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I was born in Poland but now I live in Coventry in England.
I am on the panel of Elders because at 14 I was sent with my family to a slave labour camp in Russia. In 1939 all the newspapers
were full of the possibility of war. In Poland there were manoevres of the Polish Army as early as May 1939. I can remember
watching a big parade of our Polish Cavalry. The sight of 300 horses made a big impression on me. My schooling was interrupted
at 14 when the Russians invaded Eastern Poland at the same time that the Germans invaded Western Poland. The Russian soldiers
came on 10th February 1940. They woke us at 2am and told us we have one hour to get some things on the sledges and pull it
to the station. My father was guarded by a soldier while my Mother and I collected what we could. We knew that we would all
be shot if we tried to run or resist.
Of course now children are supposed to be protected from everything, but at that
time we were just part of the game. There was no-one there to counsel us. We were pushed into cattle trucks with many other
families and then the trucks were locked. There was no privacy, no food except the little bits we had brought. We could not
get out for anything at all even if people were sick or died, and there were guards there to shoot us if we tried to escape.
Our journey would last a whole month. Every few days we were given water and for the first week we only got that, then after
the second week we were given salt fish soup and some bread. In the labour camp we heard nothing of the outside world, only
rumours brought by strangers and of course they told us only that Poland was destroyed. We were in that camp for two years.
When Hitler attacked Russia an amnesty was declared and we were allowed to travel to southern Russia where a Polish army
was forming. There were about 500 of us and first we travelled on barges drawn by tugs for hundreds of miles, then train -
we had 1,000 miles to travel. During the journey we had little or no food - many died - until we arrived in Kazakhstan where
Polish forces were forming. Sick and starving though we were it was a joy to see Polish soldiers and flags again.
I was to become a Cadet and have the honour of joining that army to fight to re-create my lost country. Cadet School was
based on Military Discipline. We had visits from representatives of the Polish Air Force and the Army. This was to recruit
us to one or the other. We were all eager to get into action after all the suffering we had been through and seen. We wanted
to contribute something to the effort. I was recruited to become a Pilot in the Free Polish Air Force and so I came to Britain.
Feliks Chustecki
Although I must, as a small boy, often visited my grandfather's
house in Blondel Street I have very few memories of the street. I do recall the house, crowded with furniture, the copper
boiler in the back scullery, the tiny back yard still with a bomb shelter, the narrow front "garden" with the stubs
of iron railings which were cut off during the war.
The front room was only used for "best", I recall
an old upright piano and a plant on a stand (an aspidistra?) and there was a table and chairs, the chairs had polished wood
backs of "balloon back" type; the only "easy" chairs were one or two cane chairs, dark with age. Under
the plant pot and ornaments were "dollies" crocheted by my aunt. In the back room as a large table with a scrubbed
wood top and draws under where the knives and forks were kept, I think there was a dresser and a large fireplace with a large
mantelpiece above carrying various jars in which things were kept. A cloth hanging hung around the mantelpiece. The back kitchen
had a gas cooker, china sink with wooden draining board and another large fireplace, there was aslo a larder where food was
kept (this was before the days of refridgerators for all). All I recall of the back scullery is the copper, this was a large
copper tub in a brick built surround and with a wooden lid, it was heated by a gas ring below (it was probably converted from
an earlier coal fired copper) and was used to heat water for washing clothes and for bathing water. The back kitchen and scullery
had what I recall thinking of as a stone floor but was probable concrete painted red with the same paint that people then
painted their front doorstep. White sheets were boiled in the copper and then dried in a mangle. For bathing a galvanized
iron bath was used in front of the fire in the back kitchen, hot water being carried in from the copper in the scullery. I
cannot recall upstairs; I presume that there were two bedrooms in the main part of the house and another over the back kitchen
and scullery. The toilet must have been in the back yard behind the scullery. The back wall of the yard must have backed onto
the yards of Millgrove Street, but that was another world.
