Return to Zittau

Return to Zittau

I departed from Zittau on 7th May, 1945 amid the thunder of artillery fire through which could be heard the no-longer-distant chatter of machine guns and the occasional whine of an approaching shell. It was obvious that the town would be part of the battlefield within days, if not within hours.

I had been one of a working party (Arbeitskommando) of thirty ‘other rank’ British prisoners of war living and working in Zittau since October 1943. We had been captured in Tobruk, North Africa on 21st June 1942 and had been imprisoned in a large prisoner of war camp in Northern Italy. After the collapse of the Italian Fascist government and the surrender of its successor to the British and American allies, we had been transported to Germany, to Stalag IVb at Mühlberg, and thence to Zittau.

In Zittau we were lodged in Neustadt in the town centre, in what remained of the old Town Theatre, most of which had been destroyed by fire. We occupied a day room and a dormitory on the first floor. Our guards lived on the ground floor below us.

From this base we went out to work, in parties of two, three or four, every day. Our work mainly consisted of loading and unloading railway wagons at Zittau Railway Station and at other railway sidings in and around the town. When available though, we did any other heavy manual work that was needed. We helped deliver groceries and greengroceries from wholesalers to retail shops in the area. We loaded produce from local farms onto lorries and unloaded them at their destinations. We swept the streets, dug graves in Zittau cemetery, worked in a local bakery, in an iron foundry, in a jam factory and, in fact, anywhere else where our labour was required.

On one memorable day in, I think, February 1945 some fellow-prisoners and I loaded onto a lorry a number of large and heavy boxes from Zittau Stadtmuseum and took them to the summit of Mount Oybin where we left them for safety in the ruins of an ancient monastery. Thus, so it is believed, we played a tiny part in the history of the famous Zittauer Fastentuch.

It wasn’t long before we became almost as familiar with Zittau as with our home towns in Britain. We got to know its cobbled streets and squares, its narrow alley-ways, its centuries-old buildings and, of course, its railway sidings.

We soon learnt enough very ungrammatical German to be able to hold basic conversations with our guards and with the German civilians, and prisoners of war and civilian workers of other allied nations with whom we came into contact while working. We came to know some of them very well indeed. The Germans were, of course, our enemies - but it is difficult to maintain personal enmity with people whom you have come to know well and who you realize that, under other circumstances, could have become good friends.

Two of our guards I remember particularly. In charge of the Arbeitskommando was Unteroffizier Kurt Laudenbacher. It might have been expected that he, at least, I would have regarded with enmity. Goodness knows, there had been plenty of British noncommissioned officers whom I had thoroughly disliked! It’s true that he shouted a lot. We called him ‘Alleman’ because of the frequency with which he would shout ‘Alleman raus!’, ‘Alleman saubermachen!’ And so on.

He was fair though and would often take our side against the Stalag authorities or against our civilian employers. When we first arrived in Zittau we were paid in Lagergeld – paper money that could be spent only in a Stalag shop or canteen. We pointed out that for us, in a tiny Arbeitskommando far from the nearest Stalag, Lagergeld was totally useless. He agreed and took the matter up with the Stalag. From then on we were paid in real Reichmarks and Pfennigs.

Then too, he insisted that if we worked with scrap metal we had to be provided with leather aprons and gloves. If they weren’t provided he told us to ‘down tools’ and stop work.

Then there was Otto Rosenstück, an amiable guard who wore the ribbon that indicated that he had been on the eastern front throughout the winter of 1941/1942. He told us that at one point his unit had been within sight of the suburbs of Moscow.

He lost all his toes to frostbite during that bitter winter and had been assigned to the undemanding job of POW guard because he could no longer march properly.

He was married and had a son, a toddler called Franz Josef. He arranged for his wife and son to come to Zittau to escape the allied bombing in the Rhineland where they had lived. I have often wondered what happened to that little family when the war ended.

I worked for some time for Burger’s Fruchthof which employed four or five Germans, two Dutch civilian workers and - depending on the number of railway wagons of produce expected – between two and five British POWs. Frau Burger appeared to be in charge of the business. I recall that Frau and Herr Burger celebrated their silver wedding anniversary while I was working for them and they gave a celebratory party for all their employees, including us. Frau Burger had a sense of humour. She gave a little speech in which she said that she was a very lucky woman because she had been married for twenty-five years and her husband hadn’t a grey hair on his head. He was, in fact, completely bald!

