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Marisa Parker
a book bubble about
Ciao! We’re In Africa
Biographies & Memoirs
Author Insight
A Christmas Tattoo
Last year just before Christmas for my husband’s 60th birthday, we travelled to Europe. Part of the celebration involved getting a tattoo; my first one! Our two grown up daughters and future son-in-law were there too and involved in the ‘ink’ agenda; choosing the tattoo parlour was up to them. Needing to confirm the appointment, my husband and I went early with one of our daughters. A doorway off a Prague back street revealed a serious-faced, scruffy-haired chap who opened the door to let our daughter in. He then shut the door in our faces once she had entered. Imagine our befuddlement and then growing horror wondering if we would ever see her again … and how we would explain this to her fiancée?! Luckily, she returned and as we walked away, identified that we had better go elsewhere; which we did. Being able to make choices and have our freedom is essential but sadly, not available to everyone. Growing up, my father didn’t speak much about his time in a South African POW camp during WW2. It was all second-hand information from my mother …
Book Excerpt
Ciao! We’re In Africa
It was just before Christmas in 1942 when one of the soldiers let slip that there were over sixty-three-thousand people in that camp alone.”
I’d heard some of this before and still couldn’t fathom what it must have been like for my husband.
“Well, at least you were safe in that camp,” Yvonne says flippantly. “All those other Italians out there during all that dreadful fighting.”
Eugenio doesn’t answer straight away. He had told me one night that his incarceration had been the hardest thing of all. My heart had gone out to him when he had revealed, “Being brought up a fascista, meant that I had to do my duty. Fight for Italy and keep my family safe. I would rather have died honourably than be stuck in that camp with thousands of others. We were slave labour; acting on orders, or made to suffer the consequences, at the whims of our captors.”
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