Hello, my name is David Barry. I was born at No. 9 Duffield
Street, next to the railway embankment, in 1947. As a boy I used to look from my window at night to see the great glow from
the boiler furnaces when the steam locomotives 'parked' on the line on their way into or out of the station.
There was an air-raid shelter in our back-yard, and we used to climb up it then over huge wooden pylons to get on the embankment.
There, we would make our 'den' then do a quick vanishing act if any railway officials turned up. I recall how
troops passing by on a train threw sticks of chewing gum and sweets to the kids on the embankment; I think these generous
soldiers were Americans, probably enroute to a post-war base. There were quite a few houses in our row, and a smaller number
facing us, but elsewhere, all around, were prefabs built on the rubble of the debris, which we called 'debree'. There
was still a massive area of open land, all of which had been flattened by the German bombers aiming for the railway lines.
Duffield Street ( now long gone, unfortunately) led into Stainforth Road, which always seemed a much tougher and more violent
area. I used to walk there most days on my way to Latchmere Junior Mixed School, and remember seeing naked children playing
in the dust. Sometimes, there would be the sound of a violent 'domestic' taking place or the sight of a full-blooded
fist-fight on waste land between the houses. Close to the school was the site of the swimming baths where we would have fun
splashing about in the 'penny bare-bums' section. My earliest memory is of hiding under the covers of my pram
as mum pushed me down the road towards the market near Arding and Hobbs. On the way we would pass under the long railway bridge
which seemed so shadowy and mysterious, especially on hearing the massive metalic rumble of the trains passing overhead.
So, with the hood up on my pram, I sought refuge from this strange world. Much later, I would go with my pals to a storage
yard just pass the bridge and play by sliding down the steep earth slope on old sheets of corrugated iron. Quite often, we
would go to Battersea Park and catch fish in the 'breeder' area while one of us kept a lookout for the 'parkie'.
Sometimes we carried the fish home in jars or cans and put them in a metal bath in our yard, but we stopped doing that because
the fish didn't like tapwater and always died. Later, we loved going to the fun fair at night. Because we were naughty
boys, we would gather at the Rotor, a ride built like a huge drum. As it started to spin, the floor would drop away and the
unfortunate customer 'victims' would be pinned to the walls by centrifugal force. Of course, the same force would
cause the girls' dresses to ride up, to the delight of all the lads. As kids we would go to the cinema on Saturday mornings,
to join all the other young 'Tooting Granadiers' at the big cinema at the top of the hill behind the station. Sometimes,
there was a singing session on stage, and you got some sweets if it was your birthday (or you said it was your birthday!).
As for the station itself, I can remember feelings of apprehension walking through the long pedestrian tunnels that led from
the Approach to the exit below; there was something sinister about that route. On leaving that exit. I would walk pass the
station warehouse units. One of these stored bananas and sometimes the men working there would throw us a banana or two. Although
we were very young, sometimes we went to a corner shop on the way to buy a packet of five Weights for a quick smoke. I think
we were aged about nine or ten at the time. As for the Station Approach itself, I recall an amusement arcade there with a
large 'singing sailor' puppet in the entrance. It would rock about in its glass case, roaring with laughter. I can
picture all this so vividly. Unfortunately, it's now part of 'another life'. We moved when I was eleven to Tooting
and the old houses of Duffield Street were bulldozed to make way for new council property.
It was hard to believe that just after what was thought
to be Hollywood’s greatest decade there seemed to be such lost promise. With the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, and the
resulting outbreak of World War II, the American film industry suffered a slump during the early part of the 1940s. As it
did following the Great Depression, Hollywood would have to again find a formula for survival. The world was in turmoil,
and oddly enough, it would be this very same War that helped start Hollywood on its comeback. In an effort to support the
national war effort, Hollywood studios began producing a large number of movies that became war-time favorites. One of the
classic motion pictures of all-time was also a subtle wartime propaganda film Casablanca, was released in 1942. Many stars
of the time enlisted in the Armed Forces, or provided entertainment for the troops, resulting in a large boost in morale for
both the military and the general public.
