Korean Job Discussion Forums

[khyber]

I sometimes check out stormfront.org just to see what they say. It invariably gets depressing. Until one of them, with venom and resentment cuss something like "Righteous Among the Nations", I feel obliged to check it out.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Righteous_Among_the_Nations

After Christmas dinner we sat arounded and talked about my family in Europe.

My parents were 3 by the end of it. They remember little though they claim they do remember liberation parades. But...
1) My great aunt on my mom's side hid Jews in Amsterdam. Her last name was Klinkert and she ran a hospice for old folk. That afforded her the luxury of good transportation as she'd have to pick up supplies around town. So she delivered notes for the underground over larger distances.
2) My dad's dad escaped from a concentration camp. Not a big camp though. He escaped with another man who was shot.
3) My dad's mom was living in Groeningen in northern holland. During the worst of the famine, she biked all the way down to rotterdam to get potatoes on a wooden wheeled bike. And she couldn't bike over the big dike cause the germans were confiscating everything people tried to take across. When she arrived back from the trip, she couldn't even get off the bike. She just fell over. She developed pneumonia and, while eventually recovering, she was weakened and died a couple months later (I didn't press my dad to explain that in much more detail).

My oma kept a dictionary through the war that my mom is translating. I think it'll be fascinating.


Does anyone else have any stories from their family?

[Leslie Cheswyck]

Both my grandfathers died before the war. One of my great uncles was a ski instructor for the Russkies, or so I am told. Another was in the Coast Guard, fished out bodies after Pearl harbor. And another served in the navy throughout the entire Pacific campaign; coming home after the war, slipped off the gangplank and drowned. How's that for luck, brother?

[cj1976]

My grandfather joined the British Army in 1939, and unfortunately for him the war started soon after.

[JMO]

My granda smuggles food stuff over the border between the north and south in ireland to old relatives we had in derry city. My uncle who was about ten during the war said to him it felt like nobody was really worried..he was young though.

[Temporary]

My Great Grandfather fought with one of the greatest Polish leaders of all time During the 1920-1922 Rusio-Polish War (We kicked the Russians in the balls but were sold out by spineless Polish government.). Then he fought as a partisan during WW2. My Grandfather and Granny both survived in hiding as children during WW2 . My whole family was almost executed by the Gestapo.

[pete213]

[riverboy]

My Grandfather served in France.

[JMO]

that orange thing is interesting. My uncles and dad talk about oranges like they are a big treat. they call mandarins and tangerines, christmas oranges.

[Forward Observer]

My dad is 84 now. This is him in England & France before Normandy:


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v61/satcong/DSC01323.jpg


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v61/satcong/DSC01322.jpg


My grandfather is sitting down in the middle with a sidearm.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v61/satcong/DSC01320.jpg

[D.D.]

I posted on the other thread that my grandparents were on the first boat sunk in WW2. If you google Athenia sinking you can read about it.

It was a passenger liner leaving for Canada. Even Hitler was pissed off that they had sunk a passenger liner as he was hoping England would stay out of the war.

They lived but 118 people died when one of the rescue boats ran over a lifeboat.

[RACETRAITOR]

[canuckistan]

My maternal Oma & Opa: occupied Netherlands and forced to billet 2 German officers for a while in their house because it was big--one a certified frothing-at-the-mouth Nazi, the other a much gentler guy who had to go along with it.

Opa managed to secure a transportation pass signed by some Nazi big-wig at one point and was driving a resistance guy somewhere. He also had a hidden shotgun--totally illegal--was stopped at check point and started yelling at the guards pretending resistance guy was his prisoner, and how dare they hold him up because Nazi big-wig would be pissed.... they actually bought the story and let him continue. Ha! Opa had some cojones. Like many Dutch, they were regular people who did extraordinary things during that time.

Opa eventually got sent to France to work in a munitions factory, escaped, jumped off a moving train on the way home to escape soldiers again, spent the last year of the war hiding in a space under their kitchen floor, emerging once in a while to blast Allied broadcasts from their (illegal) radio down the back lane when soldiers were searching houses--an act of defiance and just to drive them crazy. Opa taking such chances used to upset my oma since one would get shot being caught with a radio.

The older kids were in on screwing over the Nazis too. Some of my uncles and aunts would go to where the regular army grunts were camped out in a field and steal things by lifting the corners of the tents. Useful items that could be used to trade for food from farmers and their wives--cologne, shaving kits etc.

Or snip the barbed wire to cut across a field that made getting to school the old way much faster than the new route forced by German barricades.
They'd bicycle 3 hours just to get a small sack of potatoes. They were slowly starving.
It was Canadian soldiers who liberated Zeist--they threw loaves of white bread. They said it tasted like cake.

Years later when Oma & Opa talked about these things around the dinner table they could still barely contain their anger at the Nazis, the words almost spat out. I had the pleasure of knowing them for a few years. Their stories left a huge impression.

[TeeBee]

My grandfather got sent OUT of Europe during the war. The RAF sent him to South Africa where he worked on aircraft near Pietersburg and met my grandmother. Don't think he was ever anywhere near the action.

Not a good story, but it did lead to me.

[lisac1983]

I'm from a family of pacifists. My great-grandfather, however, tried to enlist in WW2 but was rejected 'cause he had flat feet.

[the_wicker_man]