Second World War

No ‘Nazis’ allowed at family event

Jonathan Kalmus — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:10:44 +0100

The organisers of a family event celebrating wartime Britain have been forced to hire security staff to eject anyone who attends dressed in Nazi uniform.

East Lancashire Railway, based in Bury, has been criticised by Holocaust survivors and MPs over the past decade for failing to prevent participants wearing full Nazi regalia attending its annual spring bank holiday 1940s weekend. Bans and warning signs at stations have been largely ignored.

Following talks with police, the Community Security Trust and local Jewish community leaders, ELR chairman Peter Duncan said new measures will include the vetting of all participants and the presence of security guards.

He said: “I was appalled when those who broke the rules last year were not challenged. This year, there are security staff to back up our own staff if we have a difficulty with someone who had been legitimately asked to leave. Trusting people in the past hasn’t worked.”

CST spokesperson Mark Gardner said the steps were “proportionate and worthwhile”.

l A Christmas card signed by Hitler and four paintings by him are to be sold by a Shropshire auction house next week. Mullock’s, of Church Stretton, expect the letter to fetch £5,000

British POWs honoured in Holocaust heroes ceremony

Sandy Rashty — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:00:38 +0100

British Prisoners of War who saved a Jewish girl from the Nazis were honoured as “Holocaust Heroes” by the government this week.

Communities Secretary Eric Pickles presented awards to eight people who saved Jews from Nazi persecution during the Second World War.

Among them were four of the 10 British PoWs who helped save the life of 16-year-old Sara Matuson when they hid her in a hayloft at the Gross Golmkau, in northern Poland, for four weeks in January 1945.

Now known as Sara Hannah Rigler, the 84-year-old survivor lives today in the United States and has written a book, Ten British Prisoners of War Saved My Life, in which she described the heroic actions of the soldiers.

All 10 PoWs have been named Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

Also honoured at the ceremony in London on Monday were Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld, who acquired more than 1,000 British visas for Jews to escape the Nazis and Lena Lakomy, who used her position as a nurse at Auschwitz to save the life of prisoner Hela Frank.

Tribute was also paid to the former consul-general in Frankfurt, Robert Smallbones, who provided visas for Jewish families and offered sanctuary to Jews in the consulate building; and to Arthur Dowden, the vice consul-feneral in Frankfurt who also made provided visas and distributed food to Jewish families in the aftermath of Kristallnacht.

Mr Pickles said: “The small acts of defiance make all the difference. Fighting the Nazis took many forms and produced unlikely heroes.”

He said that they had risked their lives “to help people from different countries, faiths and religion with scant regard to their own personal safety.

“While we can never pay back our debt to them, Britain is proud to honour their memory. These heroes make me proud to be British.”

David Morris, the Conservative MP for Morecambe and Lunesdale in Lancashire, collected the award for PoW Allan Edwards.

He said: “I was amazed when I heard this story and that we had this kind of connection that nobody talked about. I’ve been talking to people at the Lancaster City Museum and we’re trying to sort out a display to remind future generations about what happened and how Allan saved someone’s life.”

Maria Rogers, the granddaughter of PoW Roger Letchford, said her grandfather “never talked about what happened. I knew about Sarah because he still spoke to her and she used to send us Christmas cards. They met up years later at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.”

She added: “If my grandfather could help anyone he would — that was just the way he was. I’m going to take this award and show all the family. We’re going to loan it to the Dartford Museum in Kent because he was well-known in the area.”

Christopher Hammond, the nephew of PoW George Hammond who collected his uncle’s Holocaust Heroes award last month, is writing a book about the prisoners.

He said: “The phone doesn’t stop ringing all day It’s been quite hectic but now I want to focus on finding the families of the remaining four PoW’s -—when we find the rest we’ll be back to get their awards here next year.”

Mr Hammond, who picked up the award on behalf of PoW Stanley Wells' widow, described the soldiers’ first encounter with Mrs Rigler.