These war related efforts showed immediate results, as major movie studio
profits began to grow to record levels. As the war drew to an end, so did the number of films produced that were war related.
However, the influence of World War II has a permanent residence in the history of the motion picture industry. Some of the
most memorable war-time classics would include Guadalcanal Diary, Bataan, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, The Story of G.I. Joe,
They Were Expendable, A Walk In The Sun, and a great many more. There were also a number of pictures dedicated to portraying
life after war for the returning veteran. One of the most well-known of these stories is also one of the best films in motion
picture history – The Best Years of Our Lives. This multi-Oscar winning picture (including Best Picture) touched the
hearts and lives of all Americans.
I cannot remember our house very well as I spent most
of my time in nan’s. When you came out of our back door there was a gate in the fence that was the entrance to nan’s
back yard. In the yard was the huge cast iron clothes mangle and fixed to the fence was the meat safe with its perforated
zinc covered door in which was kept the perishable foodstuff. The tin bath was also hung on the fence. The entrance to the
outside toilet, complete with newspaper toilet paper, was also there. From the yard was the back door to the kitchen, which
also served as the washroom. The kitchen contained a gas cooker, coal fuelled copper boiler to do the washing in which was
also used to heat the water for the weekly bath. On the wall was nailed a wooden fruit box with a shelf in it, I remember
it was painted brown. Papa kept his toiletries in here; his hairbrush (I don’t know what the hairbrush was for as he
was almost bald) and comb, cut throat razor, shaving soap and leather strop to hone the razor on. Hung on the box, on a nail
was the same toilet paper that was in the outside toilet. This was used to wipe the soap off the razor when he was shaving.
On the windowsill were papa’s false teeth, in a cup of water with no handle. He only wore these when he went on holiday
or to the cinema. The cinema was visited once a week with his neighbour. When papa came home from the cinema the teeth were
always in his pocket wrapped in his handkerchief.
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After World War II began in l939, my brother and I with
all the other children in the neighborhood schools, were evacuated to the country to be away from the heavily industrial Birmingham/Coventry
area close to Smethwick. My brother, age 7, was in elementary school and I, age l2, had just started at Holly Lodge High School
for Girls, in the 3rd form.
We were sent to Wellington, Shropshire, to separate homes, rather losing track of each
other for a while. I don't remember how we traveled there. It was overwhelming to be leaving home in the first place,
and more so when I found myself being placed in first one home and then another. I finally was settled, with a schoolmate,
in a very small house located on Watling Street, the old Roman road that skirted the town. It was only in retrospect that
I realized the enormity of the sacrifice our hosts, a young couple with a small child - giving up their bedroom for our use
and taking care of us while they struggled with the horrors of wartime. Their name was Mr. & Mrs. Smart and I recall this
serious young husband trying to be a figure of authority but tempered with great kindness - how difficult it must have been
to take on such a responsibility! My brother was on the other side of town and I rarely saw him.
It was not until
many years later that I learned of my father's concerted efforts during this time to arrange through my mother's brother
and sister to get us out of England to the U.S for the duration of the war. He had voluntarily re-enlisted in the Merchant
Navy (where he had served as an l8-year old in the last year of World War I) and was most concerned about the ceaseless bombing
of adjacent Coventry, together with his decidedly uncertain future. I will always remember his leaving, watching him walking
down the road and out of sight, and we never saw him again. After endless efforts on the part of the U.S. relatives who had
emigrated to the States in about l923 or so, permission was granted for us to leave, with my mother's sister and husband
assuming full financial responsibility for us for an indefinite period of time. Then my brother and I came home to Smethwick
in l940, I back to Holly Lodge and Max to his school. My mother didn't tell us we were about to embark on this truly amazing
journey until a few days before we were to leave. I was not doing well at school, to the extent of being summoned to the head
mistress's office (an awesome event)! What a relief to gasp out that I was actually leaving the country in a few days…
And so our second evacuation came to pass. This was, I believe, the last officially evacuated group of children to
leave. We somehow reached Liverpool and boarded the ship, actually sleeping through a couple of nights of the worst bombings
the city suffered. We then left as part of a very large convoy. In addition to the group of British children, about 25 plus
their mothers, our ship had a contingent of Dutch sailors on board (for what reason I don't know) but thank goodness they
were there as they took charge of us, marching me round and round the deck, holding my head while I vomited continuously -
usually over the side - and looked out for my brother.
