IN FLAGGING up their recent coverage of the 85th anniversary of the evacuation of Dunkirk, Radio 4 regretted that there were no living survivors to interview. But I know one: Pessy, who was a toddler back in 1940, a Jewish refugee fleeing the Nazis with her parents. My book Shepherd of Another Flock, published in 2017, featured a fair 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 started rampaging through the town on Kristallnacht in 1938. Pessy can have been only two or three at the time, but she has very strong memories of hiding with her mother and father in a neighbour’s cupboard, as the storm troopers banging on the door, wanting to know where the Markiewiczes were. The Gentile neighbour risked her own life sheltering them, and then bravely squared up to the storm troopers: “Oh, the Markiewiczes left here ages ago. Guten Nacht, meine Herren.” While all this was going on, 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, and they 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 them all the way across Germany, and they even managed to fool the border guards and cross over into Belgium. They lived in Antwerp for a while — Pessy’s dad was an international fur trader, so found work easily. But then, when invasion threatened, they had to flee again.
Pessy, set on her dad’s shoulders, walking tall, was to remember for the rest of her life the sorry stream of refugees. They slept where they could. 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 child is sleeping,” Pessy’s mother protested.
“No, we have to go now,” her father insisted. It seemed that he had had some sort of premonition: as they looked back to the barn that they had left only minutes before, they saw it blown to smithereens by Nazi Stukas.
THEIR flight continued, following the direction of the arrows in 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 career, approached a British captain. “Take us with you,” she begged.
“Madam, it is simply not possible,” he had replied. “We have to give 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 better off dead than butchered by the Nazis.”
The captain, taking fright, said, “Come on then, madam, come quickly,” pushing the three of them 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 bright blue eyes and weatherbeaten skin, his face smeared with machine oil as he desperately tried to keep the engine ticking over.
Their troubles were far from ended when 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, somehow, Pessy’s uncle, who had escaped to the United States, was contacted. He vouched for them, and they were released. The family eventually ended up in Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, where they trudged around, knocking on door after door, looking for 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 so that his little family, with nothing except their precious freedom, could keep their sabbath in 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 whole family was cast into utter grief. The first person to visit them was their Jewish neighbour, Pessy, now married with three sons, bringing the most delicious chocolate cake: “A little something to sweeten your terrible bitterness.”
THERE is an intriguing postscript to Pessy’s Exodus story. In the early 1970s, she and her family had holidayed in 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 she asked the fresh-faced young captain if the boat had ever been further afield than the waters around Mull.
“Aye, but only 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 part of a flotilla of boats of all shapes and sizes, had plucked the British Expeditionary Force from certain death.
“Any of that original crew still around?” Pessy asked.
“Just Paddy, in the engine room,” the captain replied.
Pessy ventured down below, and recognised a shortish man, whose skin was deeply tanned, his eyes bright blue, his hair no longer blond, but white. She spontaneously threw her arms around him, profusely thanking the man who had saved her and her family and numerous others. Not surprisingly, given all the people that they had rescued, he had only a vague memory of Pessy.
“I spent most of the time 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 let loose. I peered through a pair of binoculars at 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 light from the darkest of times, when evil stalked the earth; and shows that light can dawn, even in the darkness of illegal Channel crossings, the attacks of 7 October, and the terrible destruction of Gaza.
But also, in the octave of Pentecost, her story gives us pause to reflect on how God’s Spirit can surprise us, in the guise of the brave Gentile neighbour in Leipzig, a wagoner crossing Europe, a father’s dream, an army captain terrified by a mother’s fierce devotion, and a young mechanic tending a tired engine to escape the Nazi hordes.
The Rt Revd David Wilbourne is an honorary assistant bishop in the diocese of York. Shepherd of Another Flock was published by Pan McMillan in 2017 (Books, 22 September 2017).
