A WWII love story

She was a Slovenian resistance fighter. He was a Kiwi soldier, living in a prisoner of war camp. In the heart of Nazi-occupied Europe, they met when she pushed a note through a barbed-wire fence, looking for her brother Leopold.

is a true World War II love story about Josefine Lobnik and Bruce Murray, written by their son-in-law Doug Gold.

Murray, who served with the 25 Battalion, was in the Stalag XVIIID camp in Slovenia from August 1941 until March 24, 1945, when Josefine smuggled him and a friend each a suit. The pair then escaped through removable bars on their camp windows, and hid in the barn on Josefine’s farm.

The couple eventually married in the seaside English town of Cleethorpes before moving to Wellington, where they raised three children.

The extract below details how the pair met before a chance encounter the following year.

BRUCE Stalag XVIIID, February 15, 1942

He was nursing a sledgehammer hangover. It took Bruce Murray several minutes to reorientate himself. The hut gradually came into focus — the rough timber of the walls, the muddy floorboards, the grimy window in the door.

It was Sunday. That was a good thing. That was a bloody good thing, considering the state he was in. He imagined what it would be like if the German guards came hammering at the door, as they did on most other days, ordering him to fall in for a compulsory work detail at some Slovene factory or, worse, at one of the railway sites near the Maribor POW camp.

He shuddered. Disconnected pieces of the previous evening came back to him. Shouts of laughter. The fug of smoke, of course. The eyewatering burn of the homebrewed hooch — some infernal potion the boys had concocted in secret from filched potatoes and hoarded sugar, or so he understood.

Lofty. That’s right. It was Lofty Collier’s 21st birthday, and this had seemed like enough of an occasion to break out the booze. Bruce had had hangovers before, more than he cared to remember, but this one was a real doozy. It felt as though a pneumatic drill was boring through his temple and there was a coating of cement on his tongue that fixed it to the roof of his mouth. Now his guts were churning.

He groaned.

The mood had swung wildly over the course of the evening. First there was hilarity — jokes and laughter and good fellowship. Then it had developed a hard edge, when the latest outrage committed by some guard or another riled the men. Inevitably, it had grown maudlin, as stories and reminiscences of home were shared. Towards midnight, they had rallied, and the singing had begun. Some time and several tin cups of grog later, the joy had leached from it all again as many hoarse throats joined a chorus of Auld Lang Syne — it sounded more like “Old Lands Shine” in their rendition. There were tears. Bruce might have shed a few himself.

After that, he didn’t remember much.

The hut reeked. His shirt reeked. He reeked. He had to get out.

Bruce heaved himself into a sitting position and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk, his coarse grey blanket slithering to the floor. The hut spun, and Bruce belched ominously. Steeling himself, he lurched to his feet, averted his eyes from the hazy scrap of mirror, pulled on his boots, shrugged into his greatcoat and staggered to the door. A gust of freezing air greeted him as he opened it, and he screwed up his eyes against the glare from the snow. Perhaps, he thought, sitting out in the bitter wind would purify him, purge him of the toxic aftermath of the night before. He sat heavily on the upturned Red Cross crate where he sometimes sat in warmer weather, drew his coat about him and wondered whether a ciggy would make him feel better or worse.

That’s where Frank Butler found him.

“Get up, ya ugly sod,” Frank said. “Piss off, Frank,” Bruce replied. “Come on, Brucie. Get off yer arse. Let’s take a turn, blow out the cobwebs.”

Frank grabbed Bruce’s arm and heaved him to his feet. It was their routine on Sundays to take a stroll around the perimeter of Stalag XVIIID: partly for the exercise, partly because it gave them another opportunity to taunt the goons with jibes as barbed as the wire surrounding them, mostly to relieve the unrelenting boredom.

“Cor, you look a right bloody mess,” Frank said, eyeing him sideways. Insults were the stock-in-trade of their conversation, but Frank meant it. By this hour of the morning, Bruce was usually freshly scrubbed, his hair combed and slicked down, and he would have done what he could with his clothes. Not today.

It was all Bruce could do to grunt in reply.

They walked in companionable silence, an inch of fresh snow squeaking beneath the soles of their boots. The gloom overhead thinned a little and the light brightened. It was agony on Bruce’s bleary eyes. He closed them tightly and gritted his teeth.

“Hello,” Frank breathed softly beside him. “What have we here?” Bruce opened his eyes.

They were 30 yards from a point on the southern perimeter fence that was out of the direct eye-line of the guards in the watchtowers. There was a figure standing motionless on the other side of the wire — a brave or desperate thing to do since, needless to say, the guards didn’t exactly encourage interaction between the locals and the camp inmates. It was an old woman, to judge from her attire — she wore a shapeless woollen dress and a black-fringed knitted shawl.

Her presence there was something out of the ordinary, something that stood out from the monotony of camp life.

“Come on,” Bruce said. “Let’s see what she wants.”

Frank looked all around them carefully. There weren’t any guards in sight, but that meant little. A goon might appear at any moment.

“Best not,” he said. “They’ll shoot you if they see you.”

“Nah,” said Bruce. “She’ll be right.” The hangover had relented a little. He had regained his will to live.

Frank stayed where he was. Bruce walked briskly to the wire. Unlike most prisoner-of-war camps, which had two wire perimeter fences, one inside the other with 10 yards of dead ground between them, Stalag XVIIID had been a Slovene Army barracks and was surrounded by only a single high wire fence. Despite the dangers, the locals occasionally traded items — eggs, bread, woollen mittens — for rare luxuries such as the tinned meat or chocolate bars that came in Red Cross parcels.

The woman watched him approach. Bent and shapeless as she was, she reminded Bruce of old Sis Moore who used to terrorise the kids of his neighbourhood when he was growing up. It was rumoured she would beat — and even eat — kids who strayed on to her property.

“Hello,” he said, as he neared the wire, and smiled. She stepped forward, and held out her hand towards him. His smile faltered as he met her eyes — green and unmistakeably youthful beneath the fringe of the shawl.

Her presence there was something out of the ordinary that stood out from the monotony of camp life.