The Route In honour and recognition of our Grandad Jack’s experience, we will cycle the route he was forced to march over 65 years ago. We start at Blachownia, a small village in southern Poland, which was the location of the Blechhammer forced labour camp (a sub camp to Auschwitz) where Jack was held prisoner at the end of 1944. The route goes west over the mountains into what is today the Czech Republic, following the river Ohre into Germany, then heads south towards Munich. We finish, some 700 miles later in Moosburg which was the site of a large POW camp not far from Munich where Jack was liberated on 29th April 1945 by General Patton and the Allied army. It took Jack 3 months to complete the march and on his return to the UK weighed less than 7 stone. Matthew and I aim to complete this in 6 or 7 days, raise as much as we can for charity and eat our weight in Pain au Chocolat and drink enough cappuccino to drown an elephant! |
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One of Jack’s colleagues kept a record of the march which chronicles the places they stayed each night between January and April 1945. They slept rough (in barns etc) during what was one of the harshest winters Europe has ever experienced, and scavenged for food wherever they could. Because it was an un-planned and rushed military operation no official records exist of the actual route that the POWs were forced to march. At the end of the WWII, hundreds of thousand Allied soldiers were scattered in numerous camps throughout eastern Europe and when the call came, these starving and ill-clad men were force-marched, most without any real destination. To have actually got a record of their journey is quite unique. Many of the place names have not been identified (they may have been farms or hamlets that no longer exist) but about a half have been identified – a quest in itself only due to the fact that many of the places are the German names for places that are no longer within their borders. |
GPS is up and running...follow us as we go through the challenge |
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