Article December 20, 1999 Issue

Christ's love in a prisoner-of-war camp

A retired United States Air Force officer describes the worst and best Christmas of his life in an interview with News Editor Kim Shippey.

Christmas Eve 1944 . It's twenty degrees below zero Fahrenheit in Stalag Luft 111, a German prisoner-of-war camp near Zagan in Poland. The guards have kept the lights on late as a special gesture, but fifteen thousand prisoners from many nations are still weak, hungry, and cold.

Many of them have spent the evening trudging through the snow from compound to compound, exchanging Christmas greetings in a variety of languages and observing how the members of each cultural group are making a brave effort to recapture what Christmas means to them.

Furman J. Davis, then a twenty-one-year-old navigator in the US Eighth Air Force (305th Bomb Group), which had been flying out of Chelveston airfield, near Northampton, England, takes up the story:

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