The convoy was huge and inevitably it was attacked by U-boats.
Two ships went down while we watched - it seemed so unreal. But being assembled at our lifeboat stations waiting to abandon
ship seemed quite real, and my mother deciding to run back to our cabin for some vital papers nearly gave me a heart attack!
The convoy then dispersed and we continued on our own. The crossing took 15 days as we zigzagged our way across, landing in
Boston about September l, l940. Together with family from New Jersey, which is just across the Hudson River from New York
City, we were met by what seemed to be hundreds of reporters all talking furiously and incomprehensibly. I was unable to walk,
suffering from an infected toe and quite debilitated from so many days of seasickness. I lay on the back seat of my uncle's
car, which was new and therefore could not be driven over 40 mph until it was "broken in". It takes about 3-l/2
to 4 hours today to drive from New Jersey to Boston, so one can imagine what an interminable journey that was! My mother and
brother traveled in her brother-in-law's car, he fuming at the slow pace. We finally reached our destination - I to bed
and a doctor called in, my brother and mother holding up well.
The next day brought several irate phone calls to
my poor mother, accusing her of talking too freely to the newspaper reporters, giving away classified information, including
the startling news that my father was captain of one of the ships in our convoy - which was quite untrue.
My father
died in l944 as a result of exposure caused by his ship being torpedoed three times. His granddaughter, Jane, tracked through
the internet records maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission at the Perry Bar Crematorium, Birmingham. There
I found handwritten entries in huge old tomes recording details of his death. On the wall of a building on the grounds was
a scroll commemorating Merchant Navy personnel, and Second Radio Officer George Charles Walter Hunt of the S.S. Congolian
was there. It was a very moving moment for me.
I married, had two daughters, living in New Jersey and New York.
Today I am retired, frequently visiting family and friends in England and enjoying my daughters, granddaughter and two great-grandchildren.
What could be nicer?
Marion Hunt
On Sunday September 3rd I was living with my family
in York Street, Dover (a town soon to be known as 'Hellfire Corner'). Just before 11am we gathered together in our
dining room where we had a large Bakelite wireless - no such thing as a radio in those days. We were about to hear the now
famous speech by the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. I shall never forget his immortal words "We are now at war
with Germany". My parents looked very serious, especially my father who must have been remembering the horrors of his
four and a half years fighting in the trenches in France during the Great War of 1914-18, only 20 years before. I remember
one of my aunts sitting listening with us, her eyes filling with tears as she said "my poor Denis" - her only son
and my cousin, who was 19 at the time, as she realised he would be conscripted into the armed forces. Within a few minutes
a terrific noise broke the silence of that little room; it was an Air Raid siren, a sound we would become only too familiar
with during the next six years. We were startled and very frightened, as we thought a bombing attack was imminent, then after
a while we were informed that the sirens were being tested to make certain they were working OK.
Being a young
girl and not fully realising the dreadful consequences of what "now at war with Germany" implied, I remember my
main concern was whether my friends would still be able to come to my birthday party my mother had arranged for that momentous
Sunday afternoon, as I was going to be nine years of age the following day. Happily, six or seven little girls duly arrived
at tea-time, all carrying their gas masks in cardboard boxes on their shoulders. The entire population had been issued with
them during the previous months after the Munich crisis in 1938, which we now know was just the lull before the storm.
