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Re: War Stories That Cried To Be Told

From: POW-MIA InterNetwork

Date: January 08, 2003

"War stories that cried to be told
Two encounters with the enemy. Two unforgettable memories of war.

PETER RHODES uncovered them, just a few doors from each other

Two life-changing moments. For Tony Southall it was a Nazi officer on a dusty road in southern Greece - a meeting that saved him from a bullet in the head.


Tony Southall with his wartime story, Life Behind The Wire
For Odile Lewis, it was a German soldier on a motorbike roaring into an avenue in Paris, a meeting that brought four years of wretched occupation and terrible memories of the Holocaust.

Today, the pair live a few doors apart in Penn Road, Wolverhampton. They have never met. What they have in common is a desire, before they are gone, to explain the reality of war to a younger generation.

In 1939, Tony Southall was a dashing young trooper with the Inns of Court Yeomanry, one of London's swishest TA cavalry units. Recruited exclusively from lawyers and nicknamed "The Devil's Own," they cut a dash riding through London on horses borrowed from the Life Guards.

But a few months later, the horses had passed into history and Tony Southall was watching his machine-gun bullets bounce off German tanks in the doomed Greek campaign.

Captured at the port of Kalamata, the British were marched into captivity. Those who fell by the wayside were simply shot.

"I knew I couldn't go on," Tony Southall recalls at his room in a nursing home. "I just sat down at the side of the road and said 'go on - shoot me'. And suddenly this officer behind shouted 'Oxford!' I hadn't a clue what was going on."


The fence at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp
It turned out that the German officer had studied at Oxford University before the war and had happy memories of England. He put the exhausted Englishman in a captured lorry, an act of mercy which certainly saved his life.

Tony Southall spent the next four years as a prisoner-of-war in a succession of camps. When he came home, weighing just seven stone, he went on to become a successful solicitor in Wolverhampton, part of the legal team that helped create the Mander Centre and the conversion of St George's church into a Sainsbury's store.

At 82 he has finally written and published a remarkable memoir, including an account of a mass breakout of 27 PoWs from Warburg camp and eyewitness scenes of massed Allied air raids on German towns.

"I don't think we felt any sympathy for them," he recalls thoughtfully. "My wife always said I should write it down. So I started putting bits and pieces into the computer. The more I wrote, the more I remembered."

* Life Behind the Wire by Tony Southall is published by Stockwell at £5.50


Odile Lewis was just 10 when Paris fell to the Germans in June, 1940. While thousands fled the city, her family trekked the other way to ensure the little girl could sit her school exams.



Odile Lewis - survival in occupied France
"It was bizarre," she recalls in a rich French accent. "There was this complete silence in the city. And then in one of these deserted streets I heard the terrible noise of a motorcycle.

"To me it was like a monster. The rider was a German soldier. He had a machine gun and I was terrified."

Soon Paris was flooded with German troops. Loudspeakers were erected in public places. Announcements began with "Achtung!" She visibly trembles at the memory.

Odile's father, a distinguished architect, was held as a prisoner-of-war for 18 months. When he rejoined his family in Paris he had no work.

"There was no food and we had no money to buy stuff on the black market," she recalls. "My sister and I would slip out at night to steal potatoes and wood. We had to fetch water from a stream. It was survival."

She admits the experience has left her with little sympathy for people who plead poverty in modern Britain. But the worst part of the Occupation, she says, was the growing realisation that something terrible was happening around them.

"I used to play with a little girl who lived in a big house in the country. But eventually she came no more and we thought, what has happened to these people? They were Austrians and their name was Schussnig, and we realised they were Jews."



The yellow star Jews were forced to wear
Later she and her mother saw police shoving women and children into vans.

"We didn't know what was happening but we knew they couldn't all be bad women. Then we realised they were wearing the yellow Jewish star. What happened was that they were denounced by the concierges in the apartment blocks for money. I suppose it was a temptation. I remember before the war there was anti-semitism in France.

"But it was not until 1944 that we realised all these poor women and children had gone to the gas chambers. After the war I remember seeing one of the people from Buchenwald, still wearing his striped uniform and thinking, 'so, it is true'. It was an organised massacre, something you cannot forget."

But how, she asks, are young people to remember when they do not even learn about the Holocaust? Odile Lewis, who married her English husband Philip and has lived in England for nearly 50 years, was prompted to write to the Express & Star about her wartime experiences after attending a showing in Wednesfield of Amen, a film condemning the Vatican's alleged indifference towards the Holocaust.

"Do you know," she says, "there was not a single young person watching it. They only want to see Star Wars, James Bond and ridiculous, violent things. Why is that?"

© Express & Star, 1997-2003"