Survival: Diary of an American POW in World War II (Memories Series)

Survival: Diary of an American POW in World War II (Memories Series) by Higgins, Samuel G.. paperback edition. ISBN: 9781555715144.

This is a story of an American POW taken from his memories, his fellow POWs recollections, and a secret diary that he kept in the margins of his Bible. It is a gut-renching tale of how these infantrymen kept hope alive through terror, lonliness, filth and the shattering of their pride. Years later, a package would arrive for Sam Higgins in the summer of 1955. It would be sent by a business associate who had recently visited Stalag IXB in the mountains near Bad Orb, Germany -- the place Higgins had been taken as a POW in WW II. For him, the recollections, the pictures brought back were too much. The package would remain unexamined. Upon the insistence of his family, Higgins would eventually go back to this dark place. He was a Browning automatic rifleman in an infantry company overrun by a battle-hardened SS Waffen German division. With its sub-zero temperatures, winter in the Alsace Mountains of France was unbearable. After five days of fighting, the company would find itself surrounded without a way out. Once captured, Higgins would be harassed, interrogated, and forced to walk for three days through the icy terrain to a 10 by 33 foot cattle car that would take him and 80 other POWs to the infamous Stalag IXB.