Katie's emotional pilgrimage to father's prison camp

"It was very vivid to him, yet what he had done the day before or indeed, who I really was, was virtually inaccessible to him. He is the reason I started to fundraise for Alzheimer's Research UK," said his daughter Katie Foster, who has returned from a pilgrimage in which she literally followed the footsteps of her father's wartime experiences.

"I am immensely glad that I eventually got to see the place I had heard about all my childhood and until Tim died of Alzheimer's in 2007," said Katie, of Newport.

Tim, who hailed from Hull, was the driver of a Bren Gun Carrier and he was captured on May 29, 1940, during the Dunkirk retreat.

The German officer really did say: "For you, the war is over."

Lance Corporal Mahoney was to spend five years at Stalag VIIIb, which was then in Germany but under redrawn borders is now in Poland, and was forced to work in a coal mine in Knurov, a two hour drive away.

He had a good friend in the camp, Bob Matthews, and they had a secret radio under the hut's floorboards until the guards found it.

In 1945 he and other prisoners were forced by their German captors on the notorious Long March in freezing temperatures, taking them westwards away from the advancing Russian forces.

Desperate to survive and fearing they wouldn't, Tim, Bob, and another prisoner hid in a thin aperture of a barn wall during one overnight stop. They stayed there quietly for two or three nights, hoping to evade discovery but eventually, desperate for water, emerged as they heard approaching vehicles and marching troops. Luckily they turned out to be Americans.

"His experiences affected his whole life – I guess we'd now call it PTSD," said Katie, who chairs the Alzheimer's Research UK Shropshire fundraising group.

"Most men apparently didn't talk about their war, as I later discovered, but I grew up hearing many of his same stories several times, but I just thought it was normal."

Tim moved to Shropshire in 1996 and Katie determined to reunite him with Bob before his dementia got too bad, and with the help of a Times journalist the two old soldiers, by now in their early 80s, were back in touch in 2000, the 60th anniversary year of Dunkirk.

This month Katie fulfilled her dream of travelling to Poland to visit those sites which had been so important in her father's life, meeting up in Krakow with a number of others on similar pilgrimages.

At the Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery there she was asked to read a poem next to the memorial to those POWs who had died in the camps and been brought there post-war.

From there the group travelled to Lambinowice – previously called Lamsdorf – the site of Stalag VIIIb. On June 23, 1940, Tim and other captives who had been transported by cramped and insanitary cattle trucks got off at a railway stop to trudge the final mile or so to the camp.

"I felt a huge surge of emotion as you can imagine because we were in the middle of the countryside. Over a smallholding fence, it was pointed out to us that some old cattle trucks, left over from the war, had been converted into animal sheds, perhaps for chickens or pigs.

"From there I walked along the lane that led to the track which in turn led up to the site of the camp, known apparently as Chestnut Alley. As I walked along, I had such a vivid feeling of the fact that I was literally walking in my father's footsteps.

"I tried to record my walk, talking as I went, to send home to my daughters. I managed about one minute but it was so very hard to keep speaking.

"Now the forest has encroached hugely on the site of the British huts, whereas the Russian area a mile away still has some original huts in place, though ruinous.

"In what was the German Command HQ there – a Victorian era building – there is now the Stalag VIIIb Lamsdorf/Lambinowice museum. I thought how astonished Tim would have been by that!

"The museum and its surroundings were mesmerising and disturbing for me and for others. I have over the years visited Dachau, the terrible sites in Cambodia and in Vietnam, but this time it was personal. Many of us felt very sad indeed the more we understood what our relatives had been through."

While at Lambinowice the party visited the Polish National Memorial for All Prisoners of War.

"It was astonishingly beautiful, in a peaceful and almost unknown part of the area. There I placed a candle and a photo of my dad before and after his time at Stalag VIIIb."

She added: "I remember my father so clearly as a very kind, non-judgmental and forgiving man, who became a fervent European.

"He encouraged me to have a German pen friend in the 1960s and to visit her and stay with her family. From there tourism, heritage and travel have largely been my life.

"He never bore a grudge and always made us laugh. Whenever Hitler appeared in old footage on TV, he would always chuckle and say 'There's my old boss.' I am guessing now that was his way of dealing with it all.

"I am now considering that perhaps I could go back to Poland next year and try to research, then retrace, the route Tim and his mates took on the Long March and from which they escaped."

Bob has also passed on, but Katie stays in touch with his son and widow in Portsmouth.

Alzheimer's, she says, is a devastating disease.

"We eventually started the official Alzheimer's Research UK Shropshire fundraising group couple of years ago.

"There are only a handful of us, but we do our best to raise awareness of the need for research – else we will never find any kind of meaningful treatment nor cure."