In enemy hands: South Africa's POWs in World War II

Title: In enemy hands
Subtitle: South Africa's POWs in World War II
Author: Karen Horn
Genre: War history
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Johannesburg; Cape Town, South Africa 2015
ISBN 9781868426515 / ISBN 978-1-86842-651-5
Softcover, 16 x 24 cm, 308 pages, several b/w photographs

Desription: In enemy hands: South Africa's POWs in World War II

This absorbing and authoritative book takes us back to a terrible moment in the history of the modern world, a time when South Africa still counted internationally as one of the virtuous nations in that most titanic struggle against fascist tyranny, the Second World War. Then, tens of thousands of the country's inhabitants volunteered to fight overseas in the Allied cause. For some, the brutal war which engulfed them brought neither victory nor glory, but the early shock of surrender and the lingering ordeal of becoming the captives of their Italian and German enemies. In In Enemy Hands, her pioneering account of the fate of South African prisoners of war, Karen Horn reclaims a raw, fascinating and moving history which has been all but forgotten. These gripping pages capture their everyday experience, their consciousness, and the ways in which they coped with camp life, a world stalked by fear, hope, despair, opportunism, resilience, human fallibility, and rocky moral values. Drawing on vivid oral reminiscences as well as documentary sources, In Enemy Hands is impressively lucid, deeply humane, and packed with shrewd insights. Dr Horn's major study is a superb achievement in bringing a trapped and chafing part of South Africa's Second World War generation out of the shadows.