Stephen Matthews had no idea of the nightmare to come when the Nazis invaded his home. But then he was only two.
The little lad lived on Guernsey in the Channel Islands – the only part of Britain occupied by German stormtroopers in the Second World War.
Two years later he was still too young to understand when his parents told him they were going on holiday.
The truth was they were among thousands of islanders ordered by Hitler to be imprisoned in Germany.
By the time the war ended three years later, the terrified boy had been beaten by the SS, bombed, starved, seen men die in front of him and battled constant illnesses during spells in prison camps.
But his strongest memories were of witnessing at first hand the atrocities of the Holocaust when skeletal Jewish families were shipped to their camp.
Stephen, now 81, said: “It’s something you can never erase from your mind.
“All I could see was their skin, the colour of old parchment and tightly stretched across their protruding bones.”
It was as far as it could get from his idyllic life of innocence and comfort on beautiful Guernsey before the Nazis arrived in June 1940.
Under the German occupation, businesses were shut down, radios were confiscated and food was rationed.
Then in 1942 more than 2,000 British-born islanders were sent to prison camps in Germany – with Stephen’s family among the first to go.
Hitler had ordered it as retaliation after Britain interned Germans in Iran.
Stephen told how he was excited when his parents Cecil and Eileen informed him that they were going on holiday.
“I remember the day we left,” he said. “Mum told me to say goodbye to my cat, Dinky. I recall stroking her and looking up as the clouds passed by and having a sensation that the house was going to fall.
Then I remember struggling with a big kit bag and pulling it down the pavement. We went to St Martin’s Church to catch buses to take us to the local cinema which had been turned into a processing centre.
“From St Peter Port we were put on to a boat and sent below. I recall it being very orange down there which I now realise was the glow from the rust.”
The boat docked at St Malo in Brittany where local women risked the wrath of German soldiers by pushing past them to give the families chunks of bread.
“I marvelled at how brave they were,” said Stephen.
From there, the families were herded on to a passenger train through Paris to an abandoned prisoner of war camp at Dorsten, near Essen.
“We spent seven weeks in filth and squalor,” said Stephen. “There were rats and mice everywhere and mum later wrote in her diaries that she had to tuck her trousers into her socks to stop them running up her legs.”
Two months later the Guernsey families were once again put on trains without toilets and food for a 36-hour trip to Biberach internment camp near Memmingen in southern Germany.
There they lived in stark concrete barracks along with captured Allied officers and survived on cabbage soup.
While conditions at Biberach were poor, Red Cross parcels arrived and Stephen still remembers fondly the German commander who allowed his dad to listen to the BBC news on the radio – despite the risk of them both being shot if discovered.
On his fifth birthday he even received a hand-drawn picture card of Mickey Mouse from an artist aunt who was interned in France.
SS guards still visited the camp from time to time and Stephen recalls them once beating his dad – and how his courageous mother stood up to one.
He said: “When we first arrived at Biberach my mum, frustrated by our conditions, started poking her finger at a guard. He lifted a gun to my dad’s head and told him, ‘Tell her to shut up or I’ll shoot you’. That’s the only time I ever heard my dad utter a harsh word to my mother.”
In 1944 Stephen had his hand badly crushed by a guard when he was caught passing scraps of food through a fence to starving Russian soldiers who had been ordered to plough a field.
The family even found themselves caught up in the middle of a tank battle as the French pounded German forces when the war drew to a close in 1945.
He later stumbled on a shattered human corpse in a minefield and had to be rescued by his father.
It was that year that his young eyes first bore witness to the depravity of the Nazi murder machine when starving Jews from a nearby camp where shipped in.
Until then – like the vast majority of people at the time – they had no idea about the extermination of millions of Jews in death camps.
In January 1945, Stephen and his dad were among Biberach prisoners asked to take handcarts to the town railway station to fetch new inmates.
“When we got there a German officer was being sick because the Jews were in such a bad state,” said Stephen.
“The families were deloused on the station and sent to wash, leaving pitiful piles of ragged clothes on the ground.
“As my father told them they would be taken to Biberach to be fed and housed, he looked down and saw that the pile of clothes he had been standing on was actually a prisoner’s bare toes.
“Yet the man said nothing. He was so used to violent treatment that he was too scared to speak or move. It was the first time I ever saw my father cry.”
Stephen and his dad helped push carts filled with weak prisoners up the hill to Biberach but many died on the way.
“On our cart one of the men had died before we got back. I remember saying to my dad, ‘I think he’s gone to Jesus’ and he said, ‘I’m afraid you’re right.”
Stephen later discovered the families were Dutch Jews who held passports from Paraguay and were due to be exchanged for German nationals held by the Allies.
The family were finally freed when the French liberated Biberach in April.
Stephen started writing their story after discovering his mother’s old diary and has turned it into an acclaimed book.
One souvenir he keeps of the horrific times is an aluminium mug engraved as a Christmas gift by a kind camp inmate.
But like other survivors of that conflict, his memories will never fade.
- Stephen’s book The Day the Nazis Came is published by John Blake priced £8.99
