“My mother (who died in 2005) and my six-year- old self. We had arrived from war-torn Germany in April 1947, but already I look a proper little Irish schoolboy. My father was killed on the Russian Front in 1941, before I was born. My mother had a brother who went to England in the 1920s and joined the British Army during the war, while his brother and brother-in-law (my father) were in the German Army. After the war ended, times were hard in Germany and my uncle persuaded the Irish government – a small branch of his business was in Dublin – to allow my mother and myself to move to Dublin in April 1947.”
(1948)
Submitted by Theo Hoppen