Marcel Hayler and his brother Ernest grew up in Aubers, where their father, Henry, took care of Aubers Ridge Cemetery. During the German invasion of France in 1940, the Hayler family — Henry, Sarah, Ernest (age 13), and Marcel (age 11) — escaped to England. In this interview, I speak to Marcel Hayler about his […]
Content warning: This episode discusses Nazi war crimes, specifically the murder of disabled people in Germany and Poland. It also discusses illness and death in civilian internment camps, including suicide. Charles Henry Holton was the first War Graves gardener to die in a German internment camp. An ex-sapper from Buckinghamshire, Charlie cared for the British […]
Frederick Martin was a typical War Graves gardener in many ways. He served in the First World War, settled in France, married a French woman, and was interned by the Nazis in 1940 after a failed attempt to escape. But in other ways, he was unusual. This episode features several important documents from Fred Martin’s […]
When I turned in my manuscript this past spring, I was left with heaps of additional research that I could not fit in the book. It would be easy to just let these stories lurk in files on my computer, but I wanted to make them accessible to others. Thus, a podcast. In each episode, […]
Whenever I pass a flea market or browse eBay, I look for old photograph albums. If I’m lucky enough to find one that contains written information about the people in the pictures — a full name, a date, an address — I buy the album and research it in hopes of returning it to family […]
