The German prisoners

 

When my sister and I went off around Europe with our Interrail tickets in 1983 we had a little bit of information about a Catholic Priest in his sixties who lived in West Germany. We had a name and general location but nothing more, and this was pre-Google so the chances looked slim. But with some good luck and judgement we did find him and ended up spending a weekend staying in the house which he and his sister - who worked as his housekeeper - shared in a little village on the Rhine.

And the connection was that this priest, in his twenties, had been one of the group of German prisoners-of-war who were sent to work on my grandparent's smallholding in the North of England in 1944. 

My grandparents and my mother and her siblings liked the POWs and got on well with them. They were hard-working, polite and friendly. They got to know the group who worked regularly for them, and they are the young men in prisoner uniforms in the photo above. My mother and her sister are the young women in the middle. The youngest one they all called 'Bubi', which means 'baby', because I think he had only been 17 years old when he was taken prisoner in North Africa.

My grandparents were not very typical of the other smallholders I think, because my grandmother was Irish and catholic (from county Kilkenny) and my grandfather, though English, was probably even more Irish in his outlook and sense of self than she was. So although he served in the local Home Guard (and was in any case providing essential war support through the pigs and chickens they raised and all the crops they grew) he had no illusions about the British Empire and had indeed said that no child of his would 'wear the khaki'. His children responded very literally to this by signing up for the blue serge of the RAF. 

And when my grandmother was asked by a neighbour why she was providing the prisoners with the same food as her family (rather than what? bread and marg?) she replied that if one of her children was a prisoner in Germany she would want them to be treated in the  same way that she treated the prisoners that worked for them. I like the fact that the first instinct she had was humane and moral. My granny was a scary-looking matriarch when we encountered her as children, but had a good moral compass in this kind of thing.

I have a wonderful stash of letters that various of the prisoners sent back to my Grandparents over the next ten years or so, including one sent on the day that one of them finally went back to his home city about two years after the war. Anyone who has seen the photos knows what kind of a country they went back to, and some of them found themselves in the much less hospitable Russian zone.

One of the prisoners was not able to get a message through to his parents to say he was alive (and they, vice versa) until about two years after the end of the war. Others came back to essentially piles of rubble where their hometowns had been. It is now probably too late for any of them to be alive (even Bubi would be 97) but I may still be able to contact some of their descendants to tell them more about the experience they had in England. 

I was told that after the war was over, one of the prisoners was sitting down to a good breakfast in the house and he said "I'll tell you what. If there is ever another war, we will just cut out the middle man and parachute into the Quinn's field". I like this story of hope and common humanity.