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By Root 1383 0

family was reunited, a separation common to scores of millions. And although enlistment in uniform was the commonest cause of displacement and the sundering of families, these things also took many other forms. Half the population of Britain moved home in the course of the war, some because they were evicted to make way for servicemen, some because their houses were destroyed, most because wartime duties demanded it. A significant part of the Belgian fishing fleet adopted a new life at the port of Brixham in Devon, while some Danish fishermen worked from Grimsby in Lincolnshire. Elsewhere in Europe, more brutal imperatives intervened. In January 1943, for instance, a British nurse named Gladys Skillett found herself giving birth to a child not in the British Channel Islands that were her rightful home, but in the maternity ward of a small German hospital at Biberach. She was one of 834 civilians on occupied Guernsey deported to the Reich in September 1943 to spend the rest of the war in an internment camp, as hostages; there should have been 836 of them, but an elderly major and his wife from Sark slashed their wrists before embarkation. Mrs Skillett forged a lifelong friendship with the wife of a Wehrmacht soldier who shared her hospital room in Biberach, and who gave birth to a healthy son on the same day as her own arrived.

Bianca Zagari was a mother of two in a prosperous Italian family, who fled from their home city of Naples in December 1942, when American bombing began. A party of fourteen including in-laws, nephews and nieces, maid and governess, they settled in the remote and impoverished Abruzzo region, renting two houses in a village in the Sangro valley, accessible only on foot. There, they eked out an uncomfortable existence until, to their horror, in October 1943 once again bombs began to fall around them; they were only eighteen miles from Monte Cassino, in an area bitterly contested between the German and Allied armies. Zagari and her children fled with the villagers; as they clambered into the hills, a peasant told her, in local dialect she could barely comprehend, that the bombing had claimed most of her relations: ‘Signora, the ten dead are yours.’ She wrote: ‘Now it is dawn and others are climbing up from Scontrone, terrified. Each one gives me a horrific detail: a hand, a little foot, two plaits with red bows, a body without a head.’

Her husband Raffaele survived, but most of his family perished. The survivors existed for weeks in caves in the mountains, learning skills such as Zagari had never known – lighting fires and building rough shelters with scant help from the unsympathetic local people, who cared only for their own. ‘I have to ask for everything from everyone – it is like begging for alms.’ When the Germans found them, all the men were conscripted for forced labour: ‘They took one while he was digging under ruins for his mother.’ After months of misery, one day she fled across the mountains with her two children and her jewel case. Eventually a pitying German lorry-driver gave them a lift to Rome. ‘We arrive via the Porta San Giovanni. I feel I am dreaming – I see nannies with children playing calmly. The war seems a distant rumour. Everyone asks where we have come from. No one understands the answer that we have come from Scontrone where nine members of the family have been killed. At the Corso hotel, where the concierge knows us and tries to help, we hear another guest threatening that he will refuse to patronise the establishment again if it admits such vagabonds as ourselves.’

The Zagaris were able to exploit their wealth to deliver them from the worst privations, as most Italians could not. When the icy winter of 1944 came, disease, lack of fuel and food imposed a bitter toll on civilians, especially children. One mother said: ‘Suddenly my little girl became unwell. The doctor said it was colitis – a death which took five hours, an indescribable agony. The house was freezing and Gigeto [her husband] ran to buy lots of bottles to fill with hot water. I put her in our bed and held her