大象传媒

This is the story of Thomas Wilson

When I was 17 the war had started and I had to join the fire service. When I was 19 I was called up to join the Army, I trained in armoured vehicles and I did that for 6 months. And after that I joined the fighting battalion. On D-Day I went to sea on a large ship from Dover across to France, we climbed over the side to drop into a landing craft that took us to the coast. So much fighting in Caen surprised us. I was on Hill 112 where the Germans had about 4 divisions firing at us. Then we captured Antwerp, we went across the Rhine.
I think that I was one of the first men to be sent to Belson concentration camp. The Germans called a truce there because of Typhus. After all of that trouble I was wounded when a shrapnel penetrated my tin helmet and that caused the wound to be in my neck. One of my brothers was in the Navy and he was captured in Singapore, while he was there he worked on the Death Railway. When the war finished I was in Schleswig in a castle and I was there for a year, then I got demobbed.
We entered a village in which there was a barn full of horses on fire, all you could hear was the sound of the crackling fire and the screaming of the horses and being so brave I went to help the horses out of the blazing barn, when I got in the roof was caving in on to the dry hay and straw which was making the fire even worse by the second.
We then crossed the Leine and Aller Rivers, and on April 15th, after a journey through some most difficult wooded country, led the battalion to Belsen Concentration Camp. This had been declared a neutral area before we arrived, because of the Typhus, so it was a bloodless liberation. The terrible delight of the people in the camp cannot be described, and the conditions of those we liberated is too well known to need repeating. It is sufficient to say that what was in the newspapers or on the films, far from being exaggerated, represented about one half of the truth.

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