大象传媒

Friendships Made & Sad Farewells.

One tale I will tell you is about a man called Albert Ullman from Osnabruck in Germany. He was a POW imprisoned in a speically built POW camp on Shady Lane in Leicester (it is now an arboretum). All trusty German POW's were put to work on farms and other such jobs.

I first met Albert when I was out on a bike ride. A group of men were digging trenches on Milligan Road. I stopped to look and discovered that they were German POW's. I stayed to watch and met Albert, he could speak no English, me no German, so we communicated by sign language. We seeme dto get on OK so I went back to see him the next day. He showed me photo's of his mother and father and once again through sign language we had a limited conversation. I followed him an his group all over Leicester on my bicycle and we became good friends and also managed to teach each other a few words of our representative languages and remained good friends until 1947.

By now the very strict rules controlling POW's were relaxed a little. Albert told me that Prisoners of War with English friends could spend Christmas Day with that family, and could also take one of the POW's friends with them. This was a great happening, I was now able to show my German friend off to my parents, if they would agree, I did so hope that they would. They did!!

Christmas morning arrived, a very special one for me. Albert Came with his friend called Fritz, it turned out he used to be one of Rommel's drivers.

We had a lovely Christmas as by now Albert and Fritz had enough English to hold a slow conversation, for me his visit was tinged with sadness as Albert told me that he was to be repatriated in January 1948 and we would not see each other again.

He gave me a wonderful Christmas present - a ship in a bottle, well more that just a ship, it also contained a harbour, train, windmill, church on a hill, trees, a tied up dingy at the quay side, a footbridge of the river and a village. It was all the more special to me because he had made his scene himself out of scraps and constructed it in his spare time especially for me.

This is still my most favourite thing today.

We have never met since that Christmas in 1947, but i hope he still sometimes remembers his English friend, Brian.

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