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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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"Was your father in prison too?"

Yes he was, more than my mother was. In fact he was in prison, both under his alias and under his own name. He was eventually released because I suppose they couldn't hold him any longer. He tried to get to this country before the war, in 1937.

His experiences, on a personal level, he never talked about. Never. I knew about the song that he whistled to my mother but she eventually told me about an old school-friend of hers that the Gestapo said had died and my mother saw her body on a cart and it had been tortured.

My father never talked to me in detail about his prison experiences. Whether it was because the memories were too bad or, being a man, maybe he was just more reticent. Men don't like to talk about emotional things.

Talking about my father and prison life, the oddest coincidences happen. As I mentioned, my father was black-listed. This was a list of names of people who were 'enemies of the state', who could have been shot without trial if they were caught. This list has travelled far and wide because I married for a second time and went to live in Johannesburg and my husband was in a library there and he just saw a book about the Third Reich. Knowing a bit of my family history he just picked up the book and started to leaf through it. And this list was in it and he found my father's name in this black-list, in a library in Johannesburg, without even looking for it! And he said "That's my father-in-law!" Life's odd, isn't it?

"So when did they eventually manage to get away?"

We were very lucky as my father's family had relatives in this country. A distant relative of my father, who became known as Uncle Paul, was a senior government official in the Diplomatic Corps or something in London. That side of the family had been in England for a couple of generations so we had an English side.

My father, through the Refugee Association, was desperately trying to get out of Germany. They knew that war was imminent and the chances of their survival were remote. He was writing to Uncle Paul. The letters, which I have now, I didn't read until after my father's death. I didn't know they existed until we went through his papers. It was deeply moving to read them, partly because they were written about the time I was born. One of them was written in July (I was born in August) and one was written in September.

When I read them I didn't recognise my own father because I have always known him as a fluent English speaker. In fact, in this country he was so... English. Most people had no idea he was of German origin because he was very fluent in English. So fluent, he could sound like a navvy - he could swear with the best of them! The letters showed that he was just learning his English.

There are little phrases to Uncle Paul like "I am rejoicing that you are in the best of health" and things like that. I found the letters deeply, deeply moving in that sense because dad was obviously very young and learning his English; he wasn't yet the man that I knew.

The other thing that was very sad was the desperation to get out of the country. Uncle Paul was pulling strings in every direction to get them out of the country. The letter written when I was about eight weeks old said that the police had closed all the borders and all their efforts had been in vain. He thanked Uncle Paul for trying but they couldn't get out of the country. Eventually they did, but separately. Dad was smuggled out first through the Refugee Association and brought to this country.

The refugee organisations were brilliant. They helped these people enormously, trying to give them an identity and a life over here. There weren't only Germans; there were Czechs, Poles, and other nationalities that had been displaced by the political upheavals, because it wasn't yet war-time. But as aliens, they could only do certain work, so dad was put to work on a poultry farm and then later he had a little clerical job somewhere... little jobs that would just give them a basic living.

Then, when war broke out, dad was actually able - and this is peculiar because this, in modern parlance, sounds like being a traitor - he actually joined the British Army. He was in a battalion that was made-up of displaced persons from Europe; refugee Germans, Czechs, Poles... all the dross, if you like, who had been thrown-out by the political upheaval. They were given literally the very worst jobs in the Army, things like digging drains and so forth, but for a while, dad was with Bomb Disposal. I did know that later in my childhood because we used to joke about it, that he was seen to be "disposable"! This led to other peculiar little things happening in his life. Life is very, very strange.

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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