大象传媒

My family were living in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, when the war ended and just down the road was an Italian- Prisoner-of- War camp. These cheerful, friendly men quickly became popular with local people and our family made friends with several of them. One of them, Bruno, told us he had many relations living in the United States but they were unable to send him food parcels to enhance his camp rations due to military restrictions as he was a prisoner-of-war.

We hit on the idea of having the food parcels sent from the U.S.A. addressed to our family to avoid the problems for Bruno. Soon, once a month a food parcel would arrive at our house in our name from his relations. Bruno collected the food parcel but he was a kindly chap and always gave us kids the sweets, candy bars and chewing gum. Neighbours were puzzled by how we kids were never short of sweets! Thus you could say that our family was unique in that we were fed by the enemy.

Bruno and his fellow-prisoners stayed in their camp long after other Italians were sent home from elsewhere in England. Bruno was always evasive about the reason for this. When at last he and his friends were repatriated months afterward we learnt the reason why. Bruno was a member of an ardent Fascist regiment that had fanatically supported the dictator Mussolini and had served at times as the dictator鈥檚 personal bodyguard!

This story was submitted to the 鈥淧eoples War Site by Rod Aldwinckle of the CSV Action Desk on behalf of Richard. C. Blackwell and has been added to the site with his permission. The author fully understands the terms and conditions of the site.

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