The historical value of letters written by prisoners of war (POWs) is undisputed. Written in situ, they capture the immediacy of experiences ‘there and then’. However, POW letters should be understood not only as documents, but as relational practices through which social bonds are produced, negotiated, and sustained. They are addressed, purposeful texts, and thus fundamentally different from wartime diaries, which are more inward-looking. We should also remember that POW correspondence is inherently performative with a specific recipient in mind, and under conditions of censorship it is never neutral.
POW letters are not mere artifacts; they actively do things. They offer reassurance and express emotions, as proposed by Speech Act Theory. The correspondence of my grandfather Josef Stöckl, an Austrian Wehrmacht soldier during the Second World War and later POW in British captivity, demonstrates that POW letters were a critical psychological lifeline. Letter-writing was a crucial and ritualised coping mechanism for both the prisoners and their families: an act of connection while physical presence was impossible. POW letters therefore offer us valuable insights into how senders and recipients performed ‘being a family’ during prolonged separation. At a time when many families remain separated by migration, conflict, or displacement, these letters resonate strongly with ongoing questions about how relationships may be sustained across distance.
Called up for Wehrmacht service in January 1944 aged seventeen, Josef was among scores of teenage conscripts – mostly poorly trained and ill-equipped – drafted late in a desperate attempt to halt the Allied advance across Europe. Following his capture in Normandy in August 1944, he was initially held in England at Camp 186 in Colchester, before being transferred by ship to British-controlled Egypt, where he spent two years in POW camps in the Suez Canal Zone. Such long-distance transfers and extended periods of captivity were characteristic of Axis prisoners in Allied hands, many of whom were dispersed across the British Empire and Allied territories and assigned to labour, with little certainty about the duration of their internment. In Egypt, Josef was quickly separated from German soldiers – as was common practice for infantrymen ranks considered lower risk – and assigned to the Independent Austria Working Company 2720. These labour units comprised so-called ‘white’ POWs: that is, POWs who – during a screening process on arrival – were categorised as non-Nazis or anti-Nazis. Other than providing a workforce for the British in Egypt, they attended a de-Nazifying re-education programme for the prospect of a democratic post-war Austria.
Between September 1944 and November 1946, Josef wrote diligently – 82 letters and postcards have survived. This two-year exchange between him and his family offers us a window into how his relationships were maintained, negotiated, and performed.
One striking practice was his careful tracking of the letters: he numbered each one and monitored which had been sent, received, or delayed. As he explained in a letter written from Camp 306 in June 1946, ‘Today I am writing Letter No. 5… so that you can see which letters have arrived and which have not,’ asking his parents to report missing messages and noting the ‘very irregular’ postal service. This monitoring extended to others, as Josef tracked who in the camp had received mail and who had not. Describing himself as ‘still writing into the unknown,’ he noted that others had already received letters while he had ‘no news’.
The critical function of letters for psychological coping is especially visible in Josef’s responses to gaps in communication. Periods of silence prompted increasingly urgent questions – ‘Are you receiving anything at all?’ – while the arrival of letters brought intense relief. Receiving news from home was ‘the greatest luck of my life… a gift from heaven,’ he wrote in January 1946, having already ‘given up all hope’. Even the sign-offs – urgent injunctions to ‘Please write to me very often!’ – underscore the emotional weight placed on maintaining contact.
Josef’s letters are saturated with emotional labour as he – deliberately or subconsciously – engaged in the socially structured work of managing the emotional tone of his letters to shape his own affective state and that of his family. For example, he often expressed optimism and foregrounded resilience to shield his parents from distress as he actively performed being a son. More specifically, Josef engaged in deliberate emotional work by repeatedly reassuring his parents about his wellbeing and urging them not to worry. ‘You can be completely unconcerned’, he wrote from Camp 186 in Colchester, ‘I am in the best of health and I am doing well.’ In this sense, the letters also protected his family from the harsher realities of POW captivity, all the while foregrounding more positive aspects of his experience such as ‘swimming in Bitter Lake’ and taking part in a ‘football and handball match against a German labour company’.
