The Cigarette Diaries: A Personal History of Life in a WWII

Army Air Corps 2nd Lieutenant Frank Pratt was captured by the Germans when his B-24 was shot down over Poland on September 13, 1944. He spent the next eight months as a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft I near Barth, Germany. While there, he kept journals that he wrote mostly on the back of cigarette packets from the Red Cross parcels. Together, his three "cigarette diaries" tell the story of day-to-day life of a prisoner of war in Germany in the closing months of WWII.