A New York homeowner discovered approximately 300 pages of once-classified World War II prisoner accounts while cleaning his garage, uncovering government records that have since been recovered by the National Archives.
Jason Hurdle, 74, found the documents inside a previously unnoticed crawlspace at his Waterloo property, where he had lived for 14 years, the Daily Mail reported.
The files bore “secret” markings and contained firsthand descriptions of captivity written by American prisoners of war.
Hurdle brought the papers to a local library, which referred the discovery to the National Archives and Records Administration. Officials subsequently collected the records and confirmed their authenticity.
Although the documents had once been classified, they are now being preserved alongside similar accounts and are expected to be digitized.
How the records reached the garage remains unclear. Hurdle said the property had belonged to his wife’s family for generations but could not explain the documents’ presence.
He mentioned that a former neighbor had memorabilia associated with an ancestor, although no connection between that collection and the recovered files had been established.
The accounts were written after prisoners reached Camp Lucky Strike in Normandy, where they were asked to document their experiences for intelligence gathering.
Records collected at the camp also supplied evidence for military tribunals examining wartime abuses, according to the Daily Mail’s account of the discovery.
The recovered pages describe deprivation, dangerous transportation conditions and the deaths of fellow prisoners.
One account, written by Julian Candelaria, recalled men being packed into railway boxcars without adequate food, water or sanitation.
He also described exposure to bombing and an extended march with little food and no medical assistance.
The Daily Mail, citing reporting by The Washington Post, said Candelaria’s obituary indicated that he refused to discuss his imprisonment by German captors after returning home.
Another former prisoner, Henry Daly, described taking cover during a bombing and losing two companions whose names he could no longer recall.
“We ran for cover, but two of my companions [whose] names I do not [recall] were killed by the bombs,” Daly wrote.
Daly’s great-grandson, Michael Yanes, said the veteran had not shared his wartime experiences with relatives.
Yanes also recalled that Daly sometimes slept in a park because he struggled to remain inside his home.
For the family, the recovered testimony provided details that had been absent from their understanding of his life.
“Seeing these words written is quite heavy. This is all new to us. The emotions. I can’t even describe,” Yanes said, according to the Daily Mail.
The National Archives had not included the newly recovered accounts on its list of missing documents, the newspaper reported.
Agency spokeswoman Grace McCaffrey emphasized the importance of preserving government records and making the nation’s history available to the public.
The discovery joins other recently recovered historical materials described in the report, including Navy records associated with an engineer involved in Apollo missions.
Those materials included blueprints and sound recordings. The prisoner accounts will remain with related National Archives holdings as officials prepare them for digitization and future public access.