The work of ‘doing family’ is also evident in Josef’s efforts to mark special occasions from afar. He imaginatively recreated Mother’s Day, writing to his mother: ‘I cannot see you, I cannot give you anything, not even a bouquet of flowers. The lilac will be blooming at home now. Have someone bring you some and think of it as being from me’. Here, his emotional expression becomes substitutive; Josef imaginatively inserted himself into a familiar scene at home, thereby recreating his presence. References to shared memories were another important means through which Josef maintained closeness, as were forward-looking expressions that imagined reunion and a life beyond captivity. ‘I still hope for a Christmas celebration together.’, he wrote to his father on 11 August 1946 from Camp 380 in Fanara, and in a letter to his mother he described long evenings spent reminiscing with a fellow POW where ‘old memories are revived, and in our thoughts we walk through the beautiful places – mountains, lakes, winter and summer in the Salzkammergut.’
Despite the semi-public nature of POW correspondence – subject as it was to censorship – many of the letters are strikingly intimate. Reading the exchanges between parents and son at times felt like an intrusion; great emotional depth could be conveyed even within constrained communicative conditions. Josef’s parents used the letters as a vital form of emotional support. After years of separation, forms of parenting at a distance became clearly visible, for example through reassurance about the future and encouragement not to ‘give up’. In her letters, Josef’s mother, Juliana, repeatedly comforted her son, insisting that ‘the worst is over’ and that he had ‘much to look forward to’. This mothering at a distance was also expressed through anticipatory acts of care: preparing special foods for his return, setting aside money, and ensuring the house will be warm. In one letter from August 1946, Juliana wrote that she had ‘already put beautiful apples aside’ and dried pears for Kletzenbrot – Austrian fruit bread – foods he had not had ‘in a long time’. These gestures projected care into an imagined future of reunion. At the same time, the letters provided a space for the expression of everyday affection between mother and son, captured in small but telling phrases such as ‘Don’t work too hard’.
Letters between father and son may reflect a different dimension of relational exchange, in this case rooted in shared experience. Josef’s father Friedrich, himself a former POW during the First World War, drew on this past, creating a sense of solidarity between them. Correspondence between siblings served yet another purpose: it provided a space for the expression of frustration as well as mutual support. Letters exchanged between Josef and his older brother Fritzl conveyed anxieties about the dire situation in post-war Austria, concerns for their parents, and, at the same time, a shared orientation towards the future. On one occasion, Josef’s brother reassured him that once he returned, it would be ‘full steam ahead into the future’ because his profession was essential for the ‘reconstruction’. As such, different familial relationships – mother-son, father-son, and sibling exchanges – each cultivated distinct forms of affective labour. For the Stöckl family, letters were crucial to emotional survival. They were a means of sustaining Josef’s sense of belonging, enabling his parents and siblings to help him still feel part of the family despite their prolonged separation.
For a language and communication researcher like me, POW letters differ fundamentally from diaries in their relational orientation. An affective practice, they enable prisoners and their families to enact kinship across distance, censorship and uncertainty. In doing so, they reveal how relationships are not simply maintained but actively produced. They illuminate not only the conditions of Josef’s captivity and civilian life in Austria during and after the war, but the persistent emotional work through which families like his sustained connection and belonging in very difficult times. However, their dual character – simultaneously immediate and constructed – demands careful interpretation.
Writing letters was a highlight of the week for my grandfather Josef and his fellow POWs, with Sundays set aside for this purpose. The process, however, was strictly regulated: prisoners were allowed two letters and four postcards each month, and all correspondence was subject to censorship. The letters exchanged between Josef and his family are therefore as revealing for what they omit as for what they articulate. Reading the letters today, I am struck that there is no direct reference to De-Nazification nor the atrocities of the Nazi regime – a silence that raises difficult questions about what was known, what could safely be written, and what people chose not to say.