“They found her and decided as a group that evening they would look after her. She was in such a state, my uncle could put his hand around her thigh. She was covered in lice.”

PoW Harold Scruton died in 1987 — his niece Mavis Shaw picked up the award. She said that he “never spoke about what happened when he came home. But because of what happened to him, he had a hatred of the Germans.

“It’s a pity they weren’t honoured in their lifetime. As time goes on, people don’t appreciate what they went through, such horrible things are still going on in the world and you wonder if anyone has learnt anything.”

The event at Lancaster House was attended by religious leaders, by Sir Andrew Burns, a former UK ambassador to Israel and the standing UK envoy for post-Holocaust issues, Israeli Ambassador Daniel Taub, and representatives from the Board of Deputies and Holocaust Educational Trust.

Ben-Gurion and the debate over Winston Churchill's funeral

Jennifer Lipman — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 10:34:48 +0100

Representatives of the Jewish world including the chief rabbi and the Israeli prime minister will be at St Paul's today to bid farewell to Britain's longest serving prime minister.

In attending the funeral of Baroness Thatcher, the Israeli prime minister is following a precedent set by Israeli statesmen when Winston Churchill died.

When the wartime leader died and was given a state funeral, both David Ben-Gurion and then-president Zalman Shazar flew to London to pay their respects.

According to a JC report of the funeral, the Israelis stayed in a hotel "about a mile away" from St Paul's cathedral, where – as with Baroness Thatcher – the service was held.

Tributes were read out at Orthodox, Reform and Liberal shuls across the UK that weekend.

"Jewish leaders and organisations all over the country have sent heartfelt messages of sympathy to Lady Churchill," the report added. "Expressing deep sorrow at the death of the great leader of the fight against Nazism and despotism."

The JC revealed that the decision to hold the funeral on a Shbbat led to debate over what Israel and Jewish representatives should do. "There were two problems – the fact that Jewish law does not permit attendance at a funeral on a Saturday and the strain which walking from Westminster, where the body of Sir Winston has been lying in State since Wednesday, would impose on the President, who is 76."

Along with the Israeli politicians, Israeli journalists from seven papers came to London for the funeral.

Although it appears there was some debate at the time, the then-chief rabbi Israel Brodie did attend the service, staying for Shabbat at The Savoy hotel so he could be there.

According to former Board of Deputies president Lionel Kopelowitz, as detailed in a 2010 letter to the JC, "Jewish public opinion soon made it clear that it expected the Chief Rabbi to attend in person. Rabbi Brodie bowed to this opinion... and walked with Israel’s President Shazar to the Cathedral."

Call for Sunderland chair to resign over Di Canio

Marcus Dysch — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 19:30:00 +0100

A leading Reform rabbi and the dean of Durham have attacked Sunderland AFC’s appointment of Paolo Di Canio as head coach.

Rabbi Jonathan Romain, of Maidenhead Synagogue, called on Sunderland chairman Ellis Short to resign for overlooking Mr Di Canio’s apparent fascist beliefs when hiring him this week.

The Very Reverend Michael Sadgrove, the son of a Holocaust survivor, said he was “baffled” by Mr Di Canio claiming not to be racist, despite having a tattoo that pays tribute to Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator.

Mr Di Canio made a straight-arm fascist salute to far-right fans while playing for Rome club Lazio in January 2005.

After making a similar gesture in December that year, he reportedly said of complaints from the Italian Maccabi Federation: “If we are in the hands of the Jewish community, it’s the end. If action is taken because one community is up in arms it could be dangerous.”

Mr Di Canio, who has written in the past of his “fascination” with Mussolini, issued a statement on Wednesday saying he was “not a racist”.

“I do not support the ideology of fascism. I am not the man that some people like to portray,” he said.

He also told journalists to “call Phil Spencer, he’s Jewish”, for a character reference. Mr Spencer, who is Mr Di Canio’s agent, said: “I’ve known him for 14 years. Paolo is aware of my Jewish heritage. I would not represent anyone who I thought was racist or antisemitic.”

