Cpl. Brinley Norman "Bryn" Williams
British Army Royal Engineers
from:Fleur-de-lis, Mon
I knew very little about Dad's wartime experiences - he died when I was barely out of my teens. He had told stories of being in Palestine during the war and I know he was a POW - but he never talked about that. I do recall seeing a newspaper cutting from 1945 when he returned from the war (my grandmother had kept it). It said he was very sick, and that POWs had been so hungry they had eaten grass.
When I began to research my family history I got Dad's military records from the MOD. What a revelation - they told me so much about this young man who joined up in 1939 - about his education, his previous employment (and what he earned) and his physical appearance. The records also told me that Dad was captured at Gazala in North Africa and ended up in Stalag VIIIb, in what is now Poland, from September 1943 until liberation in April 1945. Research then told me about the Death Marches - and the fact that the starving prisoners ate grass. An elderly cousin of my father was able to tell me about the impact his capture and imprisonment had on his family - his sister and parents - and that helped me understand a lot about family relationships in later years. As a teenager, she remembered Dad's return and how very weak and ill he was.
I have just come back from a visit to the remains of Stalag VIIIb and the Prisoner of War Museum at Lambinovice (Lamsdorf). I stood on the railway platform where Dad would have arrived, and saw the entrance to the camp. Very little remains there, but there is an exhibition of daily life in the camps and a reconstruction of a hut where Russian POWs were held (and treated very badly). Lamsdorf became a prison camp in 1870 during the Franco Prussian War - and was used as such until the late 1940s. Hundreds of thousands passed through those gates - and tens of thousands died there. It saw almost a century of misery. Today there are beautifully kept POW graveyards in peaceful surroundings, filled with birdsong. The visit has really inspired me to make sure that Dad's name is recorded and remembered. His wartime experience was instrumental in forming the man he became. His lifelong involvement in the British Legion is testimony to that.
