Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell?: A powerful story of love and survival by Horace Greasley

Horace ‘Jim’ Greasley was twenty
years of age in the spring of 1939 when Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia
and latterly Poland. There had been whispers and murmurs of discontent from
certain quarters and the British government began to prepare for the
inevitable war. After seven weeks training with the 2nd/5th Battalion
Leicester, he found himself facing the might of the German army in a muddy
field south of Cherbourg, in Northern France, with just thirty rounds of
ammunition in his weapon pouch. Horace’s war didn’t last long. He was taken
prisoner on 25th May 1940 and forced to endure a ten week march across France
and Belgium en-route to Holland.

Horace
survived…barely…food was scarce; he took nourishment from dandelion
leaves, small insects and occasionally a secret food package from a
sympathetic villager, and drank rain water from ditches. Many of his fellow
comrades were not so fortunate. Falling by the side of the road through sheer
exhaustion and malnourishment meant a bullet through the back of the head and
the corpse left to rot. After a three day train journey without food and
water, Horace found himself incarcerated in a prison camp in Poland. It was
there he embarked on an incredible love affair with a German girl
interpreting for his captors.

He experienced the sweet
taste of freedom each time he escaped to see her, yet incredibly he made his
way back into the camp each time, sometimes two, three times every week.
Horace broke out of the camp then crept back in again under the cover of
darkness after his natural urges were fulfilled. He brought food back to his
fellow prisoners to supplement their meagre rations. He broke out of the camp
over two hundred times and towards the end of the war even managed to bring
radio parts back in. The BBC news would be delivered daily to over 3,000
prisoners. This is an incredible tale of one man’s adversity and defiance of
the German nation.