Revealed at last ... Huddersfield man's war story he'd kept secret for 70 years

He was a hard-working man all his life ... yet great grandad Mieczyslaw Szkiler had a secret he had kept hidden until his death.

Mieczyslaw, known as John, died recently aged 92 after living a quiet life in Huddersfield for almost 70 years.

His neighbours in Marsh, his former workmates and friends, his wife and family – none of them knew of a hidden part of his life.

For it’s amazing that Polish-born John survived World War Two after working as a forced labourer and was then conscripted into the German army after a quirk of fate meant he avoided the concentration camps.

Mieczyslaw (John) Szkiler in his Polish uniform

Since arriving in Huddersfield after the war John was always employed as a labourer, in the late 1940s firing the kilns at Elliot’s brickworks in Lepton before working at John Edward Crowther in Marsden and then for 38 years he was a warehouseman for John Crowther & Sons at Union Mills in Milnsbridge.

Son Nick said: “He was proud to say that in all the years he only had two days off through sickness. He didn’t talk a lot, but when he did it was always worth listening to.”

Mieczyslaw (John) Szkiler in his German uniform at his grandmother's funeral

From 1948 until 2004 John kept a secret from his wife, Sheila – who was born in Marsden and brought up in Linthwaite – and his two sons, Nick and Paul, five grandchildren and two great grandchildren. When he revealed the shocking truth of his early life, he wanted the story of his war years to remain a private matter until after his death.

John was born in Gniezno, Poland, on December 30, 1924.

As a hungry child John carried people’s bags at the railway station for a few copper coins so he could buy himself a piece of sausage.

Mieczyslaw (John) Szkiler with wife Sheila in Marsden Park

At the outbreak of World War Two he was not yet 15 but one month after Poland’s invasion he was taken as a forced labourer to work on a German farm in October 1939, a time marked by great loneliness, hardship and suffering and he was treated little better than a farm animal. Between 1939 and 1945 at least 1.5 million Polish citizens were transported to the German Reich for labour.

They were forced to wear identifying purple Ps sewn to their clothing, subjected to a curfew, and banned from public transportation.

His mother, Anna Zobel, could speak fluent German and was regarded by the Nazis as being of ‘German ethnicity’. She was useful to the authorities in that she could translate legal documents from German to Polish and had the role of an unofficial solicitor. Following the death of her husband she opted to join the Volksdeutche list, making her a sort of second-class German citizen and thus able to obtain a better food ration. What she probably did not realise at the time was that in signing the list she gave the Nazis the right to conscript her two eldest sons.

As the war progressed the Germans looked to some of their immigrant labourers as potential conscripts for their hard-pressed army and by the summer of 1942 John found himself fighting with his enemy against the allies of his native Poland.

All through the war and for a further 30 years he was unaware that his own father had been born a Ukrainian Jew. His father had emigrated to Poland and renounced his Jewish faith in 1919 in order to marry a Catholic girl. In the mid 1970s John needed some documents from Poland in order to apply for naturalisation as a British citizen. One such document was his father’s baptism certificate which listed his grandfather’s occupation as ‘Rabbi’.

This Jewish heritage was not known in Poland and thus John avoided what would have been an almost certain death sentence following Poland’s defeat by the Nazis.

John Szkiler (far left) next to his wife, Sheila, in 1952

After being taken to Germany John never saw his own father again and believed him to have been shot by the Nazis while on a work detail repairing a bridge.

Even though he was a Polish boy and the son of a Jew John became a young soldier embedded with the German army, the Wehrmacht, fighting against his allies. John later revealed how he deliberately avoided shooting allied soldiers and aircraft during his military service in France in 1943 and 1944.

He looked for a chance to surrender and this came in September 1944 in northern France where he handed himself over to the American forces. He describes how he and two pals approaching a tall African-American GI who had wandered into some woodland to relieve himself.

He apparently fainted with shock at the sight of three German soldiers and as he came round they put their hands up to indicate surrender.

He then joined a Polish unit and spent the rest of the war in Scotland serving as a military instructor. Later he joined the Polish Resettlement Corps. These handsome young Poles caused quite a stir when they arrived in Marsden at a ‘hostel’ based in an old school on Carrs Road. This place was a magnet for the factory girls after clocking-off time at the mills and Sheila was one of the many local girls who found a new life with these mysterious but somewhat glamorous foreigners.

She would often walk to Marsden from Linthwaite to go dancing at the Marsden Mechanics Institute and fell in love with a quiet, but loyal and hard-working man.

Nick added: “There are so many amazing things about my dad’s story. Amazing that he survived the war at all – especially since 6 million of his compatriots, 3 million Poles and 3 million Polish Jews did not. Amazing that he survived as the son of a Jew serving in the army of the Wehrmacht.”

After John’s death Nick found a 1940s biscuit tin in his wardrobe which contained old photos along with German documents describing him as ‘missing in action’ and a signed picture of the late Huddersfield actor Gorden Kaye of ‘Allo Allo’ fame who once worked with him in the warehouse at John Crowther’s between acting jobs.