i , 6D Ogden Standard-Examiner, Sunday, April 12, 1987 handsome, friendly soldiers she and her sister liked to talk to. Memories “We | From 1D “They liked pork and we liked chicken,” he said. “A lot of times we'd trade our pork for their chickens for Sunday dinner.” Esther Parks, of Salt Lake City, was about 13 when she met Germans working, as she was, in the cherry orchards in Fruit Heights. Although rules were strict about not fraternizing with the - POWs, Parks said all the cherry pickers congregated for water at the same place during lunch . break. “As children, we would talk to them,” she said. “Most of them were friendly and they’d try out their English on us and we'd try out whatever on them.” German we knew Melba Benson of Brigham City was also a young girl when her parents hired the Germans to work on their farm east of Tremonton thinning beets and picking beans. Looking back, she said there was a marked contrast between the fearful Germans she’d heard about fighting the war and the a saw that they were people just like everyone else,” she said. “We talked to them at the end of the day when we were weighing beans and they would add up the beans in German. ‘Add them again,’ we would say, so we could hear the numbers again in German.” Hilda Glasgow of Honeyville wishes she knew more about her father’s experiences as a prisoner of war in Rupert, Idaho, and Ogden. Her father died before she moved to Utah from Germany in 1967 and before she realized she was so near where he was imprisoned. But as a child, Glasgow re- members hearing her father speak about his treatment in America. “My dad used to say all the time that they had it much better as prisoners of war than we did in Germany,” said Glasgow, who recalls eating potato peel soup during the war and going begging for food with her family. An employee at Defense Depot Ogden since 1941, Marian Carlson worked with German Italian prisoners doing nance and construction. and mainte- Although some may have resented the Germans because of the war, Carlson said, “tor ine most part, I think they were accepted. At his lecture in Ogden, Powell read a letter from a Cache Valley potato farmer that he felt summarized the prisoner-of-war experience. | s | _ Every day, 12 prisoners and a guard would arrive at the farmer’s potato patch. One day, the farmer said a POW picked up his 3-year-old daughter and “it gave me a fright.” But as the farmer approached the German to retrieve his child, he saw tears running down prisoner’s face. “I knew that somewhere in world he had a nice little girl he may never sec. again,” farmer wrote. the the that the Powell would like to hear from people who had first-hand experlof ence with the German prisoners had ve who' rs othe war or know such contacts. The historian may be reached at the Utah State Historical Society, 300 Rio Grande, Salt Lake City, 84101, phone 533-6017. —