As it's gone 4:30 and it's Friday afternoon, and as nearly everyone else here has already gone home, I feel justified in spending time at my desk blogging. If that's the correct verb form.
I was in Essex last weekend sorting out flat things, and while there we visited the relatives I still have there. My mother moved to Cornwall last November, so she is just down the road now, but I still have 1 brother (who now comes bundled with wife and baby), 1 grandmother, 1 uncle, 1 great-aunt and great-uncle. That's 3 different house-holds, and they never bother to see each other. My grandmother now refuses to see my great-aunt for very stupid reasons, so I have to visit each separately. I find this slightly annoying. We have to drive all the way across country, and they can't be arsed to get together so I can see them all in one go.
Anyway, I wanted to write about my great-uncle. He has been very ill recently. In the last couple of years he has had an especially rough ride, and he has just had radiotherapy. It affected him badly, bit we're now hoping that he is through the worst of it and can enjoy the years left to him. When we were there this time I asked him if he could write down some of his experiences. He has a lot of stories from WW2, and I have been thinking for a little while now that it would be a shame if they were lost. He's not feeling up to writing at the moment, so I shall try and record what I remember.
My uncle (who I shall call J) is Dutch, and Germany invaded the Netherlands when he was still little more than a boy. I think he was 16 or somewhere around there. With his brother he became a member of the Dutch underground. One story he told was how they had a delivery of plastic explosive -two big bags of it. At some point they got the order to blow something up, I can't remember what. A house or a train or something. They had no experience and no instructions, so they mixed the whole two bags of explosive with water and made it into a big lump, also sticking several fuse pencils in to make sure. It made a hell of a bang. Afterwards someone from higher-up came and wanted to know what they had done with all the explosive. He wasn't pleased that they had used it all on a single small job.
J's career in the underground didn't last very long. One day they got orders to do a job somewhere. There was a group of them, J and his brother, and several others. While they were on the bus or tram getting there, it was stopped by some German soldiers. One of the soldiers got on, pointed to J and each of his comrades and told them to get off. It seemed that somebody had tipped off the Germans. They were all armed. J's brother had a pistol and grenade, J had a sten gun, the others all had various weapons. J says that they were nearly shot there and then. The soldiers lined them up, but fortunately there was an older officer there. This officer stopped the summary execution, saying that they would have to be tried first. So they were tried. J's brother got 20 years in a labour camp. He served 3 months before escaping. J got 8 years I think. He escaped after about 8 months.
The camp was fairly brutal, and J hasn't told me much about it. The only thing I remember him telling me was how sometimes they used to be got up at 6 in the morning and led outside, whereupon someone would be picked from the crowd and hung while the others watched.
When J escaped he was with a group of others. They managed to make their way down the Rhein to the border with Switzerland. The Germans had the border well and truly guarded (to stop people getting out, not the Swiss getting in), but they managed to go around and get in. As J tells it, the Swiss law said that if you managed to stay in Switzerland for 24 hours you would be given asylum. J and his little band came upon a farm just inside the border, and bumped into the farmer who asked them if they were escapees. He then hid them in his shed, gave them food and blankets and kept them for the required 24 hours.
That's all I shall write for now. I need to go home now. It's Friday, time for a glass of wine!