Former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband resigned from the Premier League club’s board on Sunday, citing the former West Ham United striker’s “past political statements”.

Rabbi Romain said: “If Mr Di Canio chooses to mix sport and politics by giving fascist salutes, then he turns a football game into an ideological rally and compromises supporters who came for the former. So whether or not Sunderland stay in the Premier League, the club’s reputation has been relegated by appointing Di Canio as manager.”

What Sylvia did in Winston Churchill's War Cabinet

Sandy Rashty — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 18:00:00 +0000

A Jewish woman who served the British government during the Second World War still remembers Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s “grin”.

Sylvia Goodman, née Arnold, who worked in the civil service during the war, has had her lifetime collection of documents, photographs and letters showcased at the Jewish Military Museum in London.

Mrs Goodman, now 92, joined the War Cabinet in 1938 as a teenage secretary to Lord Hastings Ismay, chief military assistant to Winston Churchill.

She described Lord Ismay as “an absolutely wonderful man who was under a tremendous amount of stress. He was at Churchill’s beck and call but he always stayed very calm. Everyone admired the way Lord Ismay carried himself.”

Mrs Goodman initially wanted to attend art school and sketched both Lord Ismay and Mr Churchill. “At the time, it was just a job. I didn’t realise how lucky I was to be there because of all the top people I met,” said Mrs Goodman, who attended government conferences in Washington, Quebec and Malta.

“When we used to work in the Cabinet War Rooms late at night – some defence committee meetings would start at 10pm – Churchill used to walk by and give us a grin. I always found that the higher up the rank you were, the nicer you were.”

She also recalled having lunch with Mrs Churchill who was also “very nice and friendly”.

The Stanmore United Synagogue member, who served the Cabinet from the Czech crisis in 1938 until she married in 1947, remains discreet about what was said in official meetings that she noted and transcribed.

“When we all joined, we signed the Official Secrets Act,” she said. “In the office we never heard about any leaks – that says a lot about the people who were really there and fighting for Britain.”

The mother of two will be going to the Museum exhibition which displays a number of her sketches, her marriage announcement from the JC in May 1947 and a Rosh Hashana 1944 letter from her optician father Sidney Arnold, who had co-founded Edgware Synagogue on Mowbray Road in 1931.

The letter, from a concerned Mr Arnold to his daughter who was working many late nights at the height of the war, read: “Dear Sylvia, we so hope you are keeping well, but we would like to have a letter from you, even if it is only a few words. Everybody at home is quite well and are all anxious to hear from you. So do please write as soon as you possible can – best wishes for a Happy New Year from ALL.”

Working in the Cabinet offices, “I never hid that I was Jewish,” said Mrs Goodman, who grew up in a traditional and kosher home in Edgware. “We weren’t extreme, but I stayed away from school on Jewish holidays.”

Mrs Goodman worked in an office with 15 other girls. She recalled: “Women took on so much responsibility when the men were called up during the war”.

Roz Currie, curator at the Hendon-based museum, said Mrs Goodman “was one of many Jewish women who helped in the war effort. By 1943, 90 per cent of single women and 80 per cent of married women were employed in war work – women were vital to winning the war.

“Jewish women worked in every part of industry you could imagine, from directing fire services in north London to voluntary aid detachment. When the men returned and the women married, most them did not go back to work.”

Eric Pickles honours UK Holocaust hero

Sandy Rashty — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:15:18 +0000

Community Secretary Eric Pickles has pinpointed “the tiny acts of kindness that undermined the Nazi killing machine,” as he presented a Holocaust Hero’s Award to family members of a British prisoner of war who helped save a 16-year-old Jewish girl from the Nazis.

In a ceremony this week, Mr Pickles presented the medal to the nephew of the late George Hammond, one of 10 British PoWs who helped hide Lithuanian-born Sara Matuson in the Gross Golmkau camp hayloft, in northern Poland, for four weeks in January 1945.

Sara found refuge after escaping a death march which her sister and mother did not survive. She later adopted the name Hannah in memory of her sister.

