Do the Birds Still Sing in Hell?

An incredible truetale of one man'scourage and defiance of the German nation in the name of love

Horace "Jim" Greasley was 20 years old in the spring of 1939 when Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and 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 in Northern France, with just30 rounds of ammunition in his weapon pouch. Horace's war didn't last long. He was taken prisoner on May 25th, 1940 and forced to endure a 10week march across France and Belgium en route to Holland. Horace survived, barely, but many of his comrades were not so fortunate. Falling by the side of the road through 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 timesometimes two orthree timesa week. He broke out of the camp more than 200 times, often bringingfood back to his fellow prisoners to supplement their meager rations, and toward the end of the war even managed to bring radio parts back in, allowing theBBC newsto be delivered daily to more than3,000 prisoners.