Great Escapes : Remarkable Second World War Captives

Moving exhibition at the National Archives looking at prisoners of war and internees in the Second World War.

OK I admit I cried three times in this show and I’m not a crier! It gave a good overview of the history from military prisoners of war and civil internees on all sides but the guts of the show were the short biographies with artefacts which brought to life the voices from the past.

I’d come partly because Airey Neave, who escaped from Colditz, was my MP as a child and his was the first biography I read in the show so I was hooked from the start. Also a friend of my mother’s lived with Mum’s family after the war when her parents returned to Singapore to pick up the pieces of their pre-war life there. They had escaped on one of the last boats out of the city.

OK tears no 1 was the story of Gladys Skillet who was deported from Guernsey to Germany and gave birth in a German hospital next to a German lady, Maria Koch, who befriended her and they remained friends throughout their lives.

No 2 was Judy, the only dog to be declared a prisoner of war, who stayed with a group of prisoners in Japan and looked out for them, warning them of soldiers coming and scorpions and on one occasion finding fresh water for them. She survived the war and died in 1959.

Finally I found a recording of the Captives’ Hymn written by Margaret Dryburgh in a camp in Sumatra sung by a women’s choir and the tissue had to come out again!

Closed 21 July 2024


Review

Telegraph


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