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MY grandfather was a 39-year-old father of four small children when the Second World War broke out in 1939. As a telephone engineer, his skills were needed by the Royal Corps of Signals, and he joined up. Very soon, however, he was captured and for the next six years he was held as a prisoner of war. When he came home after the war, it was to a family who hardly knew him.
His time in those intervening years was spent in a prison camp located in what was then Czechoslovakia and is now part of southern Poland.