Gerald was first sent to Alderney for ‘compulsory employment’ and then on to France where he was imprisoned at Saint-Lô and then Lisieux Prison. Around 6 June 1944 a bomb dropped near Lisieux and several prisoners, including Gerald, escaped. He was apprehended by the Gestapo shortly afterwards and brutally treated for several days before being imprisoned at Fresnes, outside Paris.

At the end of July 1944 he was sent to Buchenwald concentration camp, arriving after a five-day journey in a sealed cattle truck. Gerald’s job at the camp was to remove ashes from the crematorium. He witnessed both dogs and people hung; he was beaten and shut up in a confined place for telling the guards that they wouldn’t win the war. He also had two fingers cut off from his left hand, no doubt without anaesthetic or sterile equipment, and certainly without antibiotics, rather than receiving appropriate treatment for a saw cut.

Gerald was later transferred to the military POW camp of Sagan Luft III and then in December 1944 to Kreuzburg (Ilag VIII). He arrived in Spittal in Austria in January 1945.

He survived the war but not without severe long-term damage to his physical health, including having ‘lost the lining of his stomach’ and the need for false teeth because all of his teeth were knocked out in Buchenwald. In later life Gerald received a war pension ‘for the disabilities psychoneurosis and sciatica, as having been aggravated by detention.’ A letter written in 2004 to Gerald’s wife, Audrey, from the Veterans Agency said a little more about his PTSD after the war: ‘Following his imprisonment with the Germans, Mr Bird was suffering from psychoneurosis as a result of never knowing whether he was going to be destroyed or not. People were being gassed and hanged and he was starved and knocked about.’

Gerald Bird was successful in receiving compensation for his time in Buchenwald. He was not compensated for his period of imprisonment before that.