How family fled home in Poland ahead of VE Day

Sitting on his sofa in Berkshire, Peter Herke, now 84, recalls how his family fled their home in occupied-Poland 80 years on from VE Day.

He came from a family of German speakers who had lived in the city of Łodz for more than a century.

In the weeks before the war ended on 8 May 1945, the-then four-year-old, his parents, brother and new sister, who was born en-route, fled into hoping for a better life.

One of the few possessions they had was an album of photographs in which his mother had chronicled his early life.

On the first page, facing a card announcing his birth, are two pictures of the baby Peter, being cradled in his mother's arms, less than a year after Hitler's troops had poured across Poland's borders.

Their arrival changed everything.

"We lived there under German control, I mean Hitler's people," he explained.

"My father worked in a cloth factory. They were told, you don't sell to private people, you only sell to us.

"We need uniforms and you're gonna do them," he recounted, in an accent betraying his German-speaking roots and later life in Canada.

The album showed how the regime changed things in the home as well as the workplace.

Turning the page, a picture shows Peter on his aunt's knee, between his mother's parents and their son-in-law, a doctor in military uniform.

"There you see," Peter pointed to the armband his uncle wore without naming the swastika symbol at its centre.

His father's age, 46, meant unlike many of the other German speakers, who had been conscripted, he had been left to continue his role as one of the factory managers. But then came a warning.

"The head of the Polish police force, who my father knew quite well, came to him one day and said 'look you're too high up to not actually ...," Peter paused searching for a word, "the Germans":[]}