EILEEN LAYS A GHOST TO REST

Eileen has returned to the site of a concentration camp where she worked as a translator following the end of World War Two. The notorious Fort Breendonk, situated near Antwerp, was captured by the Nazis during their invasion of Belgium; re-purposed into a prison camp for political prisoners, resistance members and Jews, the site witnessed innumerable tortures and executions until its liberation by Allied forces in 1944.

Eileen was in Belgium to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the death of dambuster Guy Gibson, and hadn't originally intended to revisit Breendonk. Her reluctance is understandable. Not long after VE day, Eileen was drafted to unearth, and to explain to RAF officers, the extent of the atrocities carried out in the camp; on top of the horrors related to her, which included human waterwheels and boiling-water showers, she also had to contend with the Belgian collaborators then imprisoned there.

However, with the assistance of two RAF cadets, ultimately Eileen took the opportunity to, in her own words, 'lay a ghost to rest', and spent a day touring the memorial museum into which the camp has been converted. Though glad to have done so, Eileen described the trip as 'very sombre'. Much of what she recalls from her service remains: the blood-stained posts to which prisoners were tied prior to being shot, the gallows, the mud field in which prisoners were buried up to their neck.

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V2 ROCKET FOUND IN HARWICH

Recently a V2 rocket used during the Second World War was discovered in Harwich Harbour, Essex. A local sailing club spotted what looked like the tail of a rocket breaking the service of the water. Once the police had been informed a team of Royal Navy divers were called to the scene to investigate, as well as the Bomb Disposal Squad. WW2 veteran, Eileen Younghusband, knows all too well about the dangers of the V2 rockets. She served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and was tasked with detecting and tracking enemy planes and the V2 rockets in the wartime Filter Rooms.

90-year-old Eileen, who was the first person to track a V2 rocket, feels the location of the discovered V2 is quite interesting. She said: “It’s all very strange. It’s not where I would have expected it to be. The V2s were designed to travel great distances. If they were launched from Pas-de-Calais they were aimed at London, from Rotterdam they were aimed at Antwerp. This one must have been faulty.”

She continues: “These weapons were so different from the bombing of the Blitz when people could see and hear the aircraft and recognise that our fighters were up there retaliating. The V2s were something else. If you heard one, the chances are you were going to die."

Eileen’s book, ‘One Woman’s War’, which details her time in the Filter Room, is available now from www.onewomanswar.co.uk.

SCHOOL REPORT

Recently I gave a talk to Class 3, about my experience as a WAAF Officer during the last war, at All Saints Primary School at Barry, Vale of Glamorgan. These  eight-year olds had previously visited The Imperial War Museum and their class room was decorated with WW2 memorabilia - a cut-out evacuation train with their own photos pasted in the windows, fighter and bomber aircraft, the emotive words THE BLITZ, HITLER, NAZIS together with Ration books and Identity Cards.

They listened avidly to my description of the job of the Filter Room, the lynchpin of the Radar system. When I showed them a film of the work done at Fighter Command Headquarters' Filter Room, they were engrossed.

At the end they asked over twenty questions. "Had I met Anne Frank?" "No," I said. "Did I ever see Winston Churchill." "Yes," was my answer. "Did we have to be good at Maths to work there?" And the questions continued...  I spent one of my most interesting and enjoyable two hours with them. The culmination was finding in my letter box two days ago an envelope containing twenty-nine hand-made cards from these children with drawings on the front and delightful messages inside. Here a few samples of these delightful children's efforts.

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THE STORY OF A COLLABORATEUR

Last night, April 13th, my sixty-five year-long quest came to an end. In May, 1938, aged only seventeen, I went to Contrexeville in the Vosges to teach English to three young children. Their father was a right-wing member of the Chambre des Deputes, the French Parliament.

By August, it seemed war was imminent - it was the Munich Crisis - and he was called up. I was immediately sent home to avoid being caught in a war zone. Eventually at the end of World War 2, when I returned from service as a WAAF Officer, I thought about those children and wondered what had happened to them. For many years I searched without success to trace them, then through the internet I found their father had joined the Petain government and was labelled a collaborateur. I learned he had escaped to Germany in 1944 and then had managed to leave the country and found sanctuary first in the Argentine and finally in Uraguay where he died in 1968. In France, all his possessions were taken from him and his name blackened. But what happened to the children?

Last night Helene, the youngest of the three, telephoned me from Geneva and told me their amazing story. A French writer friend of mine, Genevieve Moulard, had managed to track her down through the Mayor of Contrexeville. Having been contacted by her, Helene immediately phoned me. She talked for an hour and a half in excellent English relating an amazing tale of escape, of anger, of bitterness and of danger. The life story of that family is food for a novel. Perhaps my next venture!!!

www.onewomanswar.co.uk