Father’s prisoner of war journey remembered
George Heydon wrote to his wife from a World War II prison camp: “When this ends, we can really live”.
It’s one of the snippets unearthed by Nelson artist Sue Heydon in her quest to discover the reality of her father’s service and how he endured more than four years in prisoner of war camps.
The results of her six years of painstaking research are now on display at the Nelson Provincial Museum in an exhibition called George’s War: Following My Father’s Journey.
It features historical archives and images as well as artistic representations that were her way of “trying to comprehend how my father endured such prolonged deprivation.”
He had joined the Army in June, 1940, and married his wife Doris months later before being assigned to the 20th Battalion. He was deployed to Greece but was captured with with more than 7000 Allied soldiers after the Battle of Kalamata in April 1941.
Over the next four years he was held in various POW camps in Greece, Slovenia and Austria, before returning home to his wife in Nelson when the camp was liberated in 1945. Sue was their only child.
George Heydon died of kidney failure in 1963 when he was 58 and Sue was only 10.
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Sue said memories of her father at their home in Hope were limited, particularly as he worked at night at the telephone exchange.
“I remember him sitting in a chair, drinking beer, and I think as he became increasingly ill, he kind of went into himself, and he didn’t talk a lot about it.
“I mean when you dreamed about horrors, why do you want to recall them during the day?”
She said over the years the urge to find out more about her father grew, and in 2019, she went to Austria and Slovenia to retrace his wartime journey.
“A friend said about this exhibition that I’m trying to find my father.”
She discovered, through local archivists and a resident who lived near one of the camps, that her father was known as “a big devil and a small man” because of his sense of humour and short stature.
In the camps George Heydon survived disease outbreaks, poor rations, and the 1944 bombing of the Stalag XVIII camp, near Wolfsberg, by US aircraft.
She believed the desire to get home to his wife helped get him through.
“He came back and they brought a Morris Minor and a place in a beautiful place in the country and they had three cows. They had 18 years together and they had me.”
Sue Heydon said the wider intent of the exhibition was to show the reality of war and the suffering and resilience of POWs. She hoped younger generations would become more aware of the toll of war, particularly in the unstable world they were growing up in.
George’s War: Following My Father’s Journey is at the Nelson Provincial Museum until April 27.
By Warren Gamble, Nelson Mail
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