Now known as Sara Hannah Rigler, the 84-year-old survivor lives today in New York and has written a book, Ten British Prisoners of War Saved My Life.

Mr Pickles said the award, inaugurated in 2010, was “a terrific honour that counter-balances the dreadful stories that still grip us. Sara got the chance to have a life and raise her family, and do something, even though the Nazis thought they had liquidated her.”

Christopher Hammond spoke emotionally of his uncle’s experiences after he was captured by the Nazis in Belgium. Mr Hammond presented the Secretary of State with a booklet he had compiled of first-hand interviews, pictures and newspaper clippings.

“George would never talk about Sara by name – he just called her his ‘little sister,’” Mr Hammond said. “He said Sara was in a terrible state when they found her – he could get his hands around her thigh. All 10 of those men risked their lives to help Sara. If they had been caught by the guards during those four weeks, they would have been shot..”

George Hammond died aged 84 in August 2003. During an interview with his nephew, George recalled an incident in February 1945.

“I saw about 200-300 Jewish women and children being marched towards Danzig. They were all in a bad state. Two young girls... broke away from the column and ran into the farmyard where I was working. The guard shot one and the farmer axed the other through the head... I felt sick and sorry for them, unable to do anything as one of the guards held his rifle at me and made threatening gestures if I dared give any of the children food.”

Christopher Hammond now wants to find the remaining comrades who helped Sara. All ten men have been recognised as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Desperately seeking Netta Rose

Anna Sheinman — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 10:46:30 +0000

Rifleman Alec Jay went to war on May 22 1940. Five days later at the siege of Calais, any clues to his Jewish identity were hastily buried in the French sand as he was taken prisoner by the Germans, spending five years in captivity.

John Jay is now putting his late father’s story on paper. He has visited the places his father was held, tracked down a prisoner who knew him and found his name in PoW archives in Poland and Russia. What he cannot discover is what happened to the woman he left behind.

Netta Rose and Alec Jay’s first date was at a school dance in 1939. They were part of the same Jewish north London set and dated for some months before Mr Rose was sent to Calais.

During his incarceration, he never wrote home for fear of his religion being revealed. But the poetry he wrote made it clear he had not forgotten Netta. Believing her boyfriend dead, she married another man in 1941.

“I want to find her to learn a bit more about the woman my father was dating when he went to war,” Mr Jay said. “And if she wants to know about my father and to read the poems he wrote for her when he was a prisoner of war, I would love to share that with her.”

From a note written by his father, Mr Jay knows that Netta’s favourite theatre was the Golders Green Hippodrome and her favourite colour green. Asked what she would do if prime minister for a day, she had replied: “Resign”. She was said to resemble 1930s actress Jean Forbes Robertson.

Mr Jay does not know if Netta is a nickname, or how old she is. He can only assume that she was a similar age to his father, who would now be 93.

“The research for the book is almost done,” he said. “But I would like to fill in some of the missing pieces and for that I would dearly love to find Netta.”

UN Palestine expert Falk: Hamas like French resistance

Jennifer Lipman — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 09:48:27 +0000

The United Nation's Palestine expert has compared Hamas terrorists to fighters with the French resistance during the Holocaust.

Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, made the comments in a piece posted on the Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine website.

In an article that included repeated condemnations of Israel, Mr Falk asked his audience to "imagine the situation being reversed as it was during the Nazi occupation of France or the Netherlands during World War two".

"Resistance fighters were uniformly perceived in the liberal West as unconditional heroes, and no critical attention was given as to whether the tactics used unduly imperiled innocent civilian lives," he said.

"Those who lost their lives in such a resistance were honoured as martyrs. "[Khaled] Meshaal and other Hamas leaders have made similar arguments on several occasions, in effect asking what are Palestinians supposed to do in the exercise of resistance given their circumstances, which have persisted for so long, given the failures of traditional diplomacy and the UN to secure their rights under international law."

