Description
PROMISE KEEPER
A Soldier’s Promise, Kept Across Enemy Lines
The Wartime Testimony of Fusilier Eric Armstrong
RELEASE DATE: 14 NOVEMBER 2026
In 1940, as Europe fell beneath the shadow of war, a young soldier from Milford, County Armagh, found himself far from home, cold, frightened and uncertain whether he would live to see another morning.
He did—but the young man who returned was not the same one who had gone away.
Eric Armstrong had grown up in rural Ulster between two world wars, in a home shaped by hard work, family and faith, before enlisting like thousands of his generation.
Captured during the retreat from France in 1940, Eric was taken into captivity. The years that followed brought prison camps, forced labour, hunger and the daily uncertainty of life behind barbed wire. At Stalag XXA and the labour camps beyond it, survival depended on endurance, resourcefulness and the kindness of others.
One act of kindness stayed with him for life. In Poland, a local family reached beyond the divisions of war to help a frightened young prisoner. From that friendship came a promise—one Eric carried home and kept quietly through the years, until, thirty-four years later, he returned to Poland with his wife to find the family who had once helped him survive.
Like many who came home from war, Eric seldom spoke of what he had endured. His children heard only fragments: memories at the bedside, stories softened for young ears, and silences they understood only much later.
Compiled by his daughter, Lynda Pollock, from Eric’s memoirs, wartime correspondence and the family archive, Promise Keeper preserves the testimony of a generation taught to endure without complaint.
For all who have wondered what became of the men who returned home, and why so many could never speak of it, this is one man’s answer.