Two 99-year-old war veterans and one aged 101 laid wreaths on Remembrance Sunday at Jewish Care centres in north London who had served in the Second World War.
Jack Mann is the last survivor of his Long Range Desert Group, a British Army special forces unit that carried out raids deep behind enemy lines across German-occupied North Africa.
He was one of the veterans laying wreaths at campuses run by the charity in Golders Green, Stanmore and Friern Barnet.
“I joined the Armed Forces to fight the Nazis,” Jack recalls. “I can’t say I’m a hero — my job was communications and that’s what I did.”
His served in North Africa, the Middle East, Aegean and Cyprus, having trained with parachutes and to jump from 15ft ladder without harness and to survive!
Another veteran was Moishe Freeman, also 99, a leading signalman in the Royal Navy who joined up before his 17th birthday.
“I can recall my friends being killed,” he said. “I saw a close friend killed in action.
“Laying this wreath will bring back close memories, something I will always remember.”
Moishe served in India, Burma, Australia, South Africa and Ceylon aboard HMS London.
“It was the first time I had my own bed, coming from a very poor family,” Moishe remembers. “It was actually a hammock which I managed to fall out of three times! But I was also eating good food regularly.”
A special memorial was held at Jewish Care’s Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in Golder’s Green to mark Kristallnacht, the night when Nazi-orchestrated mobs rampaged through German cities in 1938 attacking Jews and smashing windows.
Henny Franks, now aged 101, shared her memories of Kristallnacht.
“My family hid on the rooftops that day,” she remembers. “I had two younger siblings who went to the Jewish school that the Nazis smashed when they burnt the synagogues.
“After that, my parents sent us away on the Kindertransport to Britain. I never saw my father again.”
Her father Jacob Grünbaum was murdered by the Nazis at Sobibor concentration camp.
Henny, who was eventually reunited in London with her siblings and her mother having narrowly escaped Germany, joined the Auxiliary Territorials at 16 where she later met her husband. She feels proud to have served in the Army “to do my bit”.
Wreaths were laid at Jewish Care’s Betty Asher Loftus Centre in Friern Barnet and at their Sandringham residential complex in Stanmore.
Leslie Bernard, who was awarded the French Legion d'Honneur, was one of the veterans laying wreaths. He joined the Army in 1944 in a reinforcement group supporting the Normandy Landings and went on to fight in Holland as a Bren gunner during the Liberation, then on into Germany to witness the collapse of Hitler’s regime.
Jewish Care chief executive Daniel Carmel-Brown said: “We owe a debt to these veterans and to those who lost their lives so that we could live in peace. The numbers of veterans are decreasing, so it’s important to pay tribute to the courage of those who served the nation.”
Other wreaths were laid by National Service veteran Michael Clifton, a senior aircraftsman in the 1950s, and by Sheila Golding for her father who fought in the First World War and brother who served in the Second, both having been mentioned in dispatches. The last post was played by Melvin Goldberg, who did his National Service in the 1950s.
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