大象传媒

This is a story told by Elizabeth Ellis of North West Wales

"I married during World War Two and my husband and I settled to live on my family home farm in Trawsfynydd. As all our farm workers had gone to war, we had Prisoners of Wars working on our farm. I remember two in particular - one from Italy and the other from Germany. Henry, the prisoner of war from Germany was always very tidy, and every day he used to take his bed linen and blankets outside to hang on the washing line. Henry was always very helpful around the farm and worked more hours that was necessary, and was also very friendly despite the language barrier. On the other hand, the Italian prisoner of war would never help out and as soon as his work was finished he would go straight to his room and stayed there until the next morning.
We didn鈥檛 have to pay the Prisoners of War as the authority dealt with that issue. We knew this money would not be much; therefore we used to buy cigarettes for them out of pity.

I remember we were harvesting one Saturday when we heard bombs coming from Tyddyn Sais, and the next thing a plane came down. There was a camp in Trawsfynydd, and the soldiers used to bomb and shoot our land as practice. An Englishman on a motorbike used to arrive at our farm to ask us to move as the soldiers wanted to practise. We always had to go at 9am and we would have a couple of days warning in order to get everything ready for the move. We were late moving once, and as soon as we were down the road we heard an almighty bang. We had been seconds away from being bombed.

We also had to move all the sheep to the top field of our farm, including our pet lambs and sheep that were used to be outside the farmhouse. Although they were moved, the pets came back down towards the house to look for us. Unfortunately the inevitable happened and all of them were killed by the soldiers. We were devastated. We did get paid for all of the killed stock, but money wasn鈥檛 the same as having them alive."

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