One lucky guy to have survived this. "THE 700-page book would have weighed down anyone but for a prisoner of war who had been left emaciated by three years held captive by the Nazis it might have seemed an even more intolerable burden. Many men were forced to march hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of miles west across Poland But as he stuffed it into his makeshift knapsack Gunner Robbie Clark knew the book, with a youthful Adolf Hitler, staring out from its front cover could be a lifesaver. The Germans had issued the PoW camps with copies of Hitler’s autobiographical Mein Kampf translated into English in a bid to sway minds to their cause. And as brave Clark joined about 80,000 British troops in a forced march of more than 1,000 miles across frozen Eastern Europe he grabbed the camp’s copy. “As we went out to go on the march I thought to myself ‘I’ll take this in case something happens’. I thought that if the Gestapo see I have a copy of Mein Kampf in my bag they may let me off,” he says. It was the type of practicality that meant he would survive while thousands of others died. Clark, now 96, is one of the last surviving PoWs who 70 years ago made the march back from the stalags of Poland and eastern Germany during the brutal winter of 1945. On one occasion I took clothes from someone who had died. I took his coat and I took his boots. We had to do it Robbie Clark He was captured in the North African port city of Tobruk in June 1942 while serving in the Royal Artillery as part of the 4th Durham Survey Regiment. German Field Marshal Rommel told him and his colleagues: “For you the war is over.” Transported back to Germany via Greece and then Italy he was eventually taken to the notorious Stalag VIII-B (later Stalag 344) at Lamsdorf near Krakow in southern Poland and not far from the concentration camp of Auschwitz. There, as he was a carpenter and also a healthy prisoner of war, he was sent on working parties to repair and build for the German war effort. In late 1944 the war was turning against the Germans. “The Americans were bombing near to where we were,” says Clark, now a father of two with four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. “The Germans had said the bombers wouldn’t get as far as where we were but they did. “It gave us hope when the Americans started to bomb. There was no radio or papers but we heard a little of what was happening with D-Day. I thought it was looking good. We were hoping that the Germans would desert and leave us. “But then the Germans had orders from Hitler that there was to be an evacuation of Poland back into Germany with the British PoWs. “When we left we were marching along not knowing where we were going – and I don’t really think the Germans knew either.” http://www.express.co.uk/news/history/549879/Gunner-Robbie-Clark-s-memories-of-being-a-British-POW-in-WWII