The Burgers had, as far as I know, just one daughter Sonja who was sixteen or seventeen at the time and I suppose was still at school. She was a friendly girl and much appreciated the attention of us woman-starved POWs. I hope that she survived the chaos at the end of the war. She was six or seven years younger than me and could, of course, still be living today.

Also possibly still living could be Brigitte, daughter of Herr Rutsch (I may well have spelled his surname wrongly) a coal merchant. I remember Brigitte as a shy and endearing little girl of about ten with big blue eyes and long blonde plaits. I hope that she too survived the war’s aftermath.

Her father, the coal merchant, clearly suffered from chronic bronchitis or some similar bronchial affliction. He had a most appalling cough that was made worse by the cigarettes that he was unable to resist.

Then there was a very tough old lady (‘old’ by our youthful standards – she may have been fifty) who, single handed, ran a scrap metal business. She also kept one or two sheep for their milk (most of us had never before heard of sheep being kept for their milk). She had, in her youth, been to England and had visited Harwich – a town with which I, and several other prisoners, were very familiar.

Christian, whom I got to know well, was an elderly man employed by Kurt Kramer, wholesale grocers in Neustadt, not far from our Lager. For several weeks another prisoner and I, pulling a handcart, accompanied Christian through the streets of Zittau delivering groceries to the many retail shops in the town.

Then, of course, there were the ‘foreigners’, prisoners of war and volunteer or conscripted civilian workers from every German-occupied country in Europe. The greatest number were ‘Ostarbeiters’ from Russia or the Ukraine but there were others from Poland, Jugoslavia, The Baltic states, The Netherlands, Belgium, France and elsewhere. There was even one – Cherim, who worked for the old lady metal scrap merchant – from Albania!

A few I remember by name. There was Pieter from Groningen in the Netherlands. He had such a strong local accent that his fellow Dutchmen claimed that they understood him better when he spoke in German than in Dutch. He and Jacques, a Frenchman from Marseilles, both worked for Fruchthof.

Anna, a friendly young woman of about the same age as us prisoners, came from Orel in Russia. She worked for the Münchner Hof hotel in Neustadt, from which we collected our rations (black bread, margarine and swede soup) every day. Occasionally, two or three of us would be sent across the square to the Münchner Hof to peel potatoes. This gave us an opportunity to chat to Anna who taught me enough Russian to speed my journey home through Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia in May 1945.

Then there was Alex who worked for Gocht und Steffens, Marmelade, Konserven und Kunsthönig manufacturers. He came from Sebastopol in the Crimea and had been a cinema projectionist before the war. Alex had a ‘Lagerfrau’ (he admitted that he had another wife back in Sebastopol) with whom he lived at the Gasthof Drei Linden, a hostel for Ostarbeiters. The ‘Lagerfrau’ was Mareja, a likeable Ukrainian woman whose face bore the scars of smallpox. She too worked at the jam factory. She had a passion for English milk chocolate and I always tried to save her some from my Red Cross parcels.

There were many Serb prisoners of war with unpronounceable names. One, with an enormous moustache, was called simply Schnurrbart by us, by the German guards and sometimes by his fellow-Serbs. He always vowed that he would shave off his moustache on the day that he was sure the war was coming to an end. I saw him clean-shaven, and hardly recognisable, on 6th May 1945, just a day before we were marched out of Zittau.

An Estonian dentist attended to the dental needs of all foreign workers and prisoners of war in Zittau. I visited him, with a guard, two or three times. He spoke no German except ‘Bitte spucken!’ (please spit) but he did speak Russian, and his Russian receptionist and dental nurse, who spoke fluent German, interpreted for him. They made a very good team and I certainly received as good dental treatment from him as I ever had in the British Army. Sadly, they left Zittau at the beginning of 1945 ‘for safety’. They departed in the direction of Dresden and I very much fear may have been victims of the inexcusable (in my opinion) British and American terror-raids on that town on 13th and 14th February.

On that day in early May 1945 when we marched out of Zittau into what is now the Czech Republic I never dreamed that I would ever see Zittau again. I reached my home in Ipswich – about 100 kilometres north-east of London – eleven days later, on the 18th May, my twenty-fourth birthday

I never forgot the time that I spent in Zittau though – and my memories were far from being wholly unpleasant. . I have often thought that it was in the streets and on the railway sidings of that small town in Saxony that I ceased to be a boy and became a man. Zittau was often in my mind and I wished it well.

