Writing foreword, princess salutes 'residents' heroic acts of perseverance and survival' and their 'determination to embrace change'
October 24, 2019 11:57
ByBarry Toberman, Barry Toberman
The Princess Royal has written a glowing introduction to a new book celebrating the lives of residents of South London care home Nightingale House.
The princess, who visited Nightingale in 2015, commends residents on sharing “their remarkable life stories as a lasting tribute of their generation. [It] teaches us that we should record for posterity the history of our parents and grandparents to pass down.
“I salute residents’ heroic acts of perseverance and survival in the face of adversity occasioned by the Holocaust, instability in other countries and their own health issues. I celebrate their sheer determination to embrace change at each and every stage of their lives.”
She added: “It is evident from their stories that the residents feel safe at Nightingale Hammerson and I applaud your care home for the high standards of care. I also commend Rica Infante and her team of volunteer interviewers and members of staff for having made this very worthy and inspiring project possible, highlighting the value that voluntary work has in our society as a whole.”
The princess’s 2015 visit to Nightingale was to recognise the contribution of three French wartime secret agents — Andree Borrel, Madeleine Damerment and Denise Bloch — to Britain’s Special Operations Executive, which operated from the Nightingale site in Clapham.
Among residents telling their stories in the book is Dr Frank Beck, who came to Britain as a refugee from Vienna in 1939. He was forging a career in electronics with GEC when in 1954, a director offered him a job “looking after something very new; a computer. I learned to program and operate it, and that was the beginning of my career in computing.”
This eventually led him to Cern, a multinational physics research organisation in Geneva, for which he worked on and off for 30 years.
In 1972 he was given “a fantastic job - to design and build a computerised control room for the next accelerator. It meant doing many things that were world firsts and it went very well for me.
“Now I am here in Nightingale as Jewish identity is hugely important.”
Another featured is Polish-born Wlodka Robertson, who recalled seeing the Warsaw Ghetto burn down - and learning much later that her mother had died in the Majdanek camp.
Her father had fought with the Free Polish Army and came to London after the war, where his daughters were reunited with him. She qualified as a diagnostic radiographer and met her late husband Bruce through involvement in a Labour youth movement.
She is grateful for the care she receives at Nightingale. “I know I am in a safe place. I attend the exercise class, French class, poetry group, book club and coffee mornings held by the League of Jewish Women. In the summer months I take pleasure sitting on a bench in the garden.”
