Memories of the War - Private Andrew Hamilton

Andrew Hamilton was from Westerdale, Halkirk. He was a Private in the Seaforth Highlanders. He was in Horse Transport before joining MT Transport as a dispatch rider.

He was posted missing around June 1940- he had been captured at St Valery. He was a prisoner at Stalag VIIIB. He escaped and was captured, escaped again but was caught again, then was sent to salt mines in Poland where he was fed only bread and water. He escaped for a third time and was taken in and hidden by a Czechoslovakian family who farmed in Poland. He stayed there until the end of the war, joining a local partisan force fighting the Germans. After the war ended, he and a friend made their way to the American lines and was sent home from there.

In spring 1946 his family was sent word from the War Office that he was alive. It was the first news they had had about him since a postcard from the prisoner of war camp in 1941.