IN THE summer of 1946, with their country in ruins, the first of 400 German children were evacuated to Ireland for a three-year respite from hunger and homelessness. Among the beneficiaries of "Operation Shamrock" was Herbert Remmel, then aged nine. Now, more than 60 years on, he has written the story of his extraordinary adventure in a book, From Cologne to Ballinlough.
The prosaic title describes only the starting point and terminus of the epic journey, from his native city – flattened by 1945, after 264 Allied bombing raids – to a rural community in Mayo, where he spent most of his Irish idyll. But it hints at the drama of a story, told with unflagging energy, wit, and warmth, of a child whose world is turned upside down by war.
Operation Shamrock was not an immediate success. Begun by the Save the German Children Society, the initiative was part-hijacked by what Remmel calls “nationalistic and fascistic types” who, fearing the effects of Anglo-American occupation, saw Ireland as a temporary “Teuton gene-bank” for preserving the race. A wary Irish government eventually invited the Red Cross to oversee the project.
Not that Remmel, at least, would have been a viable deposit for the gene-bank. The child of communist parents, from a Cologne suburb nicknamed “Little Moscow”, he had impeccable anti-fascist credentials.
His paternal grandfather so hated the Prussian military that, with the help of a razor and a nicotine-based solution, he created a permanent boil on his neck to secure an army discharge. And Remmel’s own father went even further: finishing the second World War in a concentration camp after his resistance cell was betrayed.
But it’s one of the book’s charms that the author does not feel much need to moralise. This is a boy’s-eye view of the war, where even communist children collected and swopped postcard pictures of military heroes, like his near-namesake Rommel, just as footballers’ pictures are swopped now. And amid all the horrors, war also offered thrills.
The start of the US air force’s day-time raids was especially exciting, Remmel admits, and when the foreign planes were hit by the flak-batteries, he and his brother Hans always cheered.
Once, they watched a stricken bomber drop vertically and smash into nearby woods: “Just in time the crew of the plane bailed out and we saw the white dots of the parachutes coming down [...] Hans and I salvaged a yellow life-jacket from the wreckage.”
Those same innocent eyes do turn, occasionally, to gaze at the grown-ups who, after the war, would say they had seen nothing. “Even as a child I knew early on that there were concentration camps (KZ),” Remmel recalls, “and that a KZ was something very bad. ‘Hold your tongue, or do you want to go to a KZ?’ was something I heard everywhere”.
But he also records his father rescuing a German officer – an old friend – from a mob in 1945, because he knew that, while a Nazi, the officer “hadn’t denounced anyone, hadn’t harassed anyone and had stayed fairly ‘decent’”.
It’s a measure of how far postwar Germany had fallen that the Dublin to which Remmel came was a place of almost impossible glamour. Transfixed by his first view of the city centre, he stared open-mouthed “at the thousand lights; at the undestroyed and undamaged houses; at the displays in the shops, which spill out onto the pavements; at the colourful shop windows; at the many bright cars; at the many people [...] strolling, not rushing.” He couldn’t take it all in, and yet somehow he did. “Even today, when I hear or see the word Dublin, I have that picture in my mind’s eye: O’Connell Street, on the late afternoon of 27th July 1946.”
Dublin was not his ultimate destination, however. After being fostered for a time by a family in Inchicore, he moved to what became his real Irish home: the Nally farm in Mayo. There, for two years, he immersed himself in hay-making, turf-cutting, rabbit-ferreting, and all the other staples of rural life, in a world a million miles from Cologne.
He learned English in part from imitating the GAA commentaries of Michael O’Hehir, whose rapid-fire broadcasts were an advanced course.
But Remmel’s assimilation in Mayo life extended to the local accent. It was the proudest moment of his time here when, passing through Dublin again en route home, he was pronounced “a proper Mayo man” by the amused women in the Red Cross office.
Remmel’s Ireland is undoubtedly romanticised. His Irish history is broad-brushed. And a few things are lost in translation. The book has several mentions of something called Kilmainham “Goal” (sic), for example.
But its author is a natural writer, with an eye for piquant detail: whether describing his first, sensational meeting with an orange (he bit through the skin, not knowing he should peel it); or recalling how, walking barefoot to school on cold Mayo mornings, he and the other children would joyously defrost their feet in fresh, warm pats of cow manure.
The book is a treasure trove of such detail, related with the breathless pace of the nine-year-old who first recorded it.
Now 72, Herbert Remmel is back in Ireland this week to launch the English edition. He will be reading from his book tonight at 8pm in Liberty Hall, Dublin, and returns to the Mayo village of Balla on Friday evening for a similar event.