The Long March Revisited

In late January 1945 Flt Lt Douglas Finlay DFC was one of 80,000 Allied POWs to be forced out of their camps and ordered to march across northern Germany, a march that claimed thousands of lives. Seventy years later to the weeks of marching I retraced the route my Uncle Douglas, using his POW diary, and 2,000 fellow POWs from the North Compound of Stalag Luft III (location of The Wooden Horse escape and The Great Escape), took on The Long March from Sagan to Lubeck where they reached their point of liberation on 2nd May 1945. Photography in this context is a language of immediacy to represent history and place. The images show the untold resilience of the human condition and mind to somehow keep moving forwards, not knowing exactly where they were going and what the final end point would be…walking towards freedom.