Victory in Europe celebrations begin.

The 75th anniversary celebrations of Victory in Europe Day have started, including out on the ham radio bands.

Very nice to work PF75FREE with my own VE call - GB5VEP - on an otherwise empty 15m band this morning.

Screengrab of GB5VEP, active most of this month.

As is the case for many across Europe, my family was impacted significantly by WW2.  My paternal grandparents were both sent to forced labour from Poland to Germany.

The story of forced labour is without doubt the most ignored aspect of WW2 history.  Though it sounds relatively innocuous, it involved random abductions ('roundups'), terrible hardship, and murder of innocents, including infants.  Some 12 million people were subject to this system during the war.

A very large number of often well-known and still-existent German companies made use of forced labour.  A list is found here.

My grandfather went to coal mining in Essen, but had a friend inflict an ankle wound with a spade upon him, such that he seems to have escaped further labour.

My grandmother was sent to serve a German officer in Magdeburg.  Very unusually, she was treated very well by this man, the identity of whom is, sadly, now lost to us.

Collection of Polish 'P' (Petka) badges, designed to German precision dimensions that served to reduce the value of human life to very little. 

During the period, my grandmother had a more acute experience.  One day, probably immediately after being removed from school and before being assigned to her work, she tried to take some coal off the railway line in order to keep warm, but was caught.  Roughed-up and blindfolded, with a pistol held to her head, she started saying her last prayer and made the sign of the cross.  This was, miraculously, just enough for the Nazi soldiers to put the pistol down, and tell her to go away.

Polish RAF 303 Squadron.  Critical to the Battle of Britain, they were not invited to attend VE Day parade in London in 1946, for fear of angering Stalin.  One of only several double-crossing of Poland during the war by Churchill and Roosevelt.

We can and should remember VE Day.  But we should also remember the horrendous human suffering, military and civilian, and the utter devasatation of civilised nations that led up to it.