Wakefield woman recalls childhood as prisoner in Nazi-occupied France

A woman who spent part of her childhood as a prisoner in a Nazi internment camp has recalled how her family were rounded up in the middle of the night.

Born in France to English parents, Elizabeth Cranswick was living in the Chantilly region at just four years old when Nazi forces invaded in 1940.

Like thousands of other British people living on the continent, she was sent to a brutal internment camp called Frontstalag 142, near the German border.

The mementoes she collected throughout the time are now being preserved by her family members who are digitising her documents and records.

Now 89, Elizabeth recalls being the moment her family was taken into captivity.

She said: "They came for us in the middle of the night. I just remember getting all my dolls out and a German soldier being in the house with his gun."

During their time in the camp, Elizabath says her family were "maltreated" and malnourised.

She added: "We were sleeping on straw mattresses and the Red Cross people came and gave us boxes.

She described herself as "one of the lucky ones" as many of the children in the camp died.

The Germans released Britons aged under 16 in 1942, but Elizabeth spent another two years living under Nazi rule.

During that time, allied bombing campaigns, including the famous D-Day assault in June 1944, claimed thousands of lives in France, paving the way for Germany's surrender the following year.

Elizabeth said: "The day we were liberated, my brother and his friend were going into the woods with a bag full of leaflets and we saw the tanks burning, injured dead bodies and others trying to escape.

"The war will be with me all the time. I can't forget it."

She was repatriated to England on 24 November, 1944, at nine years old and eventually started a family in Wakefield.

In June Elizabeth watched events marking the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings from her care home.

"I watched the D-Day landing and when celebrating the day I cried," she said

Her son Colin hopes digitising her paper records will preserve her story and memories of what she endured.

He said: "Once they're gone, the stories have gone and then the history's gone.

"It's resigned to what's in the books and the lived experience of what my mum went through, and all the people like her, dies with them."

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