JOE Mittelbach, who was born in Czechoslovakia, has celebrated his 100th birthday at Popham House in Wellington.

The event – on Sunday, April 24 – was marked by a small family gathering at the care home with a celebratory cake.

Joe’s life changed completely in his 20s when he escaped the German invasion of Czechoslovakia during the Second World War. He was a member of the Labour Party and it was able to help him get out of the country.

He eventually got a visa to go to Canada via England but he had to leave his wife and young son behind. They followed him a month later but they were split up in England before being reunited in Margate.

Next they went to a transit camp in London, near Euston and St Pancras, before arriving and working in a forestry in Wiveliscombe.

Lorries came every morning to pick up Joe and the other men to go out to the forest in the Brendon Hills.

A trained engineer, Joe joined an engineering factory which made parts for the Army and RAF.

Joe’s wife also worked in the forests and on the railways, loading and unloading wagons.

Joe moved on, to work for the Standard Telephone Company in Ilminster, as a tool maker. Joe considered going back to Czechoslovakia at the end of the war but the Communists had infiltrated and the Russian troops invaded and partitioned before things had settled enough for him to make up his mind. Finally he decided to stay and apply for naturalisation.

When Joe finally returned to the Bohemia region of Czechoslovakia after the Iron Curtain was lifted, he says it was as if the war had only just ended. Ruins were still everywhere.

He had the chance to move with his family to Alaska where 100-acre sites were being offered but his wife did not pass the medical.

He had other jobs but ended up working for British Cellophane as an engineer.

Today he looks back on the causes of the war and worries about the rise of neo-Nazism in Germany now, after what he regards as the too hasty reunification of East and West.