Nor did the German ex-soldier expect that when he did, he would be lying in a Scottish hospital bed using an interpreter to communicate because he had forgotten his native tongue.
Parted when their mother died, Heinz gradually lost all contact with Edith after he joined the Wehrmacht as a teenager, was captured in the Netherlands and finally ended up in a prisoner-of-war (POW) camp in Scotland in 1945.
Originally from Hindenburg — now Zabrze in southern Poland — Roestel is one of thousands of PoWs who stayed in Britain after the war because they fell in love, found work or lost their homes when Germany’s eastern border was shifted west.
Historians say the integration of the PoWs, who included Manchester City goalkeeping legend Bert Trautmann, helped heal the wounds of the war and pave the way for closer ties with continental Europe. Yet their fate has often been overlooked.
Roestel, 85, settled in southern Scotland and had given up hope of seeing Edith again by the time she tracked him down to the village of Penpont this summer. Shortly before she came over from Germany, he suffered a stroke but he still recognized her.
“She looked like my mother,” Roestel said from his hospital bed in Dumfries. “She was very pleased to see me. When you’ve not seen someone for 80 years, you’d be the same.”
“I didn’t have a place to stay in Germany back then,” added Roestel, whose father died during the war. “I would have had to go back to the Russian sector, so I decided to remain here.”
Like several other Germans still living in Dumfriesshire, Roestel was interned in the camp at Carronbridge near Thornhill where hundreds of prisoners of war and displaced persons from war-torn Europe passed through by the time it closed in 1948.
When not working the surrounding farmland, the German POWs put on plays, staged sporting events and published a camp newspaper in which they praised the landscape, mused on whether Scots really were tight-fisted — and bemoaned the weather.
