IN FLAGGING up their recent coverage of the eighty fifth anniversary of the evacuation of Dunkirk, Radio 4 regretted that there have been no living survivors to interview. But I do know one: Pessy, who was a toddler back in 1940, a Jewish refugee fleeing the Nazis along with her parents. My book Shepherd of Another Flock, published in 2017, featured a good few folk with remarkable stories of their experience of the Second World War. But none was as remarkable as that of Pessy, who had been my wife’s neighbour when she was growing up in Sheffield, before Pessy and her family relocated to Jerusalem.
Pessy and her parents originally lived in Leipzig, but Nazi storm troopers began rampaging through the town on Kristallnacht in 1938. Pessy can have been only two or three on the time, but she has very strong memories of hiding along with her mother and father in a neighbour’s cupboard, because the storm troopers banging on the door, wanting to know where the Markiewiczes were. The Gentile neighbour risked her own life sheltering them, after which bravely squared as much as the storm troopers: “Oh, the Markiewiczes left here ages ago. Guten Nacht, meine Herren.” While all this was happening, Pessy remembers her mother quietening her and whispering in her ear, “Shh, shh, meine Liebling.”
Once the storm troopers had gone, Pessy’s mother wrapped her in a shawl, they usually sat on the front of a hay wagon, pretending to be the wagoner’s wife and daughter. The wagoner had been well-paid by Pessy’s father; he took all of them the way in which across Germany, they usually even managed to idiot the border guards and cross over into Belgium. They lived in Antwerp for some time — Pessy’s dad was a world fur trader, so found work easily. But then, when invasion threatened, they’d to flee again.
Pessy, set on her dad’s shoulders, walking tall, was to recollect for the remainder of her life the sorry stream of refugees. They slept where they may. One night, they were sleeping in a barn by an airfield, when her father woke his wife and daughter. “We must go,” he ordered.
“Not so fast, not so fast: the kid is sleeping,” Pessy’s mother protested.
“No, we’ve got to go now,” her father insisted. It seemed that he had had some kind of premonition: as they looked back to the barn that they’d left only minutes before, they saw it blown to smithereens by Nazi Stukas.
THEIR flight continued, following the direction of the arrows within the opening sequence of Dad’s Army. They ended up stranded on the Dunkirk beaches, where the British Expeditionary Force was making a hasty retreat. Pessy’s mother, who was a dancer and singer, and had learned English to further her profession, approached a British captain. “Take us with you,” she begged.
“Madam, it is solely impossible,” he had replied. “We have to provide priority to our British soldiers.”
The troops were already packed like sardines on the boats: there was hardly enough room for them, let alone civilians. But, quick as a flash, Pessy’s mother snatched the gun from the captain’s belt and held it desperately to her little girl’s head.
“If you don’t take us, I’ll shoot my daughter, my husband, and myself. We’d be higher off dead than butchered by the Nazis.”
The captain, taking fright, said, “Come on then, madam, come quickly,” pushing the three of them right into a tiny boat. Pessy and her parents had squeezed into the engine-room, where Pessy was fascinated by the short, blond-haired mechanic with shiny blue eyes and weatherbeaten skin, his face smeared with machine oil as he desperately tried to maintain the engine ticking over.
Their troubles were removed from ended after they landed in England. German-speaking, with no papers, they were classed as enemy aliens and interned in a camp on the Isle of Man. But, someway, Pessy’s uncle, who had escaped to the United States, was contacted. He vouched for them, they usually were released. The family eventually ended up in Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, where they trudged around, knocking on door after door, in search of lodgings, only to be turned away time after time: “No Jews here!” And then, one Gentile family took them in, renting them an attic room.
Pessy’s father found work, dealing in furs in London. With his first wage, he bought a pair of candlesticks in order that his little family, with nothing except their precious freedom, could keep their sabbath within the presence of the Holy One of Israel.
My wife Rachel’s mother died when Rachel was just 16, her brothers 15 and 11;and the entire family was forged into utter grief. The first person to go to them was their Jewish neighbour, Pessy, now married with three sons, bringing essentially the most delicious chocolate cake: “A little bit something to sweeten your terrible bitterness.”
THERE is an intriguing postscript to Pessy’s Exodus story. In the early Nineteen Seventies, she and her family had holidayed within the Scottish Highlands, where they caught a tiny ferry to Iona. The particular smell of the diesel fuel triggered sharp memories from Pessy’s childhood, and he or she asked the fresh-faced young captain if the boat had ever been further afield than the waters around Mull.
“Aye, but just once, long before my time. In 1940, it criss-crossed the English Channel to bring our lads back from Dunkirk,” he answered, and showed Pessy a plaque beneath the mast, which simply stated that the boat had seen valiant service at Dunkirk, and, as a part of a flotilla of boats of all styles and sizes, had plucked the British Expeditionary Force from certain death.
“Any of that original crew still around?” Pessy asked.
“Just Paddy, within the engine room,” the captain replied.
Pessy ventured down below, and recognised a shortish man, whose skin was deeply tanned, his eyes shiny blue, his hair not blond, but white. She spontaneously threw her arms around him, profusely thanking the person who had saved her and her family and various others. Not surprisingly, given all of the those who they’d rescued, he had only a vague memory of Pessy.
“I spent more often than not down below, nursing the engine,” he explained. “I just went up on deck once at Dunkirk, our very last trip. The German army were closing in, and all hell was set free. I peered through a pair of binoculars on the Nazis on the shore. I cannae forget the look of utter black fury on their faces because we were thwarting them. Just as well that I hadn’t seen that look before we embarked, or I’d have never set sail.”
PESSY’S story mirrors the miraculous deliverance typified by Dunkirk, a beacon of hope and lightweight from the darkest of times, when evil stalked the earth; and shows that light can dawn, even within the darkness of illegal Channel crossings, the attacks of seven October, and the terrible destruction of Gaza.
But also, within the octave of Pentecost, her story gives us pause to reflect on how God’s Spirit can surprise us, within the guise of the brave Gentile neighbour in Leipzig, a wagoner crossing Europe, a father’s dream, a military captain terrified by a mother’s fierce devotion, and a young mechanic tending a drained engine to flee the Nazi hordes.
The Rt Revd David Wilbourne is an honorary assistant bishop within the diocese of York. Shepherd of Another Flock was published by Pan McMillan in 2017 (Books, 22 September 2017).