Mr Falk, who is an outspoken critic of Israel despite his UN role, also described the Western media as "stunningly oblivious to these complications of perception, almost never disclosing Israeli provocations in reporting on the timelines of the violence of the parties". He said it "fails to acknowledge that it has been the Israelis, not the Palestinians, that have been most often responsible for ending periods of prolonged truce".

In 2011 Mr Falk was roundly criticised for posting on his personal blog a cartoon depicting a dog wearing a kippah and an American flag, urinating on a statue of Blind Justice and eating human bones and blood.

Spies and silence: When politics is put before justice

Helen Fry — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 11:10:21 +0000

With the huge success of the latest Bond film, Skyfall, and celebrations last year of the 50th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s blockbuster creation, fascination with all things relating to spies is trendy again. Of course, to get nearer to the truth of the gritty underworld that protects our shores we would do better to pick up a John le Carré novel. But whether we go for the superhero or the down-to-earth agent we can’t get enough of it. TV chiefs have been quick to pick up on this new trend and offered us classic new drama in Restless and Spies of Warsaw.

To outsiders the Secret Service of any country appears to operate according to its own code, irrespective of any moral values. But should our Secret Service function within the law? Must it be bound by an ethical code that always ensures justice is done for the victims of atrocities?

Nowhere is this debate clearer than in transcripts declassified at the National Archives, which reveal that during the Second World War British intelligence set up a clandestine unit to bug the conversations of more than 10,000 German prisoners of war. At three stately homes in the countryside the latest equipment was used to pick up some of Hitler’s most guarded secrets.

At the heart of this unit were German-Jewish émigrés who had fled Nazi persecution and were serving in the British Army. In an ironic turn of events they became “secret listeners” and British intelligence’s most valuable asset. They spent up to 12 hours a day eavesdropping, most significantly on 59 German generals being held at Trent Park in North London.

The results were beyond anything Winston Churchill imagined when he authorised unlimited funds. British intelligence not only gained an insight into the enemy’s mindset, but surreptitiously gathered information on Hitler’s secret rocket programme, developments on aircraft and strategic details about U-boats, which contributed to winning the Battle of the Atlantic.

But the work had a dark side. Against the backdrop of military and political intelligence, the secret listeners overheard admission of war crimes and terrible atrocities against Jews, Russians and Poles, as well as details of Hitler’s human “stud farms”. These transcripts firmly place on record just how much British intelligence knew about the extermination programme against Europe’s Jews. Why, at the end of the war, were these files not released for war crimes trials to bring the perpetrators to justice?

The files reveal that in 1945, as hostilities drew to a close, a fierce debate raged within British intelligence about whether they should be made publicly available at the Nuremberg trials. There was a strong feeling in the Secret Service that Germany’s military men, who were clearly complicit in war crimes, should face trial. But there was another overriding factor that meant that in the end the files remained under lock and key.

Intelligence chiefs decided that making the files public would jeopardise existing British intelligence operations in England, where they were bugging the German atomic bomb scientists at Farm Hall near Cambridge, and also in Germany, where they were bugging Nazi PoWs. It was felt that enough evidence had been amassed against the main perpetrators without having to release sensitive intelligence files. As a consequence, some Nazi war criminals, especially the military men, were never brought to justice.

With this knowledge 70 years later, a number of dilemmas are raised. Should clandestine intelligence on atrocities and genocide be passed to the International Tribunal for Crimes Against Humanity in the Hague? Or will politics always stand in the way? Does national security supersede human justice? Official government policy is, of course, that having intelligence and being able to act on it are two different things.

But there are undoubtedly lessons for today and for the future, especially with the current situation in Syria, where daily reports of atrocities are coming through. Our Secret Service should be able to find a satisfactory way of making covert evidence of atrocities available without compromising any existing missions. If perpetrators of every generation are not brought to justice, then it makes a mockery of an objective code of international law, which is supposed to be above nationalistic interests.

Shul find brings recognition for wartime heroes

Jay Grenby — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 13:04:05 +0000

Families of 11 Harrow Jewish servicemen who died during the Second World War have been brought together by the chance discovery of a long-lost memorial board at Pinner Synagogue.

