So intensely busy about rehearsals and writing parts, teaching Greek, cooking gelatine-and-chips, planning a chamber-music concert and acting as usual as a general confidant and receiver of everyone’s troubles...
- John Crook, letter dated 20th December 1943
Christmas letters written by the Cambridge academic John Crook while he was a 22-year-old POW during the Second World War have been placed online.
From his prison camp in central Europe, Crook, who would go on to become a Fellow and Professor of Ancient History at St John’s College, wrote unyieldingly positive Christmas letters to his family, demonstrating a remarkably steadfast character in spite of the harsh conditions in which he found himself.
The letters are now held in the Special Collections of the College’s Library, where they are available for research, but selected items are now being made available to a global audience as well through the website.
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Image: One of several letters Crook sent from his prison camp, Stalag Luft VIII-B
Credit: Reproduced by permission of St John's College
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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