I married Heather, the girl I had met and fallen in love with on 3rd September 1939, the day that Britain and Germany went to war. We had two sons and with them we took annual camping holidays, at first in Britain and later in mainland Europe. We camped in France, Switzerland, the Italian Alps, Austria’s Vorarlberg and Tyrol. Our sons grew up and my wife Heather and I continued camping with a motor-caravan. We drove to what was then Jugoslavia , travelling down the Dalmation Coast to Dubrovnik and beyond and inland to Mostar, Sarajevo and Jajce. We spent one happy holiday in Germany’s Black Forest.

During that holiday, and during the earlier ones in Austria, I found that I had not entirely forgotten the German that I had learned as a POW in Zittau.

We didn’t visit Zittau. It was within the DDR. While I had no real fears for our personal safety, I could imagine that we might have had to endure long delays at the border, and possible searches of our camping equipment, while the DDR police satisfied themselves that we weren’t British spies intent on mischief. That was the kind of inconvenience that, in late middle age, we didn’t wish to experience on holiday.

The Berlin wall came down. Germany was reunited. Sadly, this came too late for Heather and myself. Our motor-caravan had succumbed to corrosion (it was a Toyota - perhaps we should have chosen a VW!), and we had grown too old for tented camping. Heather’s physical condition deteriorated and reached a point at which she was unable to think about taking holidays. I would certainly never have left her to go away, even for a day, on my own. I put aside any thought of overseas travel.

I didn’t lose interest in Zittau though. I wrote an article about my life as a POW for ‘The Friend’, a Quaker weekly journal. Zittau was mentioned though I thought it unlikely that any reader of ‘The Friend’ would have ever heard of the town. I was wrong. Jasper Kay, a Quaker from Cottenham, near Cambridge, wrote to tell me that his family had originated in Zittau and had settled in England a few decades earlier. Furthermore, he was a fluent German speaker and corresponded regularly with a Zittau family – to whom he had sent a copy of my article. He was to make his own first visit to the town in a month or two’s time. Was there anything I would like him to bring back from his visit?

I wrote back at some length giving him more details of where I had lived and where I had worked in Zittau and saying that I would love to have some postcards or photographs of the town.

That was how I first came to make the acquaintance of the remarkable Kulke family. Ingrid Zeibig (formerly Kulke) had been Jasper’s correspondent and became mine too. She could speak, read and write English as could her teenage daughter Maria Theresa. Her mother, Frau Ingrid Kulke lived in Zittau, as did her brother Andreas. They all proved to be good friends. Ingrid Zeibig translated my original article and my letter to Jasper Kay into German for the whole family. I have now corresponded with her by email for several years. Andreas and his mother visited every place that I had remembered and mentioned and took photographs of them for me. Frau Kulke managed to obtain for me a photocopy of a back number of the local Zittau newspaper – Der Zittauer Nachrichten for 18th May 1944 (my twenty-third birthday) that I spent as a prisoner in the town!

Heather and I felt that we had become members of the family. When Andreas married his wife Kornelia, we were told all about it and sent a wedding photograph. When they had their first baby in September 2006 I was sent a birth notification card. They had been blest with a lovely little girl whom they named Maja Ruth.

My association with Zittau was destined to increase.

Our younger grandson, Nick, became a student at Westminster University, studying photography. Seeking a project for the final year of his degree course, he decided to retrace my journeys as a prisoner of war between June 1942 and May 1945 and to make a photographic record of his travels. He was, at that time, 21 years old – the same age as I was when captured at Tobruk.

He was unable to obtain permission to visit and take photographs in Libya, so his journey began in Tarranto on the south of Italy where we had disembarked and begun our long journey from prison camp to prison camp. It ended in Prague, where at the Hotel Atlantic on 10th May 1945 I had enjoyed my first night’s sleep in a real bed for four years!

He unearthed some interesting information on the way.

All signs of the transit camp at Altamura near Bari in Southern Italy, where we stayed under canvas for a week or so, had disappeared. The area, still as bleak and desolate as I remembered it, was now a military training area, forbidden to prying photographers and news reporters (though Nick managed to gain access!) and was, so he heard, one of the least popular postings in the Italian Army.

Campo Concentramento PG 73 near Carpi on the plain of Lombardy, was very different. It had been a large camp of which I had only unpleasant memories. We had lived in poorly built, unheated huts, unbearably hot in the summer and bitterly cold in the winter (I had suffered from a frost-bitten toe during that winter in ‘sunny Italy’!). We were counted daily, a process that frequently took long over an hour. We were louse infested, desperately hungry and bored out of our minds. Few days passed without a fellow prisoner dying of starvation related disease..

