Week 21 31.5.2011

Tendring Topics……on line


A Birthday to Remember!


My 90th birthday was one that I like to think every member of my family and my German friends, will remember fondly for many years to come. The celebration lasted for three days and involved every member of my immediate family, sons, daughter-in-law and grandchildren, with the exception of grandson Chris in Taiwan and Jo’s partner Siobhan, the latest addition to our family. As a teacher, she was unable to get away in term time. I have no doubt that they were both with us in spirit.

It took place in Zittau, the small German town at the point where the frontiers of Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic meet where, as a British PoW, I spent the final eighteen months of World War II. Because of my very minor role, as a PoW, in the 500 year long history of Zittau’s treasured Great Lenten Veil (readers of last week’s blog will know about that), the town’s Mayor and other local notables made their own, very considerable, contribution to the celebration of my birthday.



The view from my bedroom window

 My family – elder son Pete, daughter-in-law Arlene, grandson Nick and his Belgian girlfriend Romy, younger son Andy, daughter-in-law Marilyn and granddaughter Jo, and I (eight of us altogether), travelled by separate routes but converged on the Haus am See, a well-appointed hotel in a delightful lakeside location on Zittau’s outskirts on 18th May. Nick, who had made all the arrangements, had arranged for me to have a room on the ground floor overlooking the lake!

The following day was really action packed. In the morning Pete, Arlene, Nick and I had the great pleasure of introducing Andy, Marilyn, Jo and Romy to our friends for many years Frau Ingrid Kulke, her son and daughter-in-law Andreas and Kornelia (Konni) and their lovely children (my honorary nephew and niece) four year old Maja and 18 months old Tomas Friedrich. Maja presented me with a lovely framed photo of her brother and herself and we all enjoyed Frau Kulke’s generous hospitality for lunch



The Mayor and I



Zittau Town Hall is an imposing, and rather intimidating, building in the Prussian style. My wartime memory of it was of filling bags of sand and carrying them up to the roof for fire-fighting; not one of my more pleasurable recollections! Our visit there on 19th May was very different. An external lift took us to – I think – the third storey and the Mayor’s Parlour. Pete, Arlene and I had met the Mayor (Herr Arnd Voigt) on a previous occasion and we were pleased to introduce him to the other members of our family. He entertained us with a champagne reception and a tour of the Town Hall, and gave me a presentation bottle of Alter Zittauer feinster Kräuterlikör (Old Zittau finest herbal liqueur) made from a recipe dating from 1750 and said to be a sovereign remedy for most of the ills (other than old age!) with which we humans are plagued. I can’t vouch for its medicinal properties but it is very warming, has a pleasant taste (not unlike Pernod) and I have no doubt that its label proclaiming it to be 35% by volume alcohol is absolutely accurate.

From the Town Hall we made our way to the Museum/Church of the Holy Cross where Zittau’s Great Lenten Veil is displayed in all its glory. We listened to a tape, in English, telling the Lenten Veil’s story. Then came one of my very nicest birthday surprises. Into the Museum/Church trooped the twenty members of a local piano-accordion orchestra playing as they did so When the Saints come marching in!


The Piano-Accordion Orchestra


They set up their equipment, almost within touching distance of Romy and I who were sitting in the front row, and gave us a concert of precisely the kind of music that I most enjoy, very different from the stuff that thunders out from today’s ‘rock groups’ and the like, but the kind that I associate with Classic FM. The programme began with Ode to Joy the European anthem and continued with light classical and folk. Sitting, as I was, almost on top of the musicians I was struck, not only with the players’ musical skill but also with their enthusiasm and obvious pleasure as they played.
They completed their performance with a spirited rendering of 'Happy Birthday to you!'
It was then that Herr Helmut Hegewald Chairman of the Verein Zittauer Fastentücher (The Fellowship of the Zittau Lenten Veils) announced that I had been admitted into the Fellowship as a member, in recognition of my action in helping to take the Great Lenten Veil to safety in 1945 and the publicity that I had given to the Veil in England. He presented me with a splendid certificate to that effect. I was pleased to have the opportunity to thank Herr Hegewald for the honour that he had accorded me, and to thank the members of the accordion orchestra for their wonderful performance. I was later able to meet the orchestra’s members and have my photograph taken with them.

That wasn’t the end of the day’s activities. At 8.00 pm Nick had arranged on my behalf a celebratory dinner for the members of the family and our German friends.

