Photos in a Box

This is my uncle, Joachim Kessler. I should say he is my pseudo-uncle, in the sense that he was not actually related to me in the way uncles usually are. He was a friend of my mothers and her family when they where younger. His wife had passed away around the time I was born, and he never had any children of his own. He was a really good man who took all of his adopted nephews on trips and instilled in each of us special memories that will last a lifetime. Recently my cousin who lovingly had cared for him the last several years as his health deteriorated gave me a box of photos, documents, and a small book. The photos included my uncle long before I knew him. During a time of which he never spoke. A time in his life I knew little about, and was simply never discussed. But these snapshots and documents paint a nearly complete picture of his time in service of the German Infantry, his capture, and his life as a prisoner of war in one of Canada's most notorious camps of WWII. Clearly these documents meant a great deal to my uncle. They were a reminder of a different time, and era the world has tried so hard to move past. Now I have been given the honor of preserving and maintaining these items. I have decided they are too interesting to not share, therefore this blog will be my vessel in which I preserve the timeline of events, and tell the story of a man that would become if nothing else, one of the great 'uncles' of all time.