On one occasion we had the opportunity of having our photographs taken and sent to our families in England. On receiving mine, my mother took one look at it and tore it up. She couldn’t bear to look at the emaciated scarecrow that I had become.

When he found the site, Nick was surprised to find huts, preserved and still standing and groups of young Italians visiting. It appears that after we had been transported to Germany, the camp had been taken over by the S.S. and used as a transit camp for Jews and political dissidents destined for Auschwitz.

It was now preserved by the Italian authorities and used as an educational facility to illustrate some of the harsh realities of World War II.

Transported to Germany after the collapse of Mussolini’s government, we had spent two days and nights in cattle trucks before arriving at Stalag IVb near Mühlberg. Here, as ‘other rank’ British prisoners of war, we were showered, deloused, photographed and finger-printed, inoculated, medically examined and – eventually – issued with new underclothes and British Army uniforms, presumably provided by the Red Cross.

At Stalag IVb, as at Campo PG73, my grandson found a surprise awaiting him. He discovered that, after the Allied prisoners had been liberated in May 1945, the camp had been taken over by the Soviet NKVD. Now there was a German memorial, and well-kept German graves there as well as an Allied memorial and allied graves in the grounds of a little chapel, half a mile or so away from the actual site.

The ages marked on the graves of the German dead (many in their 40s and 50s) suggested that senior army officers had been interned, and had met their end there. The graves were cared for reverently and lovingly by dedicated volunteers.

We had spent two – or was it three? – days at Stalag IVb. Then a group of 30 of us, all found medically fit for heavy work (Schwerarbeit) were sent with just one guard to Zittau to become Arbeitskommando 1153. Although we had been processed at Stalag IVb we discovered that we were now an outpost of Stalag IVa.

At Zittau, my grandson’s only surprise was the warmth of the welcome that he received. I had given him Frau Ingrid Kulke’s address and had suggested that he might call on her with a bouquet of flowers to express my thanks and appreciation of the kindness that she and her family had already showed me. At that time he spoke no German but I had schooled him to say: ‘Ich bin Nicholas Hall. Mein Grossvater ist Ernest Hall aus Clacton-on-Sea, England’

I had hoped that Frau Kulke would be pleased to see him but I had hardly expected her to be quite so kind and hospitable. By an extraordinary coincidence it was her birthday. She invited him to a party attended by the whole of her extended family from all over Germany. She let him stay in her flat for the two or three days that he spent in Zittau and she went with him, in his hired car, to show him where I had lived and all the places where I had worked during my stay in Zittau between 1943 and 1945. He was able to meet Ingrid Zeibig, my correspondent, and her daughter Maria Theresa, and Andreas and Kornelia Kulke. Little Maja had, of course, not yet been born.

From Zittau, my grandson went on to visit Leitmeritz (now Litomerice), in the Czech Republic, where, in 1945, I had first encountered the Soviet army – and had been thankful for the few Russian words and phrases that Anna had taught me back at the Münchner Hof in Zittau. From there he went, as I had, to Prague where he found the Hotel Atlantic in which, thanks to the Czech Red Cross, I had spent my first night in a comfortable bed for four years!

To put the finishing touches on the video record of his travels that he was preparing, Nick retraced his journey through mainland Europe the following year. Once again he experienced the unstinting kindness and hospitality of Frau Kulke and her family. Later that year the video was to help him gain a BA with honours at Westminster University.

Meanwhile I continued to care for Heather who was, by then almost totally disabled. It was a difficult, challenging and sometimes heart-breaking time but it was a happy one. We became closer together than we had ever been and she remembered to the very end the wonderful camping holidays that we had spent in Britain and in mainland Europe. Sadly, her life came to an end on 12th July 2006.

She died, as she would have wished, in her sleep, in her own bed and in her own home with me by her side.

Heather’s death left a gaping – and aching – hole in my life. For the last two years of her life she had been totally dependent upon me. I had never left her side except for essential shopping, and then, for no more than three quarters of an hour at a time and always only after I had found a tv programme or DVD that she could enjoy in my absence.

I engaged in a programme of feverish activity to try to fill that gaping hole.

I had a cataract dealt with that had impaired my sight so that I could no longer enjoy reading and had had to give up driving a car. We had continued to go regularly to our Quaker Meeting for Worship on Sunday mornings in a special taxi that would take Heather’s wheelchair. It was a great relief to have my vision back again. .

