My Story, My Journey

From Silesia to Scotland

I was born in 1926 in a town in Silesia, Germanys south eastern Province bordering Poland to the east and Czechoslovakia to the south. That is how it was for 2000 years until 1945 when Hitlers war ended, and our Heimat Schlesien no longer existed. The peace treaty demanded that Silesia be annexed to Poland meaning the eviction of our people. Six months after my 17th birthday, shortly before Christmas 1943, I was called up to military service and after my training sent to Italy, where five months later, on Sunday 4th June 1944 I was captured by the U.S. Army just outside Rome. They brought us to Norfolk Virginia from where a train journey took us to a POW camp in Oklahoma, moving soon to Fort Bliss, El Paso. In autumn 1945 fifty POWs travelled by bus to the Napa Valley to pick tomatoes, prunes, and work in the vineyards, and after New Year 1946 south to pick cotton. In early March 1946 we received black-dyed U.S. Army uniforms, boarded a troop ship in Oakland and were sent back to Europe via the Panama Canal, to arrive three weeks later in Liverpool, UK. From there we travelled by train to the north of Scotland where now over sixty years later, I continue to live. My book will tell my journey.