A Survivor's Story
Former teacher's book recalls P.O.W. experience in Nazi Germany

Frank Farr spent six months in a German P.O.W. camp after he bailed out of the flaming B-17 "Winged Victory" over Merseburg, Germany near Leipzig on Nov. 2, 1944. Farr has published the book "P.O.W. -- A Kriegie's Story" about his experience. [Photo by John A. Bowersmith/Independent]

By Elizabeth Hardin-Burrola
Staff Writer

The cover illustration for Frank Farr's book was drawn by Farr's grandson, Jason Pawela, and Donovan Begay, one of Farr's former students at Crownpoint High School. [Courtesy Photo]

GALLUP — The war in Iraq is not just some sort of abstract news story to Frank Farr.

Those fresh-faced young servicemen and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan remind him of another fresh-faced young kid who went to war a couple of generations ago.

That kid was Farr, and 61 years ago he spent his 21st birthday as a prisoner of war in a bleak P.O.W. camp in Hitler's Germany. Although he was a 2nd lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, Farr now admits he was just a scared kid, trying to do his best in a man's job. At just 20 years of age, he had already received a"boot full of blood"and a Purple Heart for the injury he sustained while flying over a German airfield outside of Chartres, France.

Farr, a former English and Spanish teacher at Crownpoint High School and a former journalist, is the author of "P.O.W. A Kriegie's Story." According to Farr, "Kriegie" was a slang term that British P.O.W. coined for themselves from the German word "kriegsgefangenen," which means prisoner of war. The book was published in 2004 but just recently became available for sale in Gallup.

Now retired and living in Jamestown, N.M., Farr talked about the book and his World War II experiences during a recent interview.

A navigator with the 91st Bomb Group, Farr was shot down on Nov. 2, 1944 during a bombing mission over a refinery at Merseburg, Germany. He survived a harrowing parachute jump out of his downed B-17 after the rip cord handle failed to release his parachute. Farr was forced to manually - and frantically - pull the parachute out of the chest pack.

"P.O.W. A Kriegie's Story" tells of Farr's experiences in two P.O.W. camps, Stalag Luft III and Stalag VII-A. Throughout the narrative, which does contain some profanity and a few frank sexual references, the book covers his six months of imprisonment and weaves in flashbacks from his Depression Era childhood in Oklahoma and Missouri, his early marriage and fatherhood, his navigation training in the United States, and his military service in England.

A few months before Farr arrived at Stalag Luft III, the camp had been the site of a daring escape attempt made famous in the Steve McQueen movie "The Great Escape." Stalag Luft III proved to be relatively tolerable, and Farr enjoyed the companionship of several amiable English, Scottish, and Polish officers from the Royal Air Force who had already been prisoners for several years.

Surviving Stalag VII-A proved to be a more difficult ordeal. It was crowded, filthy, and suffered from a severe lack of food and fuel. In the book, Farr relates how he was able to feast on three bowls of soup during one lucky day at the camp. Two other P.O.W. gave him their meals that day, he explained, after a dead rat was discovered in the soup they were being served.

Food, the lack of food, fantasies of favorite meals, and memories of mama's home cooking were the main topics of conversation in the camps, said Farr. Conversations about families and girls also dominated the camps, but they still ran second to food. "We talked about food more," explained Farr. "We were hungry all the time."

Although German authorities did provide the prisoners of war with a bare-bones diet of bread and soup, the servicemen really survived on food parcels from the Red Cross. Because of the parcels' importance, Farr devotes a lot of attention to them in the book. More than 60 years after the end of the war, Farr can still remember what food items were included in the parcels and how the prisoners transformed the metal food containers into cooking utensils, miniature stoves, and radio parts.

The Red Cross also supplied books to the P.O.W. camps, and Farr found reading to be his own great escape. He read 54 books during his imprisonment, averaging one book every three days.

Although boredom was more prevalent than fear, Farr said there were times when he wasn't sure he would survive his captivity. At one point during his imprisonment, he said, the prisoners were told that Hitler had ordered the execution of all P.O.W.

"We even made plans to resist if it came to that," said Farr, who added that he was instructed to storm one of the guard towers. That never became a necessity, he added, because Heinrich Himmler refused to carry out Hitler's order.

Farr's P.O.W. ordeal came to an end on April 29, 1945.

"You could hear the big cannons of the Third Army booming in the forest," he recalled. A couple of hours later the battle ceased, and Farr and thousands of other prisoners cheered when they saw an American flag being raised on a church steeple in nearby Moosburg. Soon Gen. George C. Patton and his Third Army rolled into the camp as liberators.

Weeks later, Farr cheered again when his ship reached sight of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.

When asked to compare World War II to the current military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, Farr said he supported the American invasion of Afghanistan because the country was the base of operation for the Taliban and Al Qaeda. However, Farr views the war in Iraq as unjust and unwarranted. Iraq no longer had any weapons of mass destruction "when Bush decided to start his war," he said.

"It just makes me angry," he added.

The war against Hitler was a different matter.

"I thought it was a just war," Farr said of World War II. "We were combating the evils of Hitler and the Holocaust. I'm proud to have served."

"P.O.W. A Kriegie's Story" is available at Waldenbooks at the Rio West Mall. It is also available for purchase on-line through amazon.com or authorhouse.com.