Dark Secret: My Grandmother, the Nazi

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Hello, and welcome to a new series of Family Stories, Stories, the podcast written by you, our listeners.

This week's family stories take us from an enduring friendship between a prisoner of war and a member of the Land Army to a rare wartime sighting of Mahatma Gandhi and then back to the blitz and the tale of someone's missing fingers.

We begin this week with a story from Carl Walls.

My mother was 14 in 1944 and was in the Land Army, living in West Derby in Liverpool.

She was working in a field and in the next field there were German POW's working the land.

One day my mother fell into a bog while on the field and was quickly sinking up to her waist.

She was crying out for help.

When a POW in the next field heard her cries, he immediately risked being shot and ran to her aid.

Using his spade, he passed it to her and she grabbed the handle.

He pulled her from the bog.

After that he was allowed out of the camp every week and went to her house to have Sunday dinner with our family.

He made a jewellery box for her, which she kept until her death.

I think my sister has it now.

On the day the POW's were removed and sent for repatriation, the convoy went down the road where my mother lived.

The whole convoy came to a halt, whilst he was allowed out to go and say goodbye.

That was the last time they ever saw each other.

My brother, Robert, is named after him.

And that was from Carl Walls.

Our next story is from William Boynton.

My granddad Dennis joined the Royal Navy in the early 1940s and was posted on a corvette to counter Japanese submarine operations in the Indian Ocean.

He was lucky enough to get ashore in India a number of times.

He was used to the greenfields of Essex and said he couldn't believe how hot and dry it was.

One day he was sitting at a train station on the platform, somewhere in South East India.

He was with one of his officers and was reading his book.

He noticed a lot of people immediately in front of him, following a man with glasses on, and wearing some sort of robe.

He recalled them laying petals in front of this man.

He thought nothing of it at the time, and kept on reading his book.

His officer turned to him and said, Do you see who that was?

Grandad replied that he had not.

His officer smiled and said that it was Gandhi.

My grandad had heard of him in the newspapers, but still thought nothing of it.

We were discussing Gandhi in the mid-2000s, and my granddad proudly recounted, I saw him in person.

He seemed very pleased he did.

Granddad Dennis passed away in 2011, and that was from William Boynton.

Our next story is from Steve Steve Callaghan.

My grandfather grew up in a tiny coal mining town in central Pennsylvania, one of many siblings in a large Irish Catholic family.

When he became old enough to join the army in 1943, he was sent to New Orleans for his initial training, likely the first time he had ever left the state.

His girlfriend at the time, also from that same small town, and from a large Catholic family, agreed to marry him while he was in training.

Like him, she had never travelled far.

She told her mum she was going to stay with friends, but actually boarded an overnight train and made her way to New Orleans to marry my grandfather.

It's hard today to really understand how brave it was to travel alone as a young woman to a faraway city in the deep south.

Shortly before he departed for Europe, my grandmother gave him a picture of herself.

He carried that picture with him throughout the war.

I remember one night when I was home from college in the 1990s, he and I sat on our back deck drinking some beers.

He told me that when he was in the UK, when he could get leave, he liked to visit a local pub, but he'd always take a Canadian with him because they were great in a fight that would inevitably break out.

We believe that he served as a firefighter, and was likely attached to some British unit.

We know he landed at Normandy on D plus one, and then went on to Paris, the Ardennes, crossed the Rhine close to Bonn, and was eventually stationed in both Frankfurt and Munich.

By the time he was stationed in Munich, he had been gone for several years, and, like other soldiers, hadn't seen his brothers, or knew where they were, or what had happened to them.

One day, while walking down the street, he randomly bumped into his brother Aloysius.

It happened that an American reporter was nearby, who snapped a picture of the two brothers meeting for the first time in years.

At the end of the war, my grandfather was discharged and returned to his childhood sweetheart that he'd married years before.

Together they lived in that same small town for the rest of their lives, rarely apart.

They raised seven children together, and both died within only a few years of each other in their nineties.

Today, amongst our most prized possessions are two photographs: a weather-beaten picture of a young girl who made her way to New Orleans to marry the man she loved, and another of two brothers, both in military uniforms with rifles slung over their shoulders, in a world very different from that small town in Pennsylvania.

And that was from Steve Callahan.

Our next story is from Andy Fagans.

My grandfather, Albert Fredericks Fagens, was born in Guildford, Surrey and grew up nearby with his parents and sister Alice.

Before the war, he was a gardener for a family that owned a large house nearby, but in 1939 Albert joined the local ARP and worked in the Guildford control room.

In his spare time he enjoyed drawing caricatures and pictures of some personalities of the time, including Hitler, using Indian ink.

We are lucky to still have a book of these in our family's possession.

Bert didn't want to join the army, so on January 14th, 1941, he enlisted in the RAF at RAF Cardington, Bedfordshire.

On April 10th, 1941, their second child was born, a boy who Bert and Rose struggled to decide on a name for.

While deliberating while listening to the radio over the airways came This is the BBC News read by Alvar Liddell and so the baby boy, my father, was named Alvar.

In May 1941 Bert trained as an aircraft hand and ground gunner.

In October 1941 he is promoted to Aircraftsman First Class and then to Leading Aircraftsman in December.

In February 1942 he is posted to join 615 615 County of Surrey Squadron, who at this time were to be sent to India with their Hurricane 2s.

