Teenage Deportee

I was 14 years old when, together with my parents and seven siblings, I was deported to Germany.

On 17 September 1942 we were told to report to the Harbour on the following day, and to bring with us food for two days, a mug and bowl,a blanket and whatever clothing we could carry.

My mother had a huge abscess on her foot and could hardly walk but, despite this, the German authorities insisted that the deportation order be obeyed.

When we arrived at the harbour we were herded into a large shed, where we stayed until late in the afternoon, to be then told to return home to await further instructions, as the Swiss Red Cross had condemned as unsuitable the dirty collier that was to transport us to France.

On 26 September we were again instructed to report to the harbour on the morning of 29 September.

Once again we wended our way down to the Harbour and, late in the afternoon, we were herded aboard a small and dirty boat that had only two toilets to cater for the nearly 600 of us aboard. We left Jersey late in the evening in the face of a howling gale and rough seas to travel the relatively short distance to St Malo where we disembarked at about 8.00 am the next morning.

We were given some bread and German sausage, then boarded a corridor train to face what would be a three day journey into Germany.

The train took us across France, through the outskirts of Paris, then across the battlefields of both WW1 and WW2 before reachig Trier on the Moselle River.

At about the mid point of the train was a Kitchen Unit staffed by French POWs to prepare meals for the guards. We were able to reach this carriage via the corridors to obtain drinking water , and it so happened that I and a school friend named Maurice Hassall had gone on such an errand when we arrived in Trier. We wre unaware that at this point the train was to be split in two with part destined for a camp in the north and the remainder heading for another camp in the south. We found that we were on the wrong half of the train and, after some discussion, we were offloaded together with an armed guard to wait on the station platform until the northern half of the train was contacted. When it was, and the train halted some way up the track, Maurice and I had to tramp a couple of kilometres to rejoin it. We were both bare-footed and found it very tiring trying to match our strides to the spacing of the sleepers.

We then recommenced our journey up the Moselle valley until we reached the River Rhine at Koblenz. The train then followed the river through the Ruhr Valley, crossed the river at Wesel and finally came to a halt at a small wayside station at Dorsten. There we detrained and marched a couple oif kilometres to arrive at Stalag V1F, known to us as Dorsten Transit Internment Camp. My mother was taken from the train to the Camp by ambulance, where she was immediatly admitted to the Camp hospital.

When we arrived at the Camp we were registered and issued with our identity numbers, and then taken to the barrack buildings that were to be our homes for the next six weeks. We were given a bowl of watery soup and a slice of bread, then locked up for the night.

To be continued.

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