Drum Major Henry Barnes Jackson was 40 years old, had served in the Great War in the British Army, and was enjoying his civilian life as much as possible through the Great Depression. His big love of life apart from his family of wife and four daughters was his music. He had remained as a reservist in the army and was a ‘Drum Major’, meaning he was in charge of a band, and had a steady civilian job.

Jackson – the ‘Major’ in his rank – was not a commissioned officer. As a soldier Reservist he was called up almost immediately but given his age of 40 – far higher than the average trooper – he was additionally trained in first aid. He was part of the British Expeditionary Force deployed to France. Although the war had begun in September 1939 there was an uneasy period of calm over the winter. The Americans on the sidelines coined this ‘the Phoney War’.

As the spring of 1940 came, the Germans started moving and soon their massive invasion of France with their pioneering blitzkrieg – lightning war – was showing incredible results with the tanks and dive-bombing Stukas spearheading thrusts into Belgium and France. The British Army was pushed back to Dunkirk and that’s where Jackson was captured.

It was the beginning of five long years. Through all of it our man kept what he called a diary, but it’s more an occasional secret journal. It is clear he only made entries when something out of the normal routine had happened. Most of the time this was something unpleasant. Moved from camp to camp as military prisoners of war they were not destined for extermination, but were used to work at whatever their captors decided on – they were even paid, although this was often haphazard and was merely ‘scrip’ with which they could buy extra food – if there was any – cigarettes and so on.

Written in first-person present-tense, Jackson’s recount moves the narrative along at a good pace. He was always on the scrounge for musical instruments, with which he aimed, ‘to be able to entertain the lads and see the joy and hope in their eyes’. He seems to have been an extremely versatile musician, able to play several instruments but also to write scores: the parts for each instrument in musical notation. Through his captivity he noted down all sorts of performances which he was able to organise together with musician volunteers good and bad, and whatever instruments they could obtain.

Constantly worked; often brutalised by their guards, sometimes shot for attempted escape or acts of rebellion, the prisoners became frailer every month. I might at this point insert some of my own research from my book Atomic Salvation: of those captured by the Germans during the war, 0.9 per cent lost their lives. They were far better off than POWs in the Pacific: one analysis states: ‘Of the 140,000 Americans held by the Japanese, 34 percent – 47,000 – would die in captivity.’  Of 22,376 Australian prisoners of war captured by the Japanese, 8,031 died – 36 per cent of those held.

Life was hard but humdrum. Here’s a typical entry from 1 May 1944, when the Allies were starting to make some serious inroads into Europe and D-Day was a month away:

The news on the war continues to wax and wane. The Russians are continuing to advance, but our air force suffered horribly in a massive air raid on Nuremberg at the end of March. One hundred Allied bombers were shot down and hundreds of men are still missing, presumed dead. We can’t get to know what went wrong, but the Jerries are in high glee and say they have new and effective spotlights and new guns that point upwards and can bring down a plane easily. They jeer and say that our RAF is ‘wiped out’. One simply can’t bear to hear of any further losses, never mind write of it.

I stay sane by keeping myself busy with music. We are putting on show after show for the Jerries. I am just about to complete the score of Iolanthe, which we are putting on in five weeks’ time. Luckily, our Red Cross supplies are still holding out well.

The book’s title deserves a bit of explanation. There were nearly a thousand POW camps operated by the Germans, and according to the Holocaust Encyclopedia, they were part of the ‘more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites (including ghettos).’ Jackson was imprisoned for a while near the ‘Auchwitz complex’ – one of the biggest extermination centres devised by the Nazis.

Unfortunately in the later months of the war the increasing success of the Allied bombing raids meant that sometimes the camps were hit, with resultant fatalities and injuries. As the Allies closed in – the British and Americans from the west, and the Russians from the east – camp after camp was closed and their inhabitants force-marched to new ones. Those who couldn’t make it were doomed. Finally one morning Jackson’s group awoke to find their guards gone, leaving in the middle of the night to escape capture by the Allies.

The book, surprisingly, reaches new heights when Jackson is repatriated back to Britain, finally reaching home ground – which he kissed, as did many others – via a Lancaster bomber converted to carry troops. Many POW accounts gloss over the immediate days around a veteran’s return, but author/granddaughter Jaci Byrne made the right decision keeping these diary notes in.

Jackson arrived home to a world much-changed and a series of surprises. He was detained in hospital as unfit to travel or stay at home, and so it was weeks before his train ride home in carriages full of battered and bruised servicemen. Waiting at home for him was a devastating family surprise – with four daughters you may well guess, but it went beyond that. But other revelations were in store too.

Around a quarter of the book is taken up with the home experience, and here the author shifts into active speech. The society he left was now no more and a new one had taken its place: one where women were much more to the fore, as they had been manning everything from factory floors to searchlights – and many were determined not to let the world return to the status quo of before the war. There was more upheaval too in the working class’s rejection of societal norms.

The Music Maker of Auschwitz concludes its narrative in 1952. It’s a compelling read, and even those who have spent time perusing the POW classics such as The Great Escape will find something new here.