that is what my great grandmother told my uncle when she put 145 pictures in his school bag beside some clothes ..... She was drying the pictures before on the kitchen table because during that time the house was looted and the pictures got thrown out of the window into the dirt and my great grandmother picked them out the dirt. With tears in her eyes she was cleaning them.... they had only 10 minutes to leave their house in Strzeszow which is now located in Poland but at that time was in Germany.

They travelled for 3 weeks heading west - the weather was terrible - raining constantly, my grandfather was taken by the Russians even though he wasnt in the Army (he was working on his dad`s farm) - no one ever saw him again - we were told he died of Typhoid.

They escaped via the River Oder travelling from Eberswalde to Prenzlau and finally arriving in Siedenbollentin where they had to rest in a town called Herzsprung near Angermünder. They were able to stay with a woman who had one boy.

The kids were looking at the pictures and showing them to the other family and somehow when my mom and the rest of the family had to move on the family became seperated from the pictures ....... the details around them are lost in the mists of time for my family.

Most of the pictures were taken in 1916 - 1944 and of course the family was sad they were lost ......

that was the last we heard or saw of the and pictures ....... until!

Last year before Christmas my mother received a letter from a search team organised by the church with a letter from a man with a photo copy of pictures from that time... asking if she knew anyone in the pictures. Of course she did - they were family pictures!

They found out the letter was from the little boy at the house and he had found the pictures when he was refurbishing the house and he found the pictures again (during the 70s) and since then he had tried serveral times through organisations and TV shows but he never succeeded. He nearly gave up because he never got any response - my mother had given her name in the 70s to the same search team because she tried to find some information on her father.

My uncle lives close and took a present and visted the boy ... of course now a man .... and collected the pictures.

So finally after a long search and a long journey our family recovered some pictures from a long time ago... long but not forgotten and thanks to the kindness and perserverance of one man - we have the pictures back.

The pictures need some attention but now we will scan them and tidy them up in photoshop and then we will have some memories back.

On an interesting note... the church search team still have 120,000 letters and pictures from the field and prisons across Europe still waiting to be claimed......