Los! Schnell, schnell! - German for Let's go! Quickly!

Right at the beginning of the war, my father ('Lofty' ) was dispatched with his regiment, 51st Highland Division, Royal Signals, to northern France on an expeditionary mission. He was almost immediately captured by the Germans in St Valery, June 1940 and taken to Gdansk, Eastern Germany (now Poland) where he was detained in a prison camp before being sent to work on the land.

At the end of the war, in response to the Russian advance, German prisoners of war were released and undertook what's been called The Great March West across Czechoslovakia, Poland and Germany. This march is estimated to have taken over 4 months in freezing cold temperatures between January and April 1945 during which dysentery, starvation and death were common.

It was quite a pivotal moment for me when the driver's mirror captured his tearful blue eyes as we drove to his mother's funeral.

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