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This story was submitted to the People's War site by Genevieve Tudor of the ´óÏó´«Ã½ Radio Shropshire CSV Action Desk on behalf of Dorothy and has been added to the site with her permission. Dorothy fully understands the site's terms and conditions.

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Dad was involved throughout the war. He went to France on active service, again, a lot of the details are sketchy. One of the things that did happen that was very, very moving, occurred when that they were stationed near Dover. There was a whole battalion of them and, because dad was a very early riser, he used to get up very early because he liked to take his ablutions before the rush. This saved his life. A doodlebug that was coming over was shot down, apparently by British planes, and it crashed into some Nissen Huts killing, I think, 54 men between 18 and 40s in age - all of them foreign nationals. Dad was one of the few survivors and he was German and, of course, it was a German doodlebug. It was one of those things that made my dad ... question ... I suppose he went through guilt; he actually took us, my brother and I, down to this cemetery - there is a cemetery on the Dover Road - and every one of the graves there, he knows the men who died. And very few of them were German; they were mostly Czechs and Poles and there was dad who survived. It's really strange, very, very strange. It is one of those peculiar things that happens in life that there is no real explanation for, is there?

"What about your mum, because she came over a little later, didn't she?"

Yes. This was partly because they were leaping into the unknown and, at the time, mum still had a job. Mum was, of course not herself being booted out of the country, because she was all-German. But she had things happen which tainted her life deeply. She was being pressured by the government to divorce dad because he was a 'filthy Jew'.

She actually had people come to see her, sit with her and say, "Why have you, a fine Aryan woman, married this man?" They wanted her to divorce him and they put pressure on and she wouldn't but they still had no grounds to get her out of the country. But she knew that the chance of them living through the war where they were was remote.

Although she wanted to come anyway, one of the things that was a trigger was that my father's parents were taken. Mum had a very good relationship with my dad's parents. After my dad had gone to England, she used to put me in a little push-chair and walked me across Frankfurt to visit my grandparents on a Sunday. It was quite a long walk and on this particular day she was going through a suburb, like you might be going through the village at Minsterley, and the people were saying, "No, don't go! Everybody has been taken!" and apparently all the residents of the Jewish quarter were just ... gone.

I'm not sure how long it took for them to find out what had happened but, as far as I can recall, all of my adult life to within a few years of their deaths, they were searching for his parents. They eventually found out through the various Societies that look for missing people, that they had been taken to Theresienstadt concentration camp in what was Czechoslovakia, where they were gassed. My parents did a pilgrimage to Theresienstadt perhaps 8 or 9 years before they died but they had been looking for them for all that time.

Thanks to the refugee organisation, my mother was eventually able to come out of the country. Her dad was still alive at that time and her brother was there too but she felt that she had to get out. She literally had a suitcase of clothes in one hand and me, as a thirteen-month-old toddler in the other. I was already speaking fluent German by then - my mother said I was born talking; I never stopped! My mother spoke not a word of English. Besides Uncle Paul in the Foreign Office who I already mentioned, there was Uncle Louis who had been in England for a while. His wife was paralysed so he wrote to the refugee organisation and said he would take my mother in so that she could look after his wife. So she became a sort of wet-nurse, but he was loopy. He was totally eccentric and she couldn't cope.

Eventually, Auntie Gertie, who had a holiday house in Wales, said to my mum "I think the best thing you can do is get out of London". I think mum originally went to the holiday house. Dad was given a job on a poultry farm at Waters Upton and so that's how they came to live in Shropshire. My mum fell in love. To her, having escaped the beginnings of war and the turmoil of the thirties, it was absolute paradise. And it began what I call a very long road home.

We were here as aliens, with our German name, of course, and my mum not speaking any English. She learned English by talking and listening to people as much as possible to pick up words, and whenever she could, she went to the cinema and listened to the radio. She learned the language quite quickly but I learned it more quickly, being a tiny child. I became bilingual very quickly. When I say it began a long road home, she was wonderfully happy in that they were free; but they lived in rooms, they had no money, dad couldn't work properly and she couldn't work properly because she had no English.

When they eventually left Waters Upton and came to Shrewsbury, I think to get work, she, well educated and highly articulate in German of course, was a cleaner. She got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed floors. Dad was in the army all those years, so mum had to get rooms. Well, the people who were letting rooms in those days, particularly to Germans, were often people who were down on their luck anyway, because if anyone had a normal domestic life, they certainly didn't want an alien! So the result was that for the next eleven years we literally moved, it seemed like every few months to me. And wherever we went, we seemed to be ... persecuted is too strong a word, because people did like us, but they were always people who either had something to hide, or wreaked their personal fears on my mum.

For instance, at a house we went to in Roseway, where we lodged for a year or so when I first started school at Harlescott Junior School, the landlady there was Irish. She was a nurse, and she was ... I have to be careful what I say here ... literally pulled by the effect of the moon. She used to stick her head in the gas oven! I think it was partly because she was separated from her husband. There were no men around. They were all in the army or the air force so it was an imbalanced society, although as a child, I didn't know this. When you are living a life, it's your life; it's ordinary. You don't see anything extraordinary, and the fact that there were no men didn't sink-in, it just didn't register. So whether the landlady's behaviour was to do with the fact that her husband was away, I don't know, but she regularly had these mood-swings and mum would come in and find her with her head in the gas oven and pull her out. I actually remember this because I'd be five years old. I remember this lady clutching my mother round the knees, begging for forgiveness. My mother didn't need this, she'd got enough problems without that!

At another place we stayed, in Underdale Avenue, the landlord was very keen we didn't use too much electricity and he used to put a piece of paper between the socket and the light bulb so that when mum switched the light on, it wouldn't go on, she'd think the bulb had gone.

So we had the most peculiar life until I was eleven when my parents were able to buy the house that was to be their home for the rest of their lives. They bought that little house and they clung to it because it was their sanctuary, their escape from the world. It sounds funny now, with children growing-up in a world of their own homes and their televisions and everything, I was the one who nagged my mother to actually try and buy the house. We were living in a flat in Claremont Hill in the centre of town (oddly enough, right above the RSPCA which I later went to work for but that's by-the-by).

They had saved a little bit of money and had been looking for a house. Buying a house was a new concept to my parents. In Germany, my mother's family have a farm in Bavaria, it still exists and is still owned by the family. Country-folk tended to have their own houses and I think that nowadays there are suburbs in Germany where people have their own house, but where my parents lived in Frankfurt, they were all in rented flats. That was the way people lived, and England, to them, was very odd because you had all these suburban houses that people could actually buy.

So they had saved and saved and this little house came on the market. It was a tiny house with only two bedrooms and it was going up for auction. I was off school for some reason, dad was at work, and I remember my mother saying to me "I don't think we've got enough. I don't think we've got a chance." I said "Go! Will you please go." I stayed at home to look after my little brother and she went to the auction. It seemed to me only half an hour but it must have been longer, she came back and she had got this house! I cried because we had got a house. We'd never had our own home; we'd always lived in somebody else's house and we'd had our property stolen, we'd been bullied ... there was always something going on, so to get this house was paradise on Earth. It was wonderful. In later life, they were never going to leave. We used to say "Why don't you sell and buy somewhere bigger?" but they were quite happy where they were. So that became their sanctuary for the rest of their lives. We bought that in 1948, so a few years after the end of the war.

See more of Dot's stories:

• The War in Germany — Chapter 1
• The War in Germany — Chapter 2
• The War in Germany — Chapter 3
• The War in Germany — Chapter 4
• The War in Germany — Chapter 5
• The War in Germany — Chapter 6

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