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Comment by jll29 | Hacker News Reader

My grandfather never wrote much in his life, he was a man of physical work. When he turned 80, he suddenly wrote up his whole life story, end-to-end.

I've always wondered how complete versus sanitised his hand-written book might be, but there is some pretty gruesome stuff in it including eating a dog to avoid starvation, which resulted in extra torture because the only meat available was the beloved dog owned by the very commander of the prisoner of war camp where he was held during/after WWII.

Perhaps one day, I shall scan, OCR/type in, and publish it.

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Similar thing told by my grandfather, who was imprisoned in Russia for some time: They had to eat the grass to avoid starving. Every morning someone would be frozen to death and prisoners had to stick close together to not freeze. Or someone would have drowned in a puddle of water over night. Horrible gruesome situations.

He said things became much better in terms of food, when later on he was imprisoned in some US prison (not sure that was in the US or in another place but managed by US).

He wrote it all down as well.

Hey can I have more details? How would he also be imprisoned by the US?

I guess he could have been a German POW captured in Russia and then sent back to US-occupied West Germany.

After so and so much time in Russian POW camp, he got moved to some US prison (camp?). Only after that he was released.

They had to work a lot as prisoners, so I guess both sides wanted their share of work from war prisoners and so he first had to be in a Russian camp and then later in a US managed camp.

In documentaries you can also see, that some more qualified people got moved to "in the middle of nowhere" in Russia and Siberia as "experts" to help with building something up, where before German soldiers had destroyed. If you are willing, you can watch some kind of war documentary at least every second day in Germany. After you have seen your 20th documentary, you might get tired of it. However, many of the old people watch that stuff over and over. I guess it is because of the huge impact those events had on so many lives in their youth and to keep in mind how horrible things went. Perhaps also to try and get some kind of understanding of how a society could screw up so badly. And perhaps they want to know about all the evil things that happened, which they did not know about. The things that happened outside of the eyes of most people.

There is no lack of educational material at least. Just a day ago I saw an announcement on TV for another documentary for one of the almost infinite sides of that history: A documentary showing photographs and short clips taken by hobby photographers in 44 or 45 or so, showing a deceptive calm in some places in Germany, basically before things rolled all the way back, with only few indications of impending doom. You see, there is always something TV stations can send about it. Every little detail can be looked at and a documentary made about it.

When my grandfather had was called into the army, he was 15 years old. Send to the east, to fight a war. Many young people of that generation never finished school before entering the army. Basically children soldiers. They had to go back to school, as adults, when they returned from war and imprisonment. Re-education and further education. Imagine that contrast. I think it must have been hard for many of them, with post war trauma and all those memories.

He was either extremely fortunate, or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it. Came into a field hospital with a headshot wound, but somehow survived. The doctor told him, that he could drink and smoke as much as he wanted to, because he wouldn't make it much longer anyway. I think that must have been a German field hospital and then later he must have been captured, and of course, as part of the army, taken prisoner of war.

Well, he managed to stick around until a few years ago, reaching old age of over 90 years.

> They had to work a lot as prisoners, so I guess both sides wanted their share of work from war prisoners

As a practical matter, it may also be easier to guard and manage prisoners who are busy and tired from work, rather than idle and restless. For a detailed view of the late-war and early post-war years, I can suggest: _Savage Continent_, by Keith Lowe - https://www.npr.org/2013/07/24/204538728/after-wwii-europe-w...

Displaced persons camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Displaced_persons_camps_in_pos...

When it's said that the concentration camps were "liberated", this mostly means that the guards on the fences were changed, and any intentional killings were stopped. But it took quite some time to actually empty the camps. From the Harrison report:

>We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.

This was in August 1945, three months after Germany surrendered. Moving millions of people around in postwar Europe wasn't easy, or quick.

Obviously, all sides destroyed railways or bridges when possible. What few left operational were running at capacity just moving food, troops, and critical replacement parts. If you're a Allied junior lieutenant, and you're put in charge of a camp of 50,000 people, do you just throw open the gates, and tell them to walk home? If there was food to buy, which there wasn't, (Everyone had conscripted all their farmers. Europe had food supply problems for years afterward) they didn't have any money to buy it. Nobody had ration cards. They were lucky to have identity papers at all.

And, of course, the Allies were correctly paranoid about security. The countryside was littered with weapons. Let a starving DP out of a camp, a few days later he might be sorely tempted to pick up a fallen rifle and ambush the next checkpoint he sees.

Or... you could just leave them in the camp, where they're all in one place, not clogging the roads, where you can more or less feed them, and where you can eventually get around to handing out Nansen passports, when you feel like it.

> Perhaps one day, I shall scan, OCR/type in, and publish it.

My grandpa (who I never met) was in Fiji during WW2 - not combat but support staff on some base. Turns out he kept a journal that my uncle now has. He made a photocopy and gave it to my dad. I was super excited to read about his experiences, so I asked for my own copy. I typed the whole thing up and even looked up references to what he was talking about. (There were a lot of entries about him going to see this movie or that with his buddies, but I hadn't heard of 90% of them, so I added IMDB links.)

Almost the entire thing was mundane day-to-day goings-on and temperature and weather comments. He built cabinets for the base, went for beer with his friends, got letters from home, etc. I was expecting/hoping to at least hear his thoughts on things or what he wanted to do when he returned to the States.

You might reach out to your local library or nearest university library. Many of them have some sort of local document repository. This is the sort of thing that should at the very least be photographed page by page. They would have done microfiche back in the day. Even without OCR, it's valuable.

He could also donate it to the Internet Archive's collection of documents.

Trust me on this: do a simple phone capture (photos) as immediately as possible. We always delay things, and then they get lost irrevocably - in fire, flood, during the move, accidentally destroyed. Do plan doing the "capture proper", but do this simple one ASAP - it could take 15-30-60 minutes, but at least you'd have some sort of a backup.

Unfortunately, I am speaking from experience: just recently, I discovered that many years of my own notes were quite water damaged by a leaky pipe I wasn't even aware was there... and the slowly dripping water found its way to it through and over a random maze of random things worthy of the Rube Goldberg himself.

It is well worth archiving. I recently helped typeset and publish (via Amazon) a diary written by one of my ancestors - https://amzn.to/3tmUI3l ($0.99 as that's the lowest price Amazon accepts, but you can read the preview to get the gist)

It is written by a homesteader in 1930s North Dakota, and she just relates bits of her life, her family, and her favorite recipes. Simple, yet it's still a remarkable way to evoke the life of the era, and worth preserving and sharing as you are comfortable.

On a related note, you may want to be sure you take care with the actual physical media you have as well. Time and improper storage can render things unreadable - archival boxes (https://www.archivalmethods.com/ and elsewhere) are made to be neutral/alkaline rather than acidic, and are the sort of things museums use to preserve artifacts.

My grandpa wrote a rough draft of a memoir of his childhood. He grew up in a German-speaking town in the US around WWI, and he wanted to capture that experience since the harassment that happened to German-Americans during WWI caused those communities to Anglicize. He had more than a few sarcastic references about "patriots."

Yes please! It would very interested to read it all. Also sorry for what your grandpa had to go through. Stories like these never fail to remind me how -mostly- lucky and privileged we are to live in such peaceful times.

Same story with my grandfather and two world wars, communism, dictatorship, repressions. Unfortunately however a couldn't find yet a correctly working OCR that recognize his handwriting. Anyway, I scanned all the pages because the notebooks are rapidly degrading.

The commander of the prisoner of war camp fed his beloved dog to the prisoners?

edit: oh, no they ate the dog and were punished for it I see.

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