Throughout her adult life Heather had made a practice of writing down in a number of tiny notebooks any short piece of poetry or prose that she found helpful. I collected these notebooks together and typed out their contents to create an anthology of quotations that I had printed as ‘Heather’s Treasure’ in a 54 page booklet. Our elder grandson Christopher, an art graduate, created a line drawing of his grandmother for the title page. These I distributed as a memorial to Heather.to all the members of our extended family, to all our friends, to every member of Clacton Quaker Meeting and to anyone else who was interested.

I had several rooms of our bungalow refurbished to make it more suitable for a widower living alone – and to make it easier for my sons to sell when I am called to rejoin Heather.

Despite all this activity my life still seemed empty and devoid of purpose.

My interest in Zittau was revived when I received an email of condolence from Ingrid and a little later, when my spirits were at their lowest ebb, a message of faith and hope from Frau Kulke, Ingrid’s mother. She had written it in German and her daughter had translated into English for her.

Later, for the very first time, Zittau featured briefly in our national news bulletins on tv. Poland and the Czech Republic had become members of the EU and the national leaders of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic met to celebrate in the obvious place – Germany’s ‘three-country-corner town’!

I began to wonder if it might just be possible for me to make the journey to Zittau to thank Frau Kulke and her family personally for their kindness to myself and grandson Nick, and to revive some of my memories of the last eighteen months of World War II.. I was now free to travel, but I knew that at 85, I was incapable of making the journey on my own. I doubted if I was even capable of travelling so far with a companion.

My mind was made up for me by my elder son Pete and grandson Nick, both of whom knew how very much I would have liked to have visited to town again as a free man. They overrode my anxieties and booked, on line, for us to fly from Stansted Airport to Berlin at the end of March 2007 for a six day visit to Zittau. They arranged for a hire car to be waiting for us at the Berlin Airport. With the help of Ingrid, they rented for us a furnished apartment in Neustadt which would be ready for us when we arrived.

Our plane landed at an airport in the outskirts of Berlin soon after 9.00 a.m. on Wednesday 28th March 2007. My flight home in 1945 had been in two stages; Regensburg to Rheims and Rheims to an RAF Station to the west of London in Buckinghamshire. The aircraft for each flight had been a now old-fashioned propeller plane. Our flight from Stansted to Berlin had therefore been my first in a modern jet air liner and had been, in itself, an adventure!

The promised car was waiting for us and within an hour we were speeding along the Autobahn over the flat central German plain. Our first destination was Mühlberg. It was fortunate that grandson Nick had been there before because the actual site of Stalag IVb was by no means easy to find. But find it we did. The site was now heavily wooded and all the huts and administrative buildings had been demolished.

The main highway through the camp was still easily recognisable though. In 1943 the Soviet POW compound had been one side of that highway and the British and American on the other side. The foundations of the buildings were still visible and there were notices indicating their purpose as well as a plan of the Stalag when it had been operational. There were volunteers on the site lovingly tending the German graves and generally keeping the site neat and tidy.

My German was adequate to explain to them that I had been a prisoner there in 1943 and we were directed to the allied graves and war memorial in a well-kept enclosure half a mile or so away.

We had a late lunch in a restaurant in a nearby town and drove on to Zittau. After a while we left the Autobahn and proceeded along narrower minor roads. The countryside became less flat and we could see mountains in the distance. I knew that we were nearing our destination.

Zittau presented no major surprises. We passed through its outskirts into the town centre and finally parked in the Neustadt Square which, in 1943, had been called the Platz der SA. The whole area round the square had then been referred to as Neustadt. Above us towered the enormous, and surely unique, Salzhaus. It had been used for cheap housing accommodation towards the end of World War II and had, as I knew from my correspondence with Ingrid, been recently restored. Now there was a welcoming restaurant and bar ‘Zum Alten Sack’ near the main entrance.

The remnants of the old burnt-out theatre, which had been converted into accommodation for us prisoners had been demolished. In its place was the modern Dresdner Bank. On the other side of the square I recognised the Gasthof where the friendly Russian girl Anna had worked and from which, as prisoners we had collected our rations every day. It was now the Zittauer Hof and, so I was later told, had been completely refurbished and refitted as a comfortable modern hotel.

The square itself was unchanged. Its cobbled surface I remembered well but in 1943 there had been few, if any, vehicles parked there and there had certainly not been marked out parking spaces.

