About the contributor

My parents both died in the 1990s, and when my brothers and I went through their papers we found many documents that we had never seen before, documents that related to their wartime experiences. Reading them was very moving, and brought home to us what it must have been like to live through those years.

I am now 60 - three time older than my parents were when WW2 started. They married in 1942, I was born in 1943 and my father's plane was shot down over Germany in 1944. He spent 15 months in Stalag Luft 3. We have my mother's diary and my father's letters from that time - it is very strange to read their comments about me.