Why we need to be part of Europe

The great thing about volunteering is you never know who you're going to run into. Just before Christmas, on an outing for people supported by the charity Contact the Elderly, I met a woman from Carpathia.

I pretended I knew what and where that was and googled it when I got home. And was amazed.

Carpathia was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It covers the second longest range of mountains in Europe. Germans settled there in the countries now called Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Ukraine from the 13th century onwards. They were moved there not from choice but because of the skills they had as craftsmen or because they had experience as miners. The empire these ethnic Germans had served vanished in 1918. But the people stayed on. They had always been 'encouraged' to assimilate, so at various times they became Hungarian, Slovak, Romanian or Russian.

Carpathia was fought over and divided up again at the end of the second world war. You just can guess how these people fared when the 'partisans' and then the Russians took over. Between 1938 and 1945, the German-speaking population of the region was reduced from 128,000 to 20,000. Some were thrown out to make way for other craftsmen. Some were forced to stay because they possessed skills no other craftsmen had.

You can read about Carpathia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpathian_Germans

The woman I met lived with her mother during world war two. They were farmers. She didn't mention her father. After the second world war, she came to the UK. I don't know about her parents and I don't know how she got to the UK or how she fetched up in Glasgow. Her late husband was a Scot. I don't know if she's been back to Carpathia or if she had children to pass her German culture and her experience of these beautiful mountains on to.

Sitting there in the conservatory of an old people's home at Christmas, she sang me a song in her native German. I recognised it at once. You hear these songs all over Europe in places where people have lost their homeland or just their sense of belonging to that homeland: Catalonia, Brittany, the Gaidhealtachd, Val d'Aosta, Galicia. The list is endless. If all the European Union does is stop us creating the circumstances where people like that woman can be moved around Europe, picked up and dropped and essentially deprived of their basic human rights, that for me is enough reason for the EU to exist and for us to be part of it.

Just because we haven't experienced the horror of war personally doesn't give us the right to dismiss what the EU has done to keep the peace since 1945.