Overview

During World War II, Sergeant Angelo Spinelli was captured by the Germans on Valentine's Day, 1943, and shipped to Stalag IIIB near Furstenburg, Germany. Using cigarettes obtained from the Red Cross, Spinelli bribed a guard at the camp to procure a Voitlander camera and film. Life Behind Barbed Wire features photographs Spinelli took during his time in prison camp. Of the more than 1,000 photographs Spinelli risked his life to take, more than 100 appear in this book. The remarkable photographs, enhanced by Lewis H. Carlson's explanatory text, feature prisoners trading with the guards; combating ticks, lice, and other vermin; preparing meager rations on ingenious cooking contraptions; fighting off boredom by playing baseball, soccer, and football; putting on musical and dramatic theatre presentations; and worshiping in a chapel the prisoners themselves built. These snapshots give us a window on camp life where catastrophe was normal and normalcy was often catastrophic. In addition, there are dramatic shots of liberation from Stalag IIIA, where Spinelli and some 38,000 other Allied prisoners had been moved during the final months of the war. Mounted as a traveling exhibit by the National Prisoner of War Museum in Andersonville, Georgia, 92 of these photographs are currently on display at the Italian American Museum in New York City. Before being captured in North Africa, Angelo Spinelli was a decorated combat photographer in the Signal Corps in World War II. After the war, he and his brother owned a successful jewelry business in New York City for more than fifty years. Spinelli now lives in Hallandale, Florida.

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9780823223053

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.,. unveils a unique trove of images that had gone unseen for over a half-century. The one hundred photos reproduced in the book represents less than 10 percent of the total collection, which Spinelli produced by risking his life.

...an absorbing, fluent memoir. GCoBooklist

Author Information

Lewis H. Carlson is Professor Emeritus of History at Western Michigan University. He has written or edited ten books, including We Were Each Other's Prisoners: An Oral History of World War II American and German Prisoners of War and Remembered Prisoners of a Forgotten War: An Oral History of Korean War POWs.

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