What did your family do in WW2?

[Butcher]

All this is very interesting, especially to here from so many different countries.
Here's my two £'s:

My (Polish) Paternal Grandfather fought the Russians in '39 (in his own words, him and ten others were given a rifle and ten rounds and told to 'go stop them') upon which he escaped and made his way up through Spain to the U.K, where he joined the Polish Army there and served as a Tank Commander (again in his own words 'we were in Shermans, and everytime we saw a german Tank we just got out and ran because we knew it had seen us first'), Fighting through France with the Polish Armoured Division and ending up in Germany where he met my (German)-
Paternal Grandmother, who despite being rather young, was conscripted into the Luftwaffe as a radio operator (in her own words 'It was so sad to see all these young men fly off and none return, and to hear their screams in the radio as they were shot down') and was eventually posted to Berlin towards the end of the war. She ended up having to escape the advancing Russians and walked all the way to Denmark (3 weeks walk apparently) during which she was shot at (along with other refugees) by U.S planes, in one instance the bullet pinned her hair down to the ground.. nice! She then got sent back from Denmark to Germany to her family in a coal train, where she met her future husband who was billeted in her house.
Her father was a private in Von Paula's 6th Army, and was one of the lucky ones to come back from Russia in the 50's. Apparently they couldn't recognise him when he did, he had changed so much.

On the other side, my (Irish) Maternal Grandmother didn't do much apart from live in Ireland, until she met my (Dutch)-
Maternal Grandfather who was in The Netherlands when the Germans invaded, and joined the Dutch Resistance. As a Civil Engineer, he was a dab hand at blowing up bridges etc, until he was forced to flee to the U.K because apparently the Germans didn't like people doing that sort of thing. He then signed up with the Royal Engineers, became a Seargent. I don't know what he did after this, but do know he ended up having to sort out some concentration camps at the end of the war. He never got on with my German Grandma, unsurprisingly.

The interesting thing is that none of them had anything nice to say about the war, it was generally more unpleasant than we realise, and not something that they willingly went through.