Educational Coincidence

As a 10 year-old boy in 1943 I lived temporarily in Anglesey to avoid the bombing, and I was sent to school in the neighbouring village of Moelfre. I was somewhat mystified to find that the two schoolmistresses who ran it were not only a mother and her daughter but also that they were Germans - with whose country Great Britain was at war. Almost half a century later, I retired from a full career in the RAF to a cottage near Chichester. My opposite neighbour was a German - a retired Lutheran pastor with whom I became very friendly; we used to go sailing together and he has become almost part of our family. One day when we were out in the boat I asked what had happened to him during the war and he confessed that he had, much against his will, been conscripted into the Luftwaffe as a young anti-aircraft gunner. We both laughed, as he knew I had been in the RAF, albeit just after WW2, and I then told him that I had once been taught by two German ladies and mentioned their surname. When he heard this his eyes opened wide and he told me that in the 1930s he had a teacher of the same name. She had left the school quite suddenly in about 1936 and he understood that she and her family had gone to England because they were Jews. Excited by the thought that she might be one of the same couple who had taught me, I mentioned this story to a policeman friend who happened to have an old colleague who had retired to Anglesey and who would be delighted to investigate further. Within a few weeks he had sent me three photographs: one of the house where I lived as a boy, another of the erstwhile school in Moelfre and the third a snapshot, taken in the 1940s, of the two ladies in question. I took this across the road to my Lutheran friend and he recognised the younger one instantly. It appears that these women, together with many other German Jewish refugees, were initially interned on the Isle of Man, where they set up a school behind the wire. Once the British Government recognised that they did not represent a security threat, all German Jewish females were released and were free to travel to the mainland. Thus it was that I discovered that my German friend and I had both been educated by the same person some sixty years earlier, he in Germany and I in this country, notwithstanding that both nations had been at war and that each of us had spent the intervening period travelling literally all over the world; yet we have ended up living immediately opposite each other. Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect is that we ever discovered the link at all.