Major (ret.) Gerhard Singer

"I have served by the 200th anti-aerial regiment. I was operating the automatic cannon called Bofors. This gun was being loaded from the top. There were four bullets in one clip. One soldier was standing on the ground and was passing the bullets from the container to the loader who was standing on the Bofor´s platform and was loading the bullets down the cannon. It looked like... You know the top loaders? A machine gun or rifle has the bottom loader. But machine cannon had the top loader. The loader operator had to be very fast, because that cannon could fire as many as 80 times per minute."

"So I got on this Danish farm in 1939. They took great care of us there. Even today we’re still in touch with their children. And when they were younger they came for a visit. You have to understand, that we’re all over eighty now and those people, who took care of us in Denmark are unfortunately already dead. But we kept writing to each other for a long time."

"There was no place to stay there (in Torbruk - editor’s note). We simply stayed in shelters we made ourselves. We dug out a hole, found some logs or woods although there wasn’t much wood around too. Then we put some sheet over it and covered it all with dirt. That’s how we lived there. Some warm cozy place - that just didn’t exist. We had to be careful when it was raining though, because our trucks were standing on the muddy, sand like ground someone could easily drown there. The water was all over, it didn’t have time to seep, so it was running through the wadi straight into the sea."

"The Swedes didn’t want us in Sweden at all. So we had to carry on to the north by train, where is a border town called Haparanda. It is located between Sweden and Finland. In Finland they have agreed that I wasn’t able to travel any longer so the local Jewish associations took me under their wings. And I got in one nice family where they took good care of me. Just when I got a little better they put me in another family. One of the family members told me: „Wait a minute, we know where Mistek is. My cousin lived there! “What a mere coincidence! And so we got really great along because of this fact. All my life was full of coincidence if I think of it now."

"The flood in Dunkerque wasn’t really pleasant either. When we arrived to Dunkerque we settled there. We made some ditches, then we had to lift the tanks a little up, so they could fire to longer distances. Nearby there were some abandoned farms where we stayed. And all of a sudden the ground water appeared all over. So we called the firemen from the surrounded villages to drain the water, but the water just came back in a little while again."