When my dad came home from the war, he refused to talk about what happened to him in the German prison camp. I heard this from my grandma, my mother, and my aunts and uncles. I remember asking my dad about it over the years, and he would just say nothing.

Then, around 1999, my daughter got a school project to write about anyone in her family who had been in World War II. So she called my dad, who was living in Florida at the time. The next thing we knew, she received about five handwritten pages by fax!

A few years later, at a family party in Michigan, a retired journalist was talking to my dad, and he began making an audio recording of dad’s stories of the war. This journalist was very earnest in telling us to record my dad’s story.

And recently, at a gathering of friends who work in the advertising business, my dad started talking about his war experiences, and before long he had a large group surrounding him, fascinated by his stories. He is a very entertaining storyteller, with lots of excitement in his voice, along with sound effects. Now that I think of it, this storytelling thing must run in the family. Whenever my grandpa or my dad started talking, people gathered around them!

Not only were there middle-aged people in this advertising crowd, but also young people, people in their early twenties who had never personally known anyone who had been in World War II. It was the young people who were especially interested in his stories and who kept asking him to tell more and more! In this group were several advertising executives and television producers from Chicago who urged me to document my dad’s war experiences.

So, I asked my dad to write down what he could remember. I also asked his sister to write about her relationship with him. Put together, this is the story of Kenneth Horrigan, World War II prisoner of war in Stalag 17B.