On arrival, the squadron was stationed at RAF Jesore before moving to RAF Fani and Alipur in Bengal, as well as moving nearer to the Burma front to support operations there, before moving back again to India.

During this time in India, Burt had spells of being unwell due to the harsh conditions.

In September 1943, he was admitted to the No.

47 General Hospital in Calcutta, suffering from dysentery and sprue.

Rose was informed of this and was told to expect him to be repatriated back to England to recover.

One morning, Rose had a knock on the door and on opening it, was handed a telegram.

She was fully expecting to find out when Bert would return home to England when she was stunned to read the words, We regret to inform you that your husband, 1225904, LAC Albert Fagans, died of dysentery and sprue at number 47 General Hospital, India, on the 16th of September, 1943.

My grandmother Rose was very fortunate to be able to visit Bert's grave in Boanipur Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery in Calcutta as part of the Royal British Legion War Widows Pilgrimage Scheme in the late 1980s.

One can only imagine her thoughts at the ceremony there after all those years.

And that was from Andy Fagants.

Our next story comes from Miles Bing.

My mum, Valerie, recently died, and I found her written manuscript and memoir of growing up in London during the war.

It's just recently been published as a memoir called London Can Take It.

Anyway, she writes, A vivid memory from school at that time was when we were all called together and a young boy wearing a different school uniform was paraded in front of us.

They revealed he was from the Tottenham area, and he looked a bit snivelly with fresh cut marks running up his face.

It was clear that he didn't very much want to be there, particularly when a teacher on the low stage pulled up his arm to reveal a freshly bandaged hand with what looked like, could it be, some missing fingers?

There was a big speech made warning those assembled about how dangerous and stupid it was to go near or pick up unexploded munitions.

Of particular concern were the small hand-sized incendiary devices which were scattered in the thousands every night by our airborne arsonist friends, designed to punch through roofs and set fire to people's lofts.

Many of these fell in trees and bushes, some not going off at all, and others were on timer fuses.

At school we had buckets of sand that were meant to be thrown over anything that might drop near us.

Nothing very sophisticated.

After so many months of suffering, the Blitz had created bands of feral children, usually boys, sneaking out at night and forming little gangs, so that they could follow the ARP and fire wardens to precisely where the incendiaries had fallen.

It was all the talk of the playground.

Collecting shrapnel was one thing, but some of the naughtiest boys would take the heads off the incendiary devices, tip out the magnesium, and then set the contents alight in buckets.

Every night could be bonfire night.

We had been warned so many times about such things, and I suppose the school was trying to use shock tactics to make their point.

I was still quite young, and disturbed by the image of the bandaged boy being manhandled off the stage, already being taken away, presumably to repeat the same exercise at the next school.

I couldn't fathom why some boys would actually choose to be outside during an active raid, or to set off explosives.

However, as we dispersed back to class, the boys behind me whispered excitedly to each other, and I heard one of them say, Well, it's only a couple of fingers

Our last story comes from Elliot Rudnicki.

The vast majority of my family was murdered in the Holocaust.

My grandparents left a destitute Europe in their late teens and only a small handful of their large families survived the concentration camps.

My step-grandmother or Bubby in Yiddish as we called her, married my paternal grandfather in 1979.

She had known my family for decades, previously having lived in their tight-knit Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York.

She even told me stories of pushing my father and uncle around in a perambulator when they were babies.

She fitted into our family seamlessly and over the years would share stories of her escape from Auschwitz by hiding inside the wing of an airplane that was being built before she was tattooed.

She even served as a sort of matriarch of the family.

and for me as the focal point for a high school paper I wrote about my Holocaust story.

She died about 15 years ago.

Then about six years ago, a German journalist reached out to my uncle to discuss a woman who'd been searching for her mother.

The journalist had written several pieces about her, her grandparents who raised her, and her unknown mother.

He had uncovered that her lost mother was my bubby, who had died a few years prior.

My father and my uncle refused to acknowledge the letter.

It was written in German and neither had little understanding of what it said.

Eventually, I convinced them to share it with me.

It turns out my bubby, the woman who spoke Yiddish, knew more about Judaism than many members of our family, who loved us and was a beloved member of the family, was a Nazi.

Bubby had married a German man in her early twenties.

Her husband became a soldier and they both became members of the Nazi party and were even photographed wearing uniforms and the dreaded red armband.

The next part of the story is quite confusing.

One night, while her husband was off fighting, she had gone to see a film in the local cinema.

While there, her town was bombed.

From what we understand, I believe she fought her parents, who were watching her daughter, and her daughter were killed.

In what I can only imagine was an overwhelming sense of utter despair, she must have realised there was no life for her in her small German town, and decided to literally start a new life.

She somehow became a refugee and claimed that she was a displaced Jew, and eventually arrived in New York and integrated seamlessly into Jewish culture in America.

The realization of my Bubby's past was incomprehensible to my father and uncle.

It was an existential crisis of beliefs.

She was loving and supporting to us, but also had some role in the slaughter of our family.

These recriminations translated into a refusal to help an unfortunate lost woman who just wanted information about her mother.

As for my bubby, I am torn.

I believe she thought her family had perished and decided to move on from a morally bankrupt and evil past that had clearly been revealed as a malignant disease on humanity.

But my god, how do you walk away without confirming with certainty your mother, father, and young daughter are truly dead?com.

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Thanks for listening and goodbye.