Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Resisting the Nazis from a shed - BBC
Chris Bowlby explains how, for his wife's grandfather, his garden was a place of peace and defiance amid the turmoil of German history.
...
... when the Nazis took power in the 1930s he waged from his potting sheds his own courageous resistance, until the Gestapo came trampling in and forced him to dig up the typewriter that had been buried in a flower bed, on which he had been writing anti-Nazi leaflets.
He was sent to prison and threatened with execution.
But this indomitable handyman, desperate for freedom and the outdoor life he adored, had a metal file smuggled into prison inside a cake, and sawed away at the window bars of his cell in the night until he could escape and walk across the mountains to Czechoslovakia and Poland to eventual wartime exile in Britain.
...
We were sitting once in his home in 1990, when we heard loud banging from the flat above. Herbert went to see what was happening and returned pale and speechless. His neighbour had used his balcony - the sort of balcony Herbert filled with plants - to erect a huge German nationalist flag. Herbert had last seen such flags amid the chaos of the collapsing Weimar Republic as the Nazis took power, and now they threatened to loom over his old age as the political far right revived. ...
Chris Bowlby explains how, for his wife's grandfather, his garden was a place of peace and defiance amid the turmoil of German history.
...
... when the Nazis took power in the 1930s he waged from his potting sheds his own courageous resistance, until the Gestapo came trampling in and forced him to dig up the typewriter that had been buried in a flower bed, on which he had been writing anti-Nazi leaflets.
He was sent to prison and threatened with execution.
But this indomitable handyman, desperate for freedom and the outdoor life he adored, had a metal file smuggled into prison inside a cake, and sawed away at the window bars of his cell in the night until he could escape and walk across the mountains to Czechoslovakia and Poland to eventual wartime exile in Britain.
...
We were sitting once in his home in 1990, when we heard loud banging from the flat above. Herbert went to see what was happening and returned pale and speechless. His neighbour had used his balcony - the sort of balcony Herbert filled with plants - to erect a huge German nationalist flag. Herbert had last seen such flags amid the chaos of the collapsing Weimar Republic as the Nazis took power, and now they threatened to loom over his old age as the political far right revived. ...
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