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172496
Floyd Reed
US Army
from:Alabama, USA
My dad is 81, and remembers when his brother, Floyd Reed, was reported missing by the Army. They lived at the end of a long country road, and few cars ever came to their house, so he saw the car coming toward the house from his upstairs bedroom window. It was the Red Cross bringing news that his brother was missing. Then several months later, the same type of car came and told his parents that his brother had been killed. He remembers his father fainted, but his mother maintained that her son was NOT dead, because if he was, she would know it.
Eight more months passed, when another car came toward their house in the middle of the night. This time a tall, very thin jaundiced young man got out of the car and came toward the house along with the ladies from the Red Cross. My dad said he looked at the guy, and he looked very scary, with sunken eyes, and he "wasn't anyone I knew." However, his mother grabbed him saying, "My boy, My boy is alive." My uncle had been a POW in Germany at Stalag 9B Bad Orb Hessen-Nassau, Prussia 50-09. For a long time, he wanted no one to come around him. When the other children in the family would get near him he would yell for them to leave him alone. However, he finally allowed my dad, his younger brother, to get close, and they became life-long friends and confidantes.
He told my dad he was kept in a pen with an electrified fence topped with barbed wire. He said they were crowded, slept in the mud, had no food, and that it became so bad that soldiers would make the others promise not to starve but to consume them once they died. He never said if he participated in cannabalism but confirmed it went on. He went on to marry and have children, but always preferred to spend time working alone.