大象传媒

I was a child of the war, being 3 years old and living in Bridgend, South Wales, when war began. In the Autumn of 1939 I can well remember being sent TO London for a "rest" from the nightly air raids of the Germans trying to find the underground Arsenal in Bridgend and going on to find the Swansea docks and the refineries at Skewen. I was so traumatised by fear when the air raid warnings sounded that to this day the sound of factory hooters still instill fear in me.

I can well remember D-day at the age of 8 and from that moment onwards having no doubt in my mind that we would win the war.

I can remember my uncle, Israel Rose, who was in the Black Watch, coming to say goodbye to my cousin & me at a school party in January 1940 before embarking for France. He was captured in June 1940 at St. Valery and the telegram arriving at my grandmother's home announcing that he was missing, presumed dead. A couple of months later my grandmother received a postcard that he was able to pass to a nun whilst marching through France on his was to POW camp in Breslau addressed to my grandmother, correctly, in indelible pencil. The message read, "My mother". This was the only indication that we had that he was still alive until well into the winter of 1940-41. He was one of the last to the "local boys" to arrive home when hostilities ended. He had been a POW in the largest camp in Germany, Stalag VIII B and was one of the few survivors of the forced march from Breslau to the outskirts of Berlin and halfway back. He was released by the Russians. During his period of captivity he was hidden underground in the camp for a period of about 3 months so that he could not be taken to the local salt mines where instant death was a near certainty for any minor infringement of German rules or regulations.

Two of my aunts served in HM forces. The elder one, Sophie Rose was a Red Cross VAD officer and the youngest aunt, Hilda Rose, served in the WAAF until invalided out in 1943.

When the war ended and my uncle Issy Rose, known to his regiment as "Taff", was repatriated to this country my Aunt Sophie and my father Sgt Mark Rose (REME) who had saved up their leave, came home to Bridgend to welcome my uncle home. There was a German POW camp at Island Farm in Bridgend, one of the POW's being von Runstedt and the prisoners used to be marched from Bridgend station out to the camp past my grandmother's house on Merthyr Mawr Road. Von Runstedt travelled by car. When it was time for my aunt to return to her unit at St. Hugh's College, Oxford (which had become requisitioned as a military hospital), she rode by taxi to the station to be confronted by a trainload of German POW's lined up in the station yard. She, in her own inimitable fashion, gave them a broad smile and the Churchillian V sign, at which point there was nearly a riot! Sophie's dedication and sense of duty meant that when having contracted rheumatic fever in summer 1944, she did not tell the War Office so that she could return to duty.

The utter relief when the war ended is indescribable, but the trauma of those days still lives with me and has certainly coloured my life and, in particular, with the regard of nutrition in young children in their fomrative years. This has been impressed on me when my uncle returned and told us the day that he arrived home that the "boys" that had been properly fed as children were the ones that survived the long march. The others dropped by the wayside and died like flies. We, all of us, owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all those of all nations that fought with and for us to secure the peace and this debt must never be forgotten.

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