My late father, Christopher Stanley Arthur Tennant, was a driver in the Royal Corp of Signals and served in the western desert until his capture by the Italians. He spent some time in a POW camp somewhere near Naples before being placed in a cattle truck and spending 3 days getting to Germany.
Originally, I have him in Stalag 4B, which puzzled me slightly as this camp was liberated by the Russians, and other parts of his story did not fit with this camp - I will come on to this later. However digging a little deeper it would appear that he was moved to 4F. He said the conditions were bad and that the whole hut had body lice so badly that they were regularly dusted with DDT until they found the man who always managed to miss the dusting and burnt all his clothes, after which things improved.
He appeared to live for his Red Cross parcels which were shared with a friend (Dusty Miller, a lad from the West Country) who appeared to tell him many West Country dialect words, one of which was "Dumbledore" for a bumblebee (no JK Rowling did not invent the word), and which he always used as a term of endearment for his three grand-daughters. The Red Cross parcels were always intercepted by the German guards who always took the socks and soap much to his chargin.
He apparently worked clearing railway lines, often frozen to the core with little clothing but had no idea why the lines were so busy day and night and for what reason. Just before he died he told me the following, he never spoke of this to anyone else within the family, just me and until today I have never been able to verify the facts.
At the end of the war the guards left the POWs in the camp. They could hear the Russians advancing one way and the US forces the other and they prayed that the US would reach them first. They did, luckily and starving the men set out to find food. They followed the railways lines and came across a concentration camp. I believe that my Dad may have been one of the first in. He said that what he saw had haunted him his entire life, and that following that they went into the local town and looted the Post Office. It is only today that I have been able to verify that the camp was liberated by US forces and that there was a concentration camp nearby.
I have his diary from 1941 that he managed to keep going all through the war and one entry reads "excused work today, yellow jaundice weight 6 stone". He was luckier than the victims nearby but I am sure it coloured his whole life what he saw that day. He was a sweet gentle man who hated injustice and although he died 15 years ago he is very much missed by his entire family.