The following year, in June 1940 at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation, I was, like thousands of other children evacuated
to South Wales. But that's another story.
I was born in 1940 so I only remember the end of the war well when we had street parties and bonfires to celebrate.
I missed our street party, which was held in "The Albion" on the Lichfield Road because it poured with rain. I probably
had tonsillitis but the thing that grieved me most was that my mother had donated my favourite chocolate cake - made of course
to a special wartime recipe. (I would love to get a copy and see if it was as good as I remember it).
Rural “I have no really unhappy memories of the
war years. We lived in Colman Avenue in Wednesfield, which was then very rural, surrounded by fields which were farmed to
help the war effort. Now most of these fields have been built on. “My father, Arthur Newey, was in a reserve occupation,
pattern making at F.H. Lloyds, Darlaston. I think they made tanks and war munitions. I have enclosed a leaflet issued to the
workers during the war. He was also in the Home Guard. He spent all his spare time gardening, growing a variety of vegetables
and fruit. I enclose a photograph of him at work. He even extended his garden into the field at the rear of the house where
he kept bees (which were very useful guards, no one intruded into the garden for fear of being stung!). Rabbits Consequently,
we had a good diet because we also kept rabbits; they were very tasty; those who do not like the idea of eating them have
not known what it was like to have to live on war rations! We had good vegetables and fruit from the garden and of course
we were able to exchange and share with neighbours - the next door's pig was always good for one meal, we gave them our
waste food, peelings etc. for the pig swill, which was cooked in a special 'oven' at the top of their garden, built
of brick and mainly burning rubbish - everything had to be utilised. Some neighbours kept chickens so that was another food
source. “When bins were collected each week there was always a small truck, pulled along at the rear of the lorry, so
that any waste food, i.e. bread or peelings etc., were put in it. This also went for feeding farm animals. Nothing could be
wasted and I often think that this was far more environmentally acceptable than a lot of today's practices. Because we
had open fires, we were able to burn rubbish, again much healthier than stale food left about and no 'disposable'
containers littering the streets. “My most frightening memory of the War was of an aeroplane crash on the Lichfield
Road, Wednesfield in May 1945. The plane came over our house from the direction of Stubby Lane, dropping a huge piece of metal
on our house.
When we were growing up, it was the war and we had to
do without it!" is a phrase that was often on my parents' lips when I was a small boy growing up in rural Belgium.
We were then in the late fifties and early sixties, decades of plenty, when people were getting better off every year and
thinking that it couldn't go another way. Yet, memories of the second world war were still vivid to those who had been
unfortunate to live through it, including my parents who were teenagers during 1940-45. My mother would recount how she and
her family had been deported to the south of France in May 1940, in a futile attempt to stay ahead of the Germans, and walked
nearly 600 miles by foot carrying suitcases and pushing her younger brother half asleep on his small scooter, how she returned
some months later again by foot only to find the family house ransacked, and how she lived through the rest of the war in
fear of the Germans. My father, who spent the war years in Brussels, had tales of rationing and having to ride his bicycle
to a distant farm where a cousin would be kind enough to give him bread, eggs and butter in return for a whole day of helping
around the farm. And, as if the day of physical labor on the farm had not been enough, the bicycle ride followed cobbled backroads
on which the bumps often snapped the weak strings - the only strings that one could then find - that held the precious cargo
on the back rack of the bicycle, eggs, butter and all, falling without mercy on the cobblestones.
For me and my
siblings in our plush family house surrounded by friendly neighbors and enjoying all kinds of commodities, those stories would
have seemed to come from another world, a world with nothing in common with the one in which I was growing up, if it had not
been for all those physical traces of the great conflict around nearly every corner: the bombed building that had not yet
been levelled, the temporary river bridge paralleling the old stone bridge with the missing middle arch, the armored tank
in the middle of the town square, and, saddest of all, those acres of white crosses in so-called "American cemeteries".
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