
-The stories of prison camp newspapers and radio receivers, using information from the BBC and other sources.