Thessaloniki, 1941: Hanna Hemingway and her family, British citizens, are held in Pavlo Mila prison:

I remember everything about being taken prisoner. There's a reel in here [points to her head]. I can’t get it out of my mind. It's there. I just wish somebody would erase it. I remember the good things, I remember the bad things, because wherever you go you can find a laugh.

The Germans gave us injections. Why I have no idea. Because we were British we had to have a certain amount of care? I have no idea.

Then came the day. My father came with two soldiers guarding him. He told my godmother to say goodbye to me. He told me to take off my Star of David bracelet & a little Star of David around my neck & these earrings, which she had bought me. But she wouldn't take my earrings. That’s why I kept them.

A soldier told my mother ‘take all you papers or anything of value, you are not coming back’. He did us a service. Without that British passport we wouldn’t have… So my mother took that & an alarm clock. She must have been absolutely demented. Passport you can understand but why an alarm clock? We had a good laugh over the alarm clock over the years.

It was a Greek prison for very hardened criminals. They opened the door & we were thrown into this room. Six young children & my mother, pieces of straw on the floor. Filthy. We just sat there petrified. A hell of a lot women walking around looking at us.

In the corner: one small barred window & this cauldron which was used as a toilet. I will remember the stench to this dying day.

The only food we had was a piece of bread once a day. They let the women go round in a circle while they watched dinner being served. Somebody would tip a sack of potatoes with mud and everything, a sack of carrots, and within a matter of minutes we each had a carrot & a potato. It just doesn’t bear thinking about.

My godmother, god bless her, contacted the English consulate in Greece & said ‘there was this English family held in…blabla’. He came from the consulate. Luckily my father had his passport. They took us out of this filth, put us in a shower, we needed it, we reeked.

My mum took as much of the lice she could out of us. She'd be up night after night, wiping the lice off our faces so that we could sleep & she couldn’t. She used to sleep as much as she could during the day.

For the first time we saw clean straw. We were put into this room. A long room, less people in it . We were bathed, well showered, we were scrubbed, the skin was sore…they weren’t very gentle. We thought we were in heaven because we could lie down & just go to sleep, it was clean.

After three days we got a Red Cross parcel. I'd like to say ‘thank you’ to the Red Cross: those parcels saved our lives. We used to get one a month. My mum didn’t smoke, she didn’t drink tea. Bella used to weasel her way around & get us bits of food in exchange for the things we didn’t want. For 3½ years we did that.

My mother used to tell us stories; she used to sing to us, that’s all we could do. Go to the window…I stopped going to the window actually. There were dustbins & a boy was caught scavenging in there. In front of our window there was a big tree. They took him up. They stretched his arms & legs round this tree. He screamed. Screams you don’t forget. They left him all night. They cut him down the morning after but of course he died. But the horror of that boy's death is…I just wish I could forget it, but I can’t.

Hanna Hemingway

Memories

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