My son made a call on his mobile phone. Within minutes a car drew up beside us. It was Ingrid with the keys of the flat. It was an emotional moment for me. Ingrid and I had corresponded for several years but had never met. She was every bit as friendly, helpful and charming as I had expected. She handed over the keys to the flat – it was on the top floor of a building just across the alleyway beside the Dresdner Bank, within a few yards of my former lodging in the town! As Ingrid wished us good night she invited us to breakfast at her mother’s apartment the next morning – and to an evening meal with all the family later in the week.

The flat proved ideal for our purpose. It had a large living room with a kitchen annexe, containing a settee that could be converted into a bed as required, two roomy bedrooms and a spacious and well appointed bathroom. A feature of the living room was a balcony from which it was possible to survey the roof tops of Zittau and many of its public buildings. On view was the tower of the Rathaus, to the roof of which I had once had the task of carrying sandbags as a fire precaution! In the distance could be seen ‘the blue remembered hills’ of the Zittauer Gebirge.

We were to visit those hills on one of the most memorable days of our stay. Ingrid, my son Pete and I went to Zittau railway station where we caught the narrow gauge railway train to Berg Oybin, while Nick, my grandson, drove there by road to meet the train.

The journey itself evoked more memories than I had expected. Soon after the train moved off we passed a main line railway bridge beyond which had been the entrance to Burger’s Fruchthof. A little further on was the entrance to the Felt factory (Filzfabrik) where we had often worked. Near its entrance had been a pig slaughterhouse. Far away across level fields, could be seen a many arched railway viaduct that I well remembered having gazed at over sixty years earlier.

Further on still, on the other side of the track, there was a large building standing on its own. It was the old barracks (der Alt Kaserne) used for cheap housing accommodation in 1943 and ’44. Several times, when being taken in the back of a lorry to work in the outskirts of the town, we had stopped at the Alt Kaserne while the driver picked up Fritz - or Hans - or Heinz, who lived there and was working with us.

I couldn’t identify it but I am sure that we must too have passed the spot where there had been a siding and what we used to call the ‘Rinder Bahnhof’. Huge piles of tree bark were stacked by the railway track. I never did discover their purpose but from time to time we had to unload more bark from railway wagons or stack some onto lorries to be taken to an unknown destination.

On one occasion I cut my hand quite badly while working there. The cut was bleeding profusely. I was able to communicate in German by that time and I told the civilian who was in charge of us that I needed to go back to the Lager in Neustadt, to have it bandaged. ‘I can’t take you’, he said, ‘I must stay here and get this wagon unloaded’. ‘Das macht nichts’, I said, ‘I can find my way back on my own’. And so I did, striding unescorted through the streets of Zittau and hammering on the door of the lager to gain admission. The guard was a little surprised to see me unaccompanied but he duly washed and bandaged my wound.

We British prisoners in Zittau could easily have escaped from the town at any time – but speaking only basic German and wearing British uniforms with big red triangles painted on them I don’t think that we would have managed to get very far.

Nick, with the car, was waiting for us at Oybin station. We drove on up the mountain track as far as possible. Then we had to walk. I got as far as the souvenir and gift shop before age and arthritis finally defeated me! Nick had been to the summit on one of his previous visits so he stayed with me in the gift shop while Pete and Ingrid climbed to the very top, seeing the ruined monastery where, in 1945, I had helped take those heavy boxes from the Zittau Stadtmuseum, believed to contain the Fastentuch.

Later we drove on into the Zittau Gebirge, having lunch in a mountain restaurant and exploring the neighbourhood of Jonsdorf. In 1944/’45 Herr und Frau Burger of Fruchthof had owned a small chalet in a deep valley in the Jonsdorf area. They kept it well stocked with food and other provisions (I helped take some of them there!) and they had intended to go there for refuge when the Ostfront threatened to engulf Zittau. I wonder what happened to them.

On the Saturday of our stay in Zittau we walked the short distance from our apartment in Neustadt to the Church of the Holy Cross, where we had arranged to meet Dr Dudeck, whose special concern had been Zittau’s great Fastentuch, at 10.00 a.m.

The tiny part that I am believed to have played in the Fastentuch’s seven centuries’ history ensured us an especially warm welcome. We had a special private showing of the great Fastentuch displayed, in all its splendour, across the nave of the now redundant church, which has been converted into a museum for that purpose only.

