The Barbed Wire University

Feature films have created the stereotype of the Second World War prisoner of war. But the reality was much more extraordinary. POWs staged shows concerts and sporting fixtures and took up crafts and pastimes using materials they found around them. Men studied attended lectures learned languages sat for qualifications and exams on such a scale that one camp was nicknamed 'The Barbed-Wire University'. And often the years in captivity proved a turning-point in their lives. Drawing on letters home diaries and interviews with redoubtable survivors Midge Gillies recreates the daily lives of a truly remarkable group of men.