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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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The courage is born out of desperation. What else are you going to do? As my mother said, you can't just let somebody take your life.

I remember having an argument with my father, many years after the war. By my nature I would be a pacifist and I'd become politically aware and I was arguing with my father. I was a teenager and I was arguing very strongly against war. My father said rightly "What would you do if soldiers come to your house and say 'You have no right to live here any more because of who you are. You are this particular person and have this particular beef so get out!'" because this is what was happening to people? My mother said that there is no way that you could just let this happen. Some people did; my mother's half-brother, out of fear, actually joined the Nazi Party, which of course caused a family rift!

You mentioned fear. As an example of the sort of thing that happened - just an incident my mother told me of one day when we were reminiscing, I was just a baby of five or six months so I have no recollection of this at all. My father was underground because he had been blacklisted. The Gestapo came to my mother's flat where we were staying and actually stayed in the flat for three days and three nights hoping that my father would come back. My mother was terrified; she was terrified that I was going to be killed and she was terrified that she was going to be raped. She couldn't go to the toilet without them following her. In their personal lives, they were deemed to have no rights as citizens. You hear all the time now about human rights, citizen's rights and civil liberties. My mother had no right to try and throw them out; she couldn't have resisted them if they tried to rape her or tried to take me away. None of these things happened but they stayed there for three days and three nights and she never, ever forgot it. She said the terror stayed with her, but more than the terror, the anger. The anger that they thought the right to do this. She said later that she would die rather than let her nature be swamped by these monsters who were killing people just because of their race or their religious belief. It had a very profound effect on her - very profound.

"Your father was hiding out in a wood and met somebody who he used to know from school, is that right?"

Yes, he was hiding or running away and one of the men, who came towards him and actually recognised him, was a school friend. This school friend could have shot him, could have killed him, but he didn't. They made eye-contact with each other and, as far as I understand, he just walked away. It just shows that, no matter how bad a regime is, individuals within that regime still retain their humanity and their feelings. Many, many people were sucked into the horror that became Germany by fear - fear for their families, of course, besides personal fear. I can believe there are as many stories of heroism among the Nazis as there are anywhere else. You can only take each individual person as you find them but the regime, of course, was totally evil - totally evil.

"Your parents were working to sabotage the Nazis?"

Yes, but again I don't know all the details. One of the greatest truisms in life is that people who really live it don't talk about it! So a lot of what I am telling you now, I didn't even really know when I was a child. They came out in later life, sometimes something as simple as a family argument. My first marriage failed and my mother was very upset about it and unable to help in the way I needed help - the details don't concern us now - and I think we had the only real quarrel we'd ever had in our lives as we didn't quarrel as a family. I accused my mother of not understanding, of not being part of the modern world and... you know what young people are like.

Afterwards my father took me aside and told me "You must not judge your mother, you have no right to judge your mother".

I was already by then in my late twenties and then he told me about the time she'd had in prison. I'd had no idea she had been in prison before I was born! She'd had nine months in solitary confinement. For a woman in prison then, I don't know what it's like now, but in the sort of prison she was in, she was in a tiny cell, there was a toilet but there was no privacy. There was a peep-hole so the guards could watch her if she was on the toilet or if she had her ... ladies little problems every month - she had absolutely no privacy whatsoever. She suffered this for nine months and then, I believe longer in the prison, a couple of years in prison, I'm not sure of the details, but it left her ... damaged for life.

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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