WE celebrated the 80th anniversary of VE Day on May 8. Earlier, on January 27, we also celebrated Holocaust Memorial Day, the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the concentration camps. These solemn dates are irrevocably linked: if we had not won the war against Nazi Germany, we would not have been free to commemorate the wholesale murder of European Jews. What was so shocking about the Holocaust is that it took place in a cultured European nation that utilised all the most modern machinery of the time to carry out systematic slaughter.
The author of these memoirs, a Catholic, is the widow of the late Harry Fox who died in 2012. ‘Harry Fox’ was the anglicised name of Chaim Fuks, born in Tuszyn, Poland, in 1930, who lived through the Nazi invasion of his country and who came to the UK as a 15-year-old in 1945 in a group invited by King George VI. They became known as ‘The Windemere Children’, later documented in a BBC film of 2020. A. M. Fox met her husband in 1991, having been in touch with the ‘45 Aid Society, formed in the 1960s to help survivors of the Holocaust; Harry was a Polish Jew, 20 years her senior. She relates, ‘His smile was infectious, his energy boundless and his charm totally irresistible’.
The memoirs are divided into three sections: Before the War; The War; and War Over. The first part is haunting, evoking as it does the vibrant life of a Jewish community in Poland which had existed for generations, only to be erased forever in the war. One of three children whose father was a tailor, Harry grew up with ‘approximately 100 relatives to be found within walking distance.’ Tuszyn was a ‘one-horse town’ of about 1000 Jews and 1000 Poles. Antisemitism, low-level but constant, did not quench this immemorial way of life, characterised by hard work, ingenuity, Klezmer music, rituals and shabbat: ‘Food for the soul came first.’
Harry lovingly remembered the Friday night suppers of his childhood: wine, challah, gefilte fish, chopped liver, and chicken soup followed by puddings of apple puree, prunes and cooked pears, lemon tea and biscuits. ‘The family employed a non-Jewish lady […] who came in to light the fires for them at home, as they could not strike a match on the Sabbath.’ Harry and his older brother attended Jewish school where they learnt to read the Hebrew scriptures. Yiddish was spoken at home.
This secure and happy childhood came to an abrupt end, as it did for millions of Harry’s fellow Jews, after the German invasion in the autumn of 1939. School was banned, wearing a Star of David enforced. On November 30, 1939, all the Jews were woken up and told to leave town: ‘Life in Tuszyn was over, after ten generations.’ The long nightmare had begun: deportation to the very first ghetto the Germans set up, in Piotrkow and being a child witness to regular shootings, beatings and killings. It got worse: on October 14, 1942, the Jews were abruptly removed from the ghetto. Harry’s mother and nine-year-old sister were put on a cattle truck along with 22,000 others and taken to Treblinka, a designated death camp, where they were gassed on arrival. The great Russian-Jewish writer, Vasily Grossman, accompanying the Russian troops who first entered the ruins of Treblinka, records his own imaginative impression of the horror of this place in his volume of short stories; as an illustration of pure evil, it should be read by everyone.
The remainder of Section Two of these memoirs describes survival for Harry and his older brother, Jona, until their liberation in 1945. ‘The brothers were there for each other’ alongside their fiercely resourceful father, until his untimely death from malnutrition at the war’s end. Slave labour in a glass factory was followed by further displacement, half-starved and in daily danger of death in worse places, including Buchenwald. Miraculously, the two brothers came through this long ordeal – ‘Nobody survived who was on their own’ – to become part of the group of 723 young people invited to the UK where, in the serene surroundings of Lake Windemere, they swam, played football and learnt to live again.
Harry eventually went into business in East London and became an active member of the London Jewish Cultural Centre and the Holocaust Educational Trust. He and other survivors were invited to speak about their experiences in schools and universities, a form of living history, though as his wife comments, it was ‘not easy to step back into this darkness and talk about it’. The book’s subtitle is ‘Living without Hatred’. Despite the past, Harry was never bitter or vengeful; his philosophy was ‘whatever happens we must embrace life’.
After so much literature has been written about the Holocaust, one might ask: why publish more? The answer is because each life matters; everyone has a story to tell, precious and unique to them, that should not be forgotten – especially a story that details the darkest side of the history of the 20th century. The biographer of Churchill, the late Professor Sir Martin Gilbert, encouraged the author to publish her late husband’s memories. She has done an excellent job: Harry lives on in these pages, energetic, handy with his fists on occasion during his youth, loyal, generous hearted, full of chutzpah. As Jews would say, he was a real ‘mensch’.
