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FEATURE | Volunteering


The collection at Front Gate eventually wound up on Wednesday, 2 December. “The boxes were packed by the evening of Saturday, 5 December,” wrote Guy. “They were labelled and ready to go by Monday afternoon.”

...and on to Germany…

On 10 December, 276 boxes – containing the 800 parcels, plus separate bundles of clothes – were carried from first-floor windows in Boyer’s down canvas chutes and loaded into a small fleet of waiting Aer Lingus lorries.

As the Trinity Refugee Campaign’s instigator, Guy would be its sole representative in Germany. He had on his person a small wad of letters of introduction to smooth his way around Germany – from the Irish Red Cross, from the Provost of Trinity, one he had written himself and one from Frank Aiken, the Minister for External Affairs.

On Saturday, 12 December, Guy and his party arrived at the fi rst camp on the schedule, Bad Cannstatt. The people there – who were among the many thousands displaced by and since the Second World War and still, in 1959, without proper homes – were housed in wooden two -or three- room huts. Guy noted that most of the inhabitants of Bad Cannstatt were Poles. “Rather than return to Russian Poland, they stayed in Germany. They were in Hitler’s slave camps,” he wrote. “Most people so placed emigrated all over the world – these few were unacceptable. Possibly they were tubercular or otherwise diseased. They settled here after the war. They are still here. Their children have known no other home.”

Guy set about distributing the parcels to the children. “Their enthusiasm was without bounds,” he wrote. Over the next week, he visited six camps where this experience was repeated again.

“A lady was here who had only been in Germany for eight days,” Guy wrote after his stop-off at a camp in Weinsberg. “She and her 86-year-old mother had just come from Czechoslovakia. Today, she was happy for the fi rst time. She had read about the Irish munifi cence in the press, and found joy in the kindness of so many.”

Back in Dublin after Christmas, Guy got letters from some of the recipients of the Trinity Campaign’s gifts. The first letter to arrive was from Alma Yourmala, a resident of Hasenbuhl camp and a former lecturer of the Free University of Riga, Latvia.

Dear sir:

Forgive my poor English, but my heart is so full of joy and gratefulness that I must thank you and all these young men of goodwill who helped you for this wonderful Christmas joy your gifts from far away Ireland brought to all of us. May the Lord bless you all dear unknown friends in Ireland! You are young and the future is yours…

At the end of January 1960, a letter from the Weilimdorf camp arrived in Guy’s rooms. A note explained that it was from the children of the kindergarten there.

"We are 39 children in a children garden at Stuttgart. Our parents are Czech, Poles and Ukrainian who have preferred to remain in Germany after the war."


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