POW, sister meet after 80 years

Dumfries, Scotland: When Heinz Roestel was separated from his younger sister Edith, aged six, he little thought it would be nearly 80 years before he saw her again.

Nor did the German ex-soldier expect that when he did, he would be lying in a Scottish hospital bed using an interpreter to communicate because he had forgotten his native tongue. Parted when their mother died, Heinz gradually lost all contact with Edith after he joined the Wehrmacht as a teenager, was captured in the Netherlands and finally ended up in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Scotland in 1945.

Originally from Hindenburg — now Zabrze in southern Poland — Roestel is one of thousands of POWs who stayed in Britain after the war because they fell in love, found work or lost their homes when Germany's eastern border was shifted west.

Historians say the integration of the POWs, who included Manchester City goalkeeping legend Bert Trautmann, helped heal the wounds of the war and pave the way for closer ties with continental Europe. Yet their fate has often been overlooked.

Roestel, 85, settled in southern Scotland and had given up hope of seeing Edith again.