Hello and welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk Family Stories.

Each Sunday we read half a dozen accounts sent in by our listeners, describing how their

families were caught up in the events of the Second World War. This week we have some

rather remarkable stories. I hope you enjoy them.

This first story is from Norman Clark. My father may have seen Hitler. That should

keep you hanging on as I tell his story. My father William James Short Clark was born

in 1920 and left school before the outbreak of war. He joined the local territory army

because they taught you how to drive and in the late 1930s that was a difficult skill

to obtain. He drove motorcycles and lorries in a royal signals unit and was called up and

sent over to France. By May 1940 his division was on loan to the French army as a gesture

of Antont Cordial and he was stationed in front of the Maginot Line near the fortress of

Hackenburg. So when the German attack came through

at Sudan they were cut off and eventually ended up at San Valerie where they were captured.

They were then marched through Belgium to the Rhine, taken by barge down the river to

a railhead where they all got packed into rail trucks, ten horses, forty men and sent

to Torn, now Turun in Poland, to camp XXA. They worked in various places such as the

Sugarbeat factory and in forestry but mainly on farms. Now for Hitler. One day the work

party were out in the fields when they were suddenly told to stop working in standstill.

At the end of the field was one of the main lines from Berlin to the east. Along came

a very large armored train covered in AA guns followed a minute later by an armored train

with shiny passenger coaches. A minute later another heavily armored flat train appeared.

This he was told was deaf-furer. Dad never told me if he waived. In 1945 all the POWs were

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