A friend in south Alabama recently sent me a clipping from the Press-Register in Mobile. It was about a 74-year-old woman who remembered being a 10-year-old when her father supervised a work force of German POWs who were transported from Loxley to the Hallett Lumber Company in Mobile during WWII.
Shirley Mosley's father was made a deputy sheriff and was authorized to carry a gun so he could guard the prisoners who worked in the lumberyard. Loxley (in Baldwin County) was one of 20 satellite labor camps in Alabama that housed German POWs on temporary work details. One of the Germans told Mosley's father that he was not a Nazi and had been a college professor in Germany before the war.
Sometimes, the POWs were given scraps of wood, and at one point, the former college professor built and stained a wooden jewelry box that he gave to Mosley's father as a gift for her teenage sister. The box contained an inscription burned into the inside of the lid. It read as follows:
German soldat - Wilhelm Lisicky, Berliner. P. W. Camp Loxley - 1945, War 1939-1945.
If anyone reading this column has additional information about Wilhelm Lisicky, it would be interesting to know what happened to him after the war and what he did with his life. You can send a comment to me at this blog and/or contact newspaper reporter Hope Northington at PO Box 2488, Mobile, AL 36652.
Monday, September 14, 2009
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