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Pam Bradburn: Our POW Friend for Life

This story really belongs to my father who is 89 now, but I’m telling it, speaking on his behalf. It’s about a Polish-German man called Albert Makovski whose documents were lost when his house was bombed. His father or grandfather had gone to America prospecting for coal in the Pennsylvania coalfields. His home city was Dusseldorf, and he was conscripted into the German navy and stationed at Boulogne at the beginning of the war on a fast gunboat. His ship came up into the Thames estuary — he was the radio operator — they were shot up and sunk, and he was one of only three survivors. He managed to survive in the water for seven hours by, as he said, ‘going with the flow of the tide.’ Following capture, he was put in hospital for three days — his only actual wound was a scar down his index finger - then promptly shipped to Canada, which is apparently where many German prisoners were sent. He became a lumberjack in Medicine Hat and, having found a Collins English-German pocket dictionary somewhere, taught himself English. As he said, ‘The war was over for me and I needed to survive and make my own way.’

In 1944, when the war was nearly over, the POWs were shipped back to England. Albert thought they were going to be sent back to their home country but, as his ship approached the Isle of Wight, it ‘turned left and headed for England.’ He came to a very large transit camp that many Shropshire people remember, at Sherrifhales. He was then sent to a much smaller camp at Cludley and sent to work at Leighton Quarry. This was around 1946. My father had his own fledgling haulage business. He was an owner-driver. One day there was a big fire at Highley Colliery near Bridgnorth and they needed stone from Leighton and sand from Hilton to douse the fire. Father had a contract with Leighton Quarry and the manager offered him a German POW to work for him.

He took Albert on and, when he turned up at home, he told my mother that he had a German prisoner in the cab of his lorry and could she make him a sandwich. Mother said he should come in and eat properly along with everyone else. I was only 3 or 4 at the time and this very tall, dark man came in, much taller than anyone I’d ever seen, and was welcomed by everyone in the family, eventually becoming an honorary family member. It was a family friendship cemented on the spot. We never looked back. Albert spent nearly all his spare time with us. He used my grandmother’s sewing machine to alter a jacket and came down to help my father with different things. My playmates would disappear because he was German. Naturally there was a lot of general ill feeling against people like him immediately after the war, but not from us. He used to visit the wool shop in Wellington where Mrs Gray was German herself, and would bring wool back for my grandmother and make lots of things from wool. Then it was Christmas and we had very few things to decorate the house then. Albert walked all the way from Cludley to our house at Bratton and he brought us a branch of a tree, all painted in red and gold, all the cones painted, and decorated by himself. Another time he turned up with the typical German toy, shaped like a table-tennis bat with pecking chickens underneath. He enquired about it years later, but it had gone. He said it had been painted by a Meissen porcelain painter.

Prisoners were repatriated in 1948, partly because Britain was going to host the Olympic Games in London, and the regulations at the time said that a country could not do this if they were holding POWs. Albert went away to a new home in north west Germany, where it was very flat, an extension of the North European Plain up from Holland, a coastal fishing place, where Erskine Childers’s novel The Riddle of the Sands was filmed. Albert said: ‘I’m going home to see my family. You are the only family I’ve had for this recent period. I don’t know what I’m going back to. I hope to see you all in eleven years’ time.’ There was silence for two years, then he sent us photographs. He had married, had one daughter, then another, and he was working in the Thyssen shipyards. There was a little note each Christmas telling us of the family’s progress but still no talk of a visit to or from him. Then, as my parents’ ruby wedding was approaching, we wrote asking him to visit as a surprise present for them. He replied immediately, saying that his passage was booked and that he would come by car. Unfortunately his wife would not be coming because she did not like travel. He arrived in Shrewsbury at 1.30 am, having first gone to the wrong house, and everything slotted back into place immediately. We all had a very emotional reunion and a wonderful party. That was in 1980. he even met a local Shropshire man at the party who had been a prisoner of the Gestapo for six months. The two of them got together over their beer and had a great talk about their war experiences.

He came again the following year and later we went to visit him and his family in Germany, and decided that we needed to learn to speak German. We did that at evening classes and, after that, there were regular visits between our families over the next 20 years until Albert died. What we learned from our visits above all was how much the German people themselves had suffered during the war, just as much as we had. It was a very enriching experience, which had the effect of broadening our minds and outlooks, because there was little or no modern German history being taught in schools after the war, and the learning of the language wasn’t encouraged.

I’ve kept all the letters, photographs and other mementoes, and have managed to trace one branch of his family back to 1874, and there are definitely Polish connections, but nearly all the relevant family records were destroyed. I’ve got a photocopy of Albert’s discharge form, on which he had given his thumbprint, ordering him — within 30 days - to get himself a civilian suit, or have his uniform dyed by the local burgomeister. There’s a photograph of a group of prisoners with him in it, some of them clearly still wearing parts of their original uniforms. Once the Iron Curtain had come down, many Germans to the wheat lands of America and many of them settled in this country, unwilling or unable to return home, so several of the men in that photograph settled down here.

While they were POWs here they mostly worked on the land or mining or in the quarries, and some may have worked at the sugar beet factory. Albert said the conditions in their camp were generally just about ‘acceptable’, though, as for everyone else, the winter of 1947 was awful, and their sheets and blankets froze and stuck to them while they were asleep. I think they all tried to use whatever skills they had. Albert had a good many, and was really quite an ideas man. He made my mother a wooden coffee table which we still have here, with all his instructions to himself on the underside about assembling the various pieces. Perhaps one day it will find its way back to Germany for his family. That would be a fitting end for it.

This story was collected by Genevieve Tudor and submitted to the People’s War site by Graham Brown of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Pam Bradburn and has been added to the site with her permission. The author fully understands the site’s terms and conditions.

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