Eric Pleasants is 73 and fighting the hardest battle of his extraordinary life. A strongman turned martial arts instructor, he survived German POW camps by joining the Britische Freikorps, and seven years in a Siberian prison camp for smuggling people across the German border. He believes that his highly developed sense of personal survival and his fanatical physical fitness have helped him recover from a massive stroke which would have killed many and crippled most.