Shot down by Germans over occupied France, Royal Canadian Air Force navigator John Harvie was the only member of his Bomber Command crew to survive the crash. After hiding at a French farmhouse for several days, he started back to England with the help of the French Resistance, but his journey ended abruptly when a spy handed him over to the Gestapo.

Harvie spent a month in solitary confinement in Paris and then was transported by boxcar to Buchenwald. He describes the appalling conditions, the indignities, and the extreme hardship he and his fellow prisoners endured there. Later he was transferred to Stalag Luft III POW camp where, with food from the Red Cross and the comradeship of fellow prisoners, his body and spirit were restored.

As the Russian army advanced into Germany, Harvie and the other POWs undertook the long march from eastern Germany to a camp near Bremen and then to Lubeck, near the Danish border, where he remained until the Allied forces broke through and he was liberated by the British army.