Blog

We are very excited to welcome you to this website which is a place for you to read about people’s wartime experiences and to post your and your family’s stories about the Second World War.  Because of my book, most of the stories which have been sent to me have been about escape from France Read more →

  The Royal Commission of History has just published  ’Why the Belgian diamonds never fell into enemy hands’. On 11 May 1940 Paul Timbal, managing director of the Antwerp Diamond Bank, fled the Diamond Quarter in Antwerp with a fortune in diamonds and on 23 June was able to deliver his charge to the Diamond Read more →

Aristides de Sousa Mendes (1885-1954) was the Portuguese Consul-General in Bordeaux, France, in June 1940. There, as dramatic events unfolded across war-afflicted Europe, Sousa Mendes disobeyed the orders of Portugal’s Salazar dictatorship and issued visas to thousands of refugees fleeing from invading German military forces. For his actions, the Consul was punished by the Portuguese Read more →

Ivor discusses his own experience of  finding out about  his family during the war. This includes the accounts of his wife Olga and his cousin Solange  Why not post your own thoughts on Ivor, Olga and Solange’s stories at the bottom of the page? The “Fleeing Hitler” website has been a remarkable catalyst for finding Read more →

Dr Diamond’s description of refugees fleeing from the northern departments of France, and Paris, in the face of the German advance of 1940 had echoes in Britain when cities were bombed later in the war. As well as official evacuees, residents would often take to the roads with possessions piled on carts to escape further Read more →

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that:   “History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies”. Well, maybe. What is certain is that this website is a gallery of original pictures, stories written by people who participated in real-life events, anxious, as my late wife Dinah was, to record their impressions Read more →

My parents had lived in France for thirteen  happy  years, the best of their lives. They’d lost their house, possessions, and more seriously in the long term,   my father had  lost his job. He’d been working for an American company and the Americans at that stage of the war were still neutral.    (Roosevelt’s refusal to Read more →

Elly Sherman’s extraordinary story first came to my attention because her niece wrote to me about a claim she is making on her grandmother’s behalf for  ’compensation of loss of personal property at the behest of La Commission pour l’indemnisation des victimes de spoliations interervenues du fait des législations antisémites en vigueur pendant l’Occupation (CIVS) at Read more →

From Paris to Liverpool via Frontstalag 142 “Running from the bombs! We were running from the bombs!” cried my stepmother when I asked her where she spent the Second World War. My boomer generation will have had many a relative unwilling to recall life under Hitler, but decades later, still haunted by their experiences, some Read more →

Philip Smith’s account of his trip through France and eventual escape by boat is quite remarkable. We can imagine the Smith family setting out each on the bicycle they would normally use to go on picnics in the St Germain forest just west of Paris. We can strongly identify with his ten year-old self as Read more →