大象传媒

This story was submitted to the People's War website by Karolina Kopiec from GMR Action Desk on behalf of Mr Gordon Roscoe and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands website's terms and conditions.

I was ten years old when the war started and well remember the circumstances leading up to it. I remember my father chatting over the fence to our next door neighbour, TAR Yarwood saying that they thought Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was completely na茂ve if he thought his visit to Hitler would stop the Fuhrer invading the rest of Europe. He was already over on Poland, and how it was no surprise when he carried on and invaded Czechoslovakia. I didn鈥檛 realise when I overheard this adult conversation how much it was going to affect my own life and within weeks at that. Apparently there was an organisation already at work trying to minimise the misery which Hitler鈥檚 detestable aggressive activities was causing. This organisation of course, was undercover and was operating with great bravery and secretly getting children out of Eastern Europe just ahead of Hitler鈥檚 forces and bringing them to comparative safety in countries like Britain and America.
I don鈥檛 remember felling shocked or even apprehensive when, a few weeks later, my mother and father told me that a Jewish girl roughly my own age was coming to live with us. She and her sister were snatched from under Hitler鈥檚 nose just in time. They had lived with their parents in Prague which was and still is a capital of Czechoslovakia. What an agonising decision it must have been for their parents to let them be torn apart from them, shipped to a foreign country, not knowing if they would ever see them again. Not knowing how they would survive or how they would be treated but knowing that their chances were infinitely better than staying at the mercy of the cruel Nazis.

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