How a POW fell in love through the barbed wire of a prison camp
It’s an impossible story. He was a German PoW, she was a Scottish secretary. But through the wire of a prisoners’ camp, they fell in love. That was just the start of a tale that would span decades, dreams and heartbreak, writes Blair Crawford.
Mark Bormann will take two small pebbles with him to the grave.
Polished smooth by the sand and waves of an English beach, then for six decades more in the hands of lovers a continent apart, the tiny white pebbles were tokens of a love that was born, but never flourished.
“I’ve been a liar all my life, really,” says Mark, now 91. “Being married, having a family, and I was carrying this stone with me all the time. Always. Wherever I was. I carried that stone.
“I was married twice, and you’re asking me ‘Who were you in love with?’ She was the love of my life.”
That love was Patricia Thatcher, a Scottish lass Mark first glimpsed through barbed wire from the inside of a prisoner of war camp. It was February 1947. Mark was a 20-year-old German paratrooper and combat veteran. Patricia was 19 and walking to work on her first day at a new job as a secretary at a shipyard. Mark was sick that day and had been excused from the PoWs’ daily work detail.
“I was walking around feeling sorry for myself, when I saw this girl coming down the road,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Oh Lord, I haven’t seen a girl in I don’t know how long.’ And she waved and said ‘Hi.’ Then she stopped and grabbed in her handbag and she threw an apple over all these fences. Dead on. A baseball player couldn’t have done better. She said, ‘I’m Patricia,’ and she walked on, then turned around and waved.”
It was the beginning of what Mark likes to call “the love story of the century.”
By most measures, Mark Bormann’s life has been a success. After immigrating to Canada in 1951, he studied accounting and became a sought-after business executive.
I’ve been a liar all my life, really. Being married, having a family, and I was carrying this stone with me all the time. Always. Wherever I was. I carried that stone. ... She was the love of my life. Mark Bormann
He was vice-president of finance at Leigh Instruments, an early darling of Ottawa’s technology industry. He rubbed shoulders with then-finance minister Michael Wilson. The house he built on Qualicum Street in Nepean was an architectural gem, designed by the renowned James Strutt.
“It was like I could do no wrong,” he says.
But in recent years, there was a bankruptcy and a long, bitter court battle with the Canada Revenue Agency. He was unfaithful to his first wife and left the marriage in 1974. His son no longer talks to him.
His second wife died in 2011 after 30 years of marriage. Now he lives alone in a bungalow in Renfrew, with his memories of Patricia and what might have been. “I have not been a very good husband,” he confesses.
At 91, his mind is sharp, but his body is failing. He uses a wheeled walker to move more than a short distance. After nearly 70 years in Canada, his German accent is still thick. His living room is lined with books, in English and German, about business, music and histories of the Second World War.
It’s in the shattered world of post-War Europe that this love story began.
In February 1947, the Second World War had been over for nearly two years, but Officer Cadet Markward Bormann was still a prisoner of war. The camp held the worst of the worst of German PoWs: Waffen SS officers, U-boat captains and elite soldiers of the Nazi war machine such as Mark Bormann, a paratrooper who fought hand-to-hand at Arnhem (the famous “Bridge too Far”), parachuted behind American lines in the Battle of the Bulge and fought Canadian troops in the desperate, bloody battle for Holland. That Bormann was stubborn and frequently argued with his captors didn’t make his life as a prisoner any easier.
That evening after his brief, surreal encounter with the woman at the wire, Mark could hardly wait to tell his fellow PoWs about his new friend. They, in turn, were excited to hear the story.
“I was telling them how beautiful she was. Then I thought, maybe she is coming back the next morning. I have to be ready. I wrote a little note asking her if she could help me get in contact with my family. She was Scottish. She could write. Maybe she could tell me if my family was still alive. They were in East Germany, Russian occupied.”
Patricia did return the next day and Mark hurled his note back over the fence. “Was this the apple of Eve?” it began. She read it, waved and walked on. The next day, a Saturday, she returned, this time with her parents and young brother.
“She came across the road, right up to the fence. She said, ‘I’m Patricia. This is my mom, this is my dad ...’ By this time, the guards were coming. This is a high-security camp: two wires, dogs, if you come within three feet you get shot, towers, searchlights, the whole works.
“Her father said to me — just think of this — ‘Can you come over tonight?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir.’ Can you imagine? I must have been nuts.”
Mark’s fellow prisoners went to work. One pressed his trousers under a mattress. Another lent him a U-boat sailor’s leather jacket. But how to get him out of a high-security PoW camp for a dinner date? The German prisoners used to make wooden toys that they would trade with their British guards for chocolate and cigarettes. That evening, the PoWs held a trading bonanza. With the guards distracted by commerce, Mark went over the fence at its one weak spot, where prisoners were allowed to climb a ladder to toss garbage out of the camp.
Patricia was waiting for him and the two walked hand-in-hand to her family’s house. Accustomed to years of army rations and PoW food, Mark could hardly eat his meal. But he remembers the soap they gave him — and his first kiss.
“It was the first girl I kissed. She kissed me. I didn’t even know what to do. I remember her arm slipping on my leather coat and she laughed because it squeaked.”
When it was time to return to camp, the PoWs staged another diversion, this time a huge, fake fist fight that spilled out of the barracks. The guards came running and Mark, amazingly, strolled in through the main gate that had been left opened and unguarded.
The couple continued to meet. By this time, Mark had been assigned jobs outside the wire, collecting sheep manure from the fields for the commandant’s garden. But the illicit romance came to a crashing end one evening when the emboldened couple tried to go see a movie together. Mark was horrified to see one of his British guards walk into the theatre. A few minutes later, police arrived.
Mark was transferred to another camp in County Kent, southeast of London. There, his relation with other prisoners was not as smooth. Seen as an arrogant outsider, Mark says, he was severely beaten by his fellow PoWs. He was still recuperating in hospital when he was told he had a visitor. He was taken to the front gate, where a crowd of guards had gathered.
“Then the gate opened and there was Patricia. She had come by train from Scotland. She had heard from other prisoners — to this day I don’t know how she did it — but she had heard where I was and what had happened and she came down to visit.”
The camp commandant, curious about their relationship, summoned Mark and Patricia to his office.
“He looked at me and said, ‘ With your record, how did this happen? Tell me the story,’” Mark said. “We were there holding hands. By this time, we were in love. She’d got my heart.”
The commandant seemed incredulous, but told them to wait while he brought in some tea.
“He was like a father,” Mark said. “He comes back and said, ‘You’re an officer cadet?’ I said, ‘Yes sir.’ He said, ‘I have a shirt and a pair of pants for you. My driver will take you to a cottage I have reserved.’ Just imagine that. This British commandant dressed me so I could get out of the camp, and got us into a hut on the beach on the coast. I had to promise him on my word of honour I would be back the next morning.”
Mark and Patricia spent that night together by the seaside. It was for both of them, their first experience at love. The next morning, they walked on the beach.
“We found two little stones that we thought looked alike and we said, ‘Whenever we meet again ...’ Because you never know. It was a hard goodbye. The driver picked us up. She had to go. I went back to the camp.”
It would be three years before Mark and Patricia saw each other again. Patricia and her family had moved to Rhode Island. Mark, having been held a prisoner of war for five years after the war ended, was at last a free man. But he had been rejected as an immigrant to the U.S. as an “undesirable.” He still has a faded newspaper clipping that described the couple’s failed bid to be together.
Instead, Mark came to Canada, arriving in Montreal in 1951. Mark and Patricia reunited for one brief day in Montreal, but Patricia’s mother strongly discouraged her daughter from seeing Mark again.