Frank Norman Parker
British Army Royal Warwickshire Regiment
from:Coventry
Frank Parker was my granddad. He was captured at Dunkirk while serving with The Royal Warwickshire Regiment, who were given the task of defending the beaches during the mass evacuation of the British Expeditionary Forces in June 1940, and taken to Stalag XXB. He learned to speak and write in German and Polish while at the camp and kept a diary which briefly reveals some of the work he was forced to do, including one entry that wearily states “still plumbing”.
He remained at Stalag XXB with thousands of other captured soldiers until January 1945 when the camp was evacuated to prevent the POWs being liberated and armed by the advancing Red Army. My granddad, like thousands of other POWs from camps across East Prussia and Poland, were then forced to march towards Germany. He was eventually liberated by American soldiers just outside Berlin on 11th of April 1945. During the Death March to Berlin, my granddad collected the dog tags of dozens of soldiers who had died and handed them into the British Army when he got back to Britain in May 1945. For many years after the war parents, siblings, wives and girlfriends of the soldiers who had died visited or wrote to my granddad asking about what had happened to their loved ones.
After the war my granddad returned to his home city of Coventry and was reunited with my Nan. In addition to my Aunty Anne, who was born in 1939, they had two more children, Uncle Frank and David (my dad). They had 11 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren, including my daughter Grace and son William.
On 28 October 2019, my wife and I were privileged to visit the Stalag XXB memorial and the nearby Commonwealth War Cemetery to honour the thousands of brave soldiers who were imprisoned alongside my granddad and remember the sacrifices they made.
