"There is a gravestone in Maesteg cemetery commemorating two persons who never came within many hundred miles of Maesteg.
When my wife died ten years ago I thought that the new gravestone should also serve as a memorial for my parents who died in the Nazi camps during the war, first my father in Therienstadt in June 1944 and then my mother in Auschwitz, where she was sent.
With many thousands of others, they are both entered in the Therienstadt memorial book published in 2000. The book also contains other relatives including my eighty-five year old grandmother who was sent on a stretcher from an old people's home, but did not survive the journey.
My brother and I were able to escape to Britain a few months before the outbreak of war. We were 15 and 17. I started working on a farm, something which, as a townie, I never thought I would do, but I continued to work in horticulture.
I married in 1942. We brought up a large family and after some wanderings in England returned to Wales in 1965 so, much of my working life was spent in charge of Maesteg parks, playing fields and cemetery.
Nearly all of my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren live in Maesteg or elsewhere in Wales, many of them Welsh-speaking. Having lived worked and studied here in Wales for the greater part of a long life, I regard Maesteg as our family's home town, and it seems appropriate that my parents are now part of it.
There is room for one more inscription on that, mine."
