glenn forger
Guest
Just read this, what a marvelous story:
Private Parker did indeed fight bravely, relentlessly, throughout the Second World War for the most part, as a POW. He spent four years and eight months as a prisoner, having been captured at Dunkirk, aged 28, and was one of 80,000 Allied POWs forced to march across Europe by the Nazis, towards the end of the war. Some 70 years later, 18 years after his death, three of Bert’s grandchildren are retracing his footsteps on a ten-day 680-mile bike ride across Poland and Germany, to raise money for charity and honour his memory.
Private Parker “never forgot he was a soldier. He and his fellow captives did all they could to try to disrupt the Nazi war effort. They would bury tools, or when they took the roll call, take it in turns to hide, so the numbers weren’t right. Any little annoying thing.”
The Polish people, noted Mr Parker, tried to help the captives, thereby risking their own lives. One day, they surreptitiously rolled a succession of hard-boiled eggs down a hill to where the POWs were sitting at the roadside, eating their lunch of crusts and dishwater, after a bout of forced labour. “They passed the eggs behind their backs until they’d all got one,” says Rose.
A quiet defiance permeates the memoir. David says: “Grandad talks quite jovially about setting up a village hall with settees confiscated from the villagers, for a meeting of Nazi officers. They picked fleas off themselves, collected them in matchboxes and sprinkled them on the seats so that they’d hatch when sat on. They were German fleas, he said, and should be returned to their rightful owners.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/goodlife...680-mile-bike-ride-to-honour-PoW-Grandad.html
Private Parker did indeed fight bravely, relentlessly, throughout the Second World War for the most part, as a POW. He spent four years and eight months as a prisoner, having been captured at Dunkirk, aged 28, and was one of 80,000 Allied POWs forced to march across Europe by the Nazis, towards the end of the war. Some 70 years later, 18 years after his death, three of Bert’s grandchildren are retracing his footsteps on a ten-day 680-mile bike ride across Poland and Germany, to raise money for charity and honour his memory.
Private Parker “never forgot he was a soldier. He and his fellow captives did all they could to try to disrupt the Nazi war effort. They would bury tools, or when they took the roll call, take it in turns to hide, so the numbers weren’t right. Any little annoying thing.”
The Polish people, noted Mr Parker, tried to help the captives, thereby risking their own lives. One day, they surreptitiously rolled a succession of hard-boiled eggs down a hill to where the POWs were sitting at the roadside, eating their lunch of crusts and dishwater, after a bout of forced labour. “They passed the eggs behind their backs until they’d all got one,” says Rose.
A quiet defiance permeates the memoir. David says: “Grandad talks quite jovially about setting up a village hall with settees confiscated from the villagers, for a meeting of Nazi officers. They picked fleas off themselves, collected them in matchboxes and sprinkled them on the seats so that they’d hatch when sat on. They were German fleas, he said, and should be returned to their rightful owners.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/goodlife...680-mile-bike-ride-to-honour-PoW-Grandad.html
