A week or so back