There were twenty in all – all eight members of the family of course. Then we had invited my oldest friends in Zittau – Frau Ingrid Kulke, her son Andreas and daughter-in-law Konni. Sadly my closest German friend Ingrid Zeibig, Frau Kulke’s daughter, was in Florida celebrating her own birthday! She was missed though she did phone me from the USA with her good wishes just before the dinner began. We also invited Dr Volker Dudeck, almost as long-standing a friend as the Kulkes, and his wife Julia, Herr Arndt Voigt, the Mayor and his wife, and Herr Helmut Hegewald and his wife. We also invited two bilingual friends of Frau Ingrid Kulke and Konni Kulke to act as interpreters for them, and a gentleman whose name I can’t recall, to perform a similar function for Herr Voigt. All were very welcome. I gave a very brief speech of welcome to which Andy responded and we all settled down to enjoy an excellent meal prepared and served by the staff of the Haus am See. The occasion, I was assured, was a great success and, I like to think, a tiny contribution to Anglo-German understanding and friendship.




Muenchner Hof (now the Zittauer Hof) 

  On the Friday I showed members of the family where I had lived and some of the places where I had worked during those last eighteen months of the war. Our ‘Lager’ (PoW barracks) had been in the Neustadt Square, then known as Der Platz der SA (Hitler’s brown-shirted stormtroopers) in what was left of the town theatre after a disastrous fire several years earlier. We had a day-room and a dormitory on the first floor with our guards on the ground floor below us. The building has since been demolished and replaced by a commercial Bank. Its memory has been retained in the naming of an alleyway beside it as Theatergasse (Theatre Alley). Immediately opposite was the Münchner Hof Guest House where we collected our rations – usually swede soup, black bread and margarine – each day. It was there that the Russian slave-worker Anna, who taught me a few useful Russian words and phrases, worked. Oh dear, if she is still alive she will be a very old babushka now!




Kurt Kramer, Wholesale Grocer

  At the end of the square, now a restaurant, was Kurt Kramers, wholesale grocers, from which for several weeks in 1945 another POW and I, accompanied by Christian, an elderly German civilian, pulled a handcart round the streets of Zittau, loaded with groceries for the small retailers in the town. We also drove to the former site of Fructhof a wholesale greengrocer for whom I worked for some time and, across the border into Poland, to see the opencast lignite (brown coal) mine – now a dreadful scar on the landscape – where I once worked.

Later, Pete and Nick drove the two cars to Oybin while the remainder of us – Arlene, Jo, Romy, Andy, Marilyn and myself took the narrow gauge steam train to the same destination. We lunched at a restaurant in Oybin village opposite the Tourist Office where later we were to be introduced to Elke Manke, a charming lady dressed as a mid-Victorian flower seller (I never did discover why!) who spoke fluent English and was to be our guide for the afternoon.


The entrance to the Crypt




The View from the top of Oybin












 I had been determined to get to the summit of Mount Oybin and see, once again, the crypt to which we had taken those heavy cases containing the Lenten Veil in 1945. I wondered though if I could do it. It was a considerable distance from the nearest spot to which it was possible to take a car – and it was very steep. Elke solved the problem. As a very ancient VIP I was offered a lift in a Japanese ‘Jeep’. Marilyn and I travelled in style, along narrow twisting mountain tracks and up all-but-vertical gradients, while the rest trudged up on foot! It was worth it. We relished the breath-taking views from the summit, saw the entrance to the crypt, took coffee in a mountain-top café – and wondered why the city fathers hadn’t installed a cable railway to double, treble or quadruple the number of visiting tourists!

We concluded the day with a convivial family dinner at Zum Alten Sack (The Old Sack), a hostelry ‘with atmosphere’ just a few yards from my former PoW quarters in Zittau’s Neustadt.


A convivial family occasion


The following day, Saturday, was a ‘free day’. Andy Marilyn and Jo departed for Berlin and home, while Pete and Arlene, Nick, Romy and I visited Bautzen and Görlitz.

We departed from the Haus am See at 5.30 am on Sunday 22nd May. Pete drove us to Dresden. There we caught our train to Brussels where we left Nick and Romy. Eurostar took us to London and Pete and Arlene drove me home. I walked through my front door – to find a pile of post and 15 emails waiting for me – at 9.30 p.m.

Zittau’s Pride and Joy – attracting 300,000 visitors in ten years!

Next week Tendring Topics…..on line will be back to normal – I promise!

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