Facing Fearful Odds: My Father's Story of Captivity, Escape and Resistance 1940-45 (Pen & Sword Books, £25) by John Jay is a testament to filial love. Its opening sentence, "My father should have written this book", goes to the heart of things. The father should indeed have written the book but he could not - because he was inarticulate and psychologically and emotionally scarred.
The son, on the other hand, is highly articulate and combines the skills of a good researcher with the journalist's gift for moving a narrative along in a pacey fashion. There is some campaign history to negotiate but the thread running through it all is a son's wish to honour his father's courage and suffering.
Alec Jay was a Jewish serviceman who fought at the siege of Calais, was taken prisoner, force-marched across France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany under horrific conditions, and later escaped unsuccessfully four times before joining Czech partisans in the weeks before the end of the war. Realising early on that it would not be wise to get caught by the Nazis as a Jew, he ditched his tags and identity papers and, once captured, refrained for a long time from writing to his family through the Red Cross.
It is clear that the war damaged him badly (we see him squabbling embarrassingly with German tourists while on holiday in Croatia later in life) and it seems he couldn't overcome or move beyond his guilt and pain and rage at what he had witnessed and endured. Like many of his peers, Alec couldn't - and didn't - talk about it later.
Yet in captivity he had sought to express himself by writing poems, though these, judged as literature, are little more than doggerel and offer only perfunctory insights into PoW life. Up against the horrors of the war, he found no way to truly articulate his thoughts and feelings.
He couldn’t move beyond his rage
But, if Alec Jay was struck dumb by his suffering and survivor guilt, John Jay has given him a voice - forged from an impressive array of sources. This work of love has produced a very moving book, which takes us to the heart of darkness where so many men like Alec had to dwell, that we might live.