The wooden memorial was found at the back of a rarely-accessed storeroom underneath a stairwell during refurbishment work.

It is believed the board was displayed in the old Harrow Synagogue and brought to Pinner after its closure in 1972. Now restored, the board has a prominent position in the Pinner shul hall.

Among the servicemen was the Rev Solly Hooker, who was Harrow Synagogue minister before becoming an army chaplain during the war. Another was Captain Simmon Latutin, who was posthumously awarded the George Cross for gallantry.

Tracing the families has been a labour of love for Pinner congregants, in particular Laurence Harris, a professional family historian and specialist in Jewish genealogical research who has also been an adviser to the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?

The online JC archives were a rich source of information, with family announcements leading to surviving friends and relatives. Military records were also fruitful, providing information about three of the servicemen. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission furnished details such as place of burial — and often names of parents. Help was also provided by the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women, the Royal Air Force Museum and the Ministry of Defence.

Mr Harris discovered that two of the men commemorated, Corporal Harold Simmonds and Sergeant Alfred Sandow, were uncle and nephew. They were also the oldest and the youngest of the 11. Corporal Simmonds, a wireless operator attached to RAF Bournemouth, was 45 when he died after his billet was bombed. Sergeant Sandow was 21 when his Lancaster bomber was shot down over Holland on a mission to Germany.

Captain Latutin was a talented violinist who joined the London Symphony Orchestra at the age of 20. He was decorated for gallantry after attempting to rescue three men from a blazing rocket inferno in Mogadishu. All, including Captain Latutin, subsequently died of their injuries.

The majority were interred where they died in places far from home — India and Iran, for example. One of the 11, Flight Sergeant David Cohen, has no known grave. He was reported “missing in action” after his plane did not return from a bombing mission.

More than 50 relatives of the men were among the 300 at a rededication service at Pinner on Remembrance Sunday. Thrilled at the turnout, organiser Brian Aisenberg said: “To have an opportunity like this where we can come together and pay our respects to these men 70 years after they died is absolutely incredible.”

Those at the ceremony included Peter Tarl from Stanmore, a nephew of Flight Sergeant Joey Shaer, a Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve member who died, aged 24, in 1944 when his plane crashed near Oxford as he was returning to base.

Although Mr Tarl was just one-year-old when his uncle died, he recalled that his grandparents often talked about their lost son.

“It was said in the family that my grandmother never got over Joey’s death,” he recalled, “and though she did not die until 1963, it was rumoured to be of a broken heart”.

FORCES CHAPLAIN WHO HOPED FOR PEACE, NOT HATE

The Rev Solly Hooker was born in 1915 in London’s East End to immigrants from Lithuania. He studied at Jews’ College and University College London, gaining a BA in semitics. After working at the Central Synagogue as student minister, he was appointed to lead Harrow Synagogue in 1939.

In 1942, Mr Hooker became a forces chaplain, serving with the Eighth Army in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Italy. In a letter home, he wrote: “I am learning and I am strong and I am confident in ultimate success. G-d bless my darling wife and daughters, and may we soon experience the grand reunion — peace and love, where now is war and hate.”

In August 1945, he returned home on leave, seeing his younger daughter for the first time on her second birthday. He was posted to India in September. There, after developing a tumour on the brain, he was admitted to the British military hospital, where he died the following February, aged 31. He was buried in the Madras war cemetery.

Mr Hooker’s two daughters, who live in New Zealand and Israel, were “heartbroken” at being unable to attend the Pinner service. However, his brother and sister-in-law, Cyril and Sally Hooker, were among a group of relatives present, Mrs Hooker in a dual capacity, as her uncle, Hillier Field, was another of the 11 soldiers remembered.

Now almost 80, Cyril Hooker said his brother “was already 18 when I was born, but I remember him as a very loving person. When he was able to take time off from his studies, he took his younger brothers and sisters to see his favourite Disney cartoons.”