Elizabeth Cranswick was just five years old when she was rounded up from her grandparents’ French home and taken on a train to an internment camp in 1941 by the Germans.
Along with her mother Rosa and older brother Frank, they were taken to a camp known as Frontstalag 142 near the German border which was designated for women and children.
This was the fate for thousands of British citizens living in France when War broke out and it would end up being Elizabeth’s imprisoned home for the next few years.
“My grandparents were both English but they moved to France because my grandfather worked in the horse racing industry in Chantilly,” explains Elizabeth.
“My mum was born in France and later married an Englishman, so I had British citizenship, and it was after my dad went off to fight in the war that the Germans came for us.
“They took me, my brother, mum and grandmother to one camp and my grandfather to another, so we didn’t see him again until after the War.
“They put us on a train. I don’t know where we went to at the time as it was dark and I was so young but we were on it for a long while. When we got to camp it was one room with six of us in it. It was a bed of straws with bugs and fleas. That’s how we lived until we were sent back home.”
The family were released from the camp after two and a half years because of Elizabeth and Frank’s young age. They were moved back to the village of Lamorlaye, north of Paris, where, as British subjects born in France, they were under constant suspicion and scrutiny of the Germans.
It was only after the D-Day landings in 1944 that the village was liberated by the Americans and the family was given papers to repatriate them to England.
Elizabeth and her family returned to England on 25th November 1944. She carried with her a treasured box of mementos – which includes newspaper cuttings, leaflets, clothing, a parachute silk and a Union Jack flag – which is kept at close quarters in her room at Linson Court.
“That box is precious to me,” she said.
Elizabeth spent the remainder of her childhood in Radcliffe, Lancashire, before falling in love with a ‘pen friend’, James (Jimmy), who she married in 1956 in New Sharlston, Wakefield.
The couple went on to have two children, Colin, 65, and Ann, 63, four grandchildren, Rachael, Marc, Lauren and Daniel and three great grandchildren, Megan, Mason and Isabel.
They were also the mayor and mayoress of Wakefield in the 1970s.
Elizabeth came to Linson Court in 2022 and has a lovely room with a nice view outside.
“Nothing will ever be as nice as home, but it’s the next best thing,” she says.
“The staff are friendly and very nice, so I have no complaints at all.”
