Bizarre reunion

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understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

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I grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa with my South African parents and family. I went to the local school, and I had close friend throughout most of my school years. Her parents had emigrated to South Africa from England and although she only lived a few blocks from me, for various reasons our parents had never met. With our houses being fairly close to each other we would generally walk to visit each other. When we were about 15 years old around 1974, I was at her house one afternoon and there was a terrific storm. I rang my father and asked him to come and collect me in the car. Later, we heard the doorbell go and knew that it was my father, but my friend's father answered the door. We heard a shout and sort of scuffling noises, and rushed to see what it was, to be greeted by the most extraordinary sight of our two fathers in an embrace and crying! The story behind this is as follows: both our father's had been prisoners of war in Stalag 8. My father was a South African soldier and her father was a British soldier. They had been best friends, and each shared many of the same or similar photos, and her father had drawings of some of his friends including my father. When the war finished, each of our fathers returned to their countries, and my father returned to his home in Durban. When my friend's father eventually emigrated to South Africa with his young wife, he had no way of contacting my father, believing my father to be in Durban, not knowing that in the interim my father had moved to Cape Town, and then to Johannesburg, and that for many years they were living a few blocks apart. As you can imagine from that day forward they saw each other nearly every week until my father passed away suddenly of a heart attack in 1979.
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Date submitted:Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:14:32 +0000Coincidence ID:5460