WARTIME GUIDES

Ken came to Toruń with his wife Sue tracking his father's steps in Stalag XXA (20A). His father worked in a workshop repairing shoes, clothes and theatre costumes. His comrades were Sam Kydd and Albie Tomson. The first one, after the war became a famous actor and the latter after leaving the camp died in the plane crach near Paris, France. Thanks to numerous documents and materials we were able to move back in history and see Torun in a wartime persepective. The reason for our visit to Torun was to try and identify and visit as many sites that my father Corporal Ron Harrison, 7th Battalion Worcestershire Regiment, would have been at during his five years in captivity at Stalag XXA during the Second World War. Ron rarely spoke about his time as a POW but he did have a considerable collection of wartime pictures plus a number of hand drawn sketches from publications such as “The Prisoners Pie”, which was an official paper produced by the prisoners. Ron signed up...

Many a time we wrote about parcels which came to Stalag XXA .  You can read about them here http://bit.ly/2lnZPRe.  Now we found a letter from 27th Dec. 1942 , thanks to which we got the knowlegde about actually was in the parcels at that time. A Prisoner of War wrote that that week they received parcels from both Canada and England.  Inside there were: roast port and stuffing, stead and tomatoe, Christmas pudding and cake. Also biscuits, chocolate, meat rolls, butter, bully meat, mashed potatoes.