Keith Panter-Brick joined the Territorial Army in March 1939, at the age of eighteen. When war broke out six months later, he was sent to France, where he was entrenched ahead of the Maginot Line in spring 1940. Following the devastating German blitzkrieg, he was captured in May 1940 and spent the next five years as a prisoner of war. To commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the end of World War Two, Keith’s friend and colleague, Paul Jankowski — Raymond Ginger Professor Emeritus of History at Brandeis University — reflects on Keith’s harrowing wartime memoir, Years Not Wasted, below.
“We were totally outclassed,” Keith Panter-Brick told me in the early 2000s. He was speaking of May 1940, when the German land and air forces overwhelmed the Allied forces in Belgium and northern France. Taken prisoner that month, he spent the next five years — the first half of his twenties — in German prisoner of war camps (Stalags) in occupied Poland. The mental honesty, scrupulous accuracy, and personal humility in his brief comment captured much of the man, the scholar, and the friend I would first meet some fifty years later.
The same qualities would reappear in his memoir, Years Not Wasted. When he returned home to Merseyside, England, in 1945, all he had was his diary, along with the many letters that had somehow reached his family. He would return to them many years later in his memoir, retelling and perhaps reliving the captivity that he and other captured Western soldiers had to endure. They contended with conditions worse than those of the officers, but far better than those of the Soviet and Polish prisoners, most of whom perished in one of the great war crimes of the Second World War. Neither self-pity nor heroics coarsen his narrative. He writes of malnutrition and bitter cold, but also of Red Cross parcels, of boredom but also release, of submission but also resistance and, in his case, attempts at escape — once in 1944 from the camp itself, and again in 1945 from the virtual death-march out of it.
It is a recollection mixing scrupulous honesty with vivid detail, on one level a document about captivity in wartime, on another a spiritual memoir of inner freedom wrested from adversity, before its physical reality was finally restored.
