Missing The Boat: War Stories of Thomas Alan Dirkin

6 collaborators and food thieves. Above all, he maintained a stubborn focus on one thing: surviving. In January 1945, the POWs were marched six to seven hundred miles west, as pawns of war. The Germans wished to a) evade the Russian advance, and b) use the allied prisoners as bargaining chips or c) execute all the POWs as part one of Hitler’s last acts of dictatorship. The winter of 1945 was the coldest in 50 years, hence the evacuation and march from the camps was dubbed a death march, as men fell victim to starvation, cold and execution. Part of the reason that these events have only been recorded in the last fifteen to twenty years, comprehensively at least, was the reluctance of the men themselves to talk about what happened to them. My father seldom offered much detail. You would never understand, he would say. Stories, not History I have brought together a collection of stories that either my father told me or I learned about his life in World War II. At the time of writing I was sixty three years old. A friend asked me how I could possibly remember what he really said. I remember these conversational incidents vividly. My father was not conveying what train he took, or what meal he ate. He was conveying emotional memories. Imagine that your son, daughter, husband or wife comes home to tell you that they witnessed a horrific murder. You remember those conversations. I have a research background learned during the acquisition of a doctoral degree. This collection of stories is my recollection of the facts, blended with my own perceptions and coloring of the scenes. These stories are not intended to be tested by academic rigor. However, none deviate from the gist of the stories as told by my father as I perceived and understood them. There is now well researched information about the events that my father experienced on a daily basis with blunt reality. My collection of stories do coincide with general history, but are intended to illuminate and personalize the telling of the story and the recollection of those stories. Prior to writing this collection of stories I intentionally did not research the key historical elements of WW II that surrounded the experiences of my father. I felt it important to convey the stories as I understood them, with minimal interference from the exchange between father and son. However, in order to