Nazis, needlework and my dad

After six months held by the Nazis in a prisoner of war camp, Major Alexis Casdagli was handed a piece of canvas by a fellow inmate. Pinching red and blue thread from a disintegrating pullover belonging to an elderly Cretan general, Casdagli passed the long hours in captivity by painstakingly creating a sampler in cross-stitch. Around decorative swastikas and a banal inscription saying he completed his work in December 1941, the British officer stitched a border of irregular dots and dashes. Over the next four years his work was displayed at the four camps in Germany where he was imprisoned, and his Nazi captors never once deciphered the messages threaded in Morse code: God Save the King and Fuck Hitler.

This subversive needling of the Nazis was a form of defiance that Casdagli, who was not freed from prison until 1945, believed was the duty of every PoW. It used to give him pleasure when the Germans were doing their rounds, says his son, Tony, of his father’s rebellious stitching. It also stopped him going mad. He would say after the war that the Red Cross saved his life but his embroidery saved his sanity, says Tony. If you sit down and stitch you can forget about other things, and it’s very calming.

Tony should know. The 79-year-old picked up his father’s stitching habit after a lifetime at sea serving in the Royal Navy, and from 6 September two of his pieces will feature in a new exhibition opening at the Victoria and Albert Museum called Power of Making. Tony is thrilled, but the relationship between father, son, needlework and suffering is complex and occasionally ambiguous — via redwolf.newsvine.com

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