The Forgotten: Canadian POWs, Escapers and Evaders In Europe, 1939-1945

Unforgettable tales of heroism, bravery and escape—the remarkable true stories of Canadian soldiers and civilians lost behind enemy lines during the Second World War.

The Forgotten tells the story of more than 10,000 Canadian servicemen, merchant mariners and civilians for whom the war ended in surrender, capture, imprisonment or escape, as seen through the eyes of a group of men who struggled to survive in Hitler's Europe. Among them were Private Stan Darch, who had already survived the cauldron of Dieppe; Sergeant Edward Carter-Edwards, who endured the hell of Buchenwald; RCAF Sergeant Ian MacDonald, who was on the run before being betrayed to the Gestapo and spent six weeks in the notorious Fresnes Prison in Paris; as well as seventeen civilian priests and brothers who were captured at sea. To survive the horrid conditions in the stalags across Europe and the hunger marches through the freezing winter of 1944–45, these otherwise ordinary Canadians required extraordinary valour and commitment to the Allied cause--and to each other.

Nathan M. Greenfield, author of the Governor General's Award finalist The Damned, shares the never-before-told stories of these forgotten Canadians in thrilling and often heartbreaking detail in a book that will haunt readers for a long time to come.