The Fastentuch’s original purpose, its origins and its history were explained to us in English and each of its ninety illustrations identified. I found myself astounded at the enormous size of it, the comprehensive nature of its ninety pictures and the obvious loving care with which it has been restored and is now displayed. I couldn’t think of a single well-known bible story that isn’t pictured there.

Afterwards my son, grandson and I were photographed for the regional press and interviewed by a friendly, and fortunately bilingual, lady newspaper reporter. As a result a very positive account of our visit appeared a week later on the front page of the Zittauer Zeitung.

On the Saturday afternoon we were shown some of the other sights of Zittau by Andreas and Kornelia Kulke, accompanied by baby Maja. There was the Salzhaus which we had previously seen only from the outside, the floral clock and the smaller Fastentuch in the Stadtmuseum – which I remembered from my previous visit in 1945. While Andreas with my son and grandson engaged in strenuous activities like climbing to the top of a church tower, Kornelia and I, with little Maja, enjoyed a coffee and a chat in a nearby café.

It was a pleasure to make Kornelia’s closer acquaintance. I found her to be a charming, thoughtful and considerate young lady who understood and spoke English much better than I had realized. She told me that her daughter was to be baptised Maja Ruth on Easter Sunday at a magnificent nearby church.

Another highlight of our stay in Zittau included a trip across the frontier into what is now Poland to visit the open-cast lignite (brown coal) mine at Hirschfeld where I had briefly worked as a prisoner. It had obviously expanded tremendously since then and was now really a dreadful man-made scar on the landscape. I was shown a site, still in Germany and just outside Zittau, where a similar open-cast mine had been converted into an attractive lake with a well-appointed and welcoming hotel on its shore. Perhaps there is hope yet for Hirschfeld!

We crossed the frontier into the Czech Republic – and were impressed by its atmosphere of prosperity. I felt that I would like to see Leitmeritz (now Litomerice) again. In 1945 I spent my first night of freedom, with other former prisoners, sleeping on the floor of a barn a mile or two out of the town. The friendly Czech farmer drove us into town the next morning.

We had found it filled with Soviet troops, their tanks being garlanded by jubilant Czechs. The few Russian words and phrases that I had learned from Anna in the Münchner Hof proved invaluable. When checked I produced a broad smile, a smart British army style salute and the assurance, in stumbling Russian, that, ‘Ya Anglishki Tovarishch. Ya yeddoo dommoy na Anglia’ which I hoped meant ‘I am an English comrade. I am going home to England’. It invariably resulted in my being waved on with an answering smile.

German women and children were being rounded up and ruthlessly driven out of town by the Czechs. It occurred to me then for the first time – ‘How quickly the oppressed can become oppressors!’ It was a thought that I was to have on many subsequent occasions as the years passed.

Leitmeritz – or Litomerice as, in 2007, it now was – came as a great surprise. It took us a lot longer to drive there from Zittau than I had expected. I was amazed that, in May 1945, walking and hitching lifts on lorries fleeing southward, I had managed to get there from the Zittau Gebirge in a little over half a day. It was also a much larger town than I had remembered and I would certainly never have recognised it.

It was clean, well-maintained and prosperous, with attractive buildings and well-stocked shops. We lunched in a restaurant near the town centre. Directly we saw the menu we realized the great difference between not knowing very much of a language, as in Germany, and not knowing it at all, as in the Czech Republic!

Later, I did at least recognise the railway station from which, with scores of others, of all ages and all nationalities, I had caught the very first post-war train from Leitmeritz to Prague during the afternoon of 9th May 1945.

When, on another day, we drove to Prague I had no difficulty whatsoever in knowing where I was. Once you have seen the Prague skyline you never forget it. I recognised the Hotel Atlantic too where, thanks to the Czech Red Cross, I had spent my first night in a ‘real’ bed for four years! I would never have found it though without having my much-travelled grandson as a guide.

The ‘Atlantic’ is now a luxurious ‘four star’ hotel. We lunched in its restaurant and were able to look into a vacant bedroom on the first floor. Was it the one in which I had spent that first-comfortable night in May 1945? It could have been. It was just as I remembered it except, of course, that it had now been provided with a television set – and there were no bullet holes in the window!

Prague is nowadays a popular destination for British and – I suppose – American tourists. There were lots of us there, and I noticed that the menus in at least the larger restaurants are in English as well as Czech!

It was wonderful during those few days, to be able to visit so many places that I had seen under very different circumstances over sixty years earlier. The memories came flooding back.

However, what I had particularly wanted to do was to meet the members of the Kulke family who had been so friendly and helpful to me, and so hospitable to my grandson Nick. In the immediate family was Ingrid Zeibig, whom I had known by correspondence for years. Heather and I had never been blest with a daughter – just two sons of whom we were immensely proud. If we had had a daughter we would have been delighted if she had developed into just such a kind, thoughtful and considerate a lady as Ingrid.

I knew, of course, from grandson Nick about Ingrid’s mother’s kindness and generosity. I discovered her wisdom for myself. She spoke no English but during the course of an evening that we spent with her family she told her daughter Ingrid that she could see I was still very sad from Heather’s death. I had thought that I had successfully concealed this! She wrote on a piece of paper ‘Psalm 103 Vs. 2’ and asked her daughter to give it to me.

I didn’t have a chance to look this up until I returned home. Then I found that this verse was ‘Praise the Lord O my soul – and forget not all his benefits’. I have indeed a very great deal for which to be thankful, not least a loving family and good friends in Britain – and now in Germany.

It was wonderful to meet Ingrid’s brother Andreas and her sister-in-law Kornelia and, of course, the lovely little Maja.

There was one other member of the family to whom it was an honour and a privilege to be introduced. That was Ingrid and Andreas’s grandmother, Frau Kulke’s mother.

She was a most remarkable lady of 95, who put me to shame. Her husband, a Leutnant in the Wehrmacht had been killed on the Eastern Front and she had come to Zittau as a refugee from Silesia at the end of World War II. She was almost blind and physically very frail indeed. Yet her mind was razor sharp and her spirit indomitable.

We told her about our visit to Prague and she made it clear that she knew the city well – and the Hotel Atlantic! She spoke very little but we discovered that she had learnt and could still speak a great deal of English – and she spoke it with perfect pronunciation. I am sure that she is a source of pride to the whole family.

On one memorable evening we met the whole of the extended Kulke family – nearly twenty of them in all. Frau Kulke had booked a large room at an hotel at the foot of Berg Oybin for the very first ‘big screen’ showing of ’60 years’ the video record of Nick’s travels in my earlier footsteps that had helped to earn him his BA degree.

The commentary was, of course, in English which only a few of those present were able to follow and understand. Perhaps though, the pictures spoke louder than words. Anyway the video seemed to be much appreciated by all present and Ingrid translated into German my few words of thanks and appreciation at the end of the showing.

Afterwards we all enjoyed a festive evening meal together in the hotel’s restaurant.

On Tuesday, 3rd April we said farewell to Frau Kulke and her mother and began our homeward journey. We were to meet Pete’s partner Arlene at Dresden airport. She was flying there with a vital piece of equipment that Nick needed for a demonstration in connection with his podcasting enterprise that he was to give in Berlin on the following day.

Arlene’s plane arrived on time and all went according to plan. We were able to spend an hour or so in the city of Dresden before taking the motorway to the capital. In 1943 our train journey from Mühlberg to Zittau had taken us through Dresden. We had had to change trains at the station there but had seen nothing of the town.

Now I was amazed at the way in which this beautiful and historic city, devastated by British and American bombing on 13th and 14th February 1945, had been restored to its former magnificence. We enjoyed a late lunch in one of its many restaurants before embarking on the final lap of our journey in Germany.

I cannot say how very much I appreciated my visit – a visit that I had never dreamed I would be able to make – to the scenes that had been so familiar to me between 1943 and 1945. Much in and around Zittau had changed in the intervening 60 years, yet much remained the same. I had felt ‘at home’ there. In some ways it had reminded me of Britain in the 1950s.

There was no litter in the streets; no graffiti on the walls; no fast-food from ubiquitous Macdonald restaurants. There were no cars parked nose-to-tail in every side street and everyone, even the motorists, seemed to be remarkably law abiding.

I think though that the most valuable aspect of our visit was the friendship firmly established between the members of the Kulke family and those of my family.

My father was a regular soldier (beruf Soldat) and served in the British army through World War I. I was a Territorial volunteer (Kriegsfreiwillige) and served in the British army through World War II. I thank God that neither my sons nor any of my grandchildren have been required to serve in the armed forces, or have felt any desire to do so. Although today’s world is far from peaceful, Western Europe at least has been at peace with itself since 1945. Nor is it possible even to imagine it being otherwise.

I like to think that friendships such as that forged between my family and the Kulkes make a tiny contribution towards lasting Anglo-German friendship, and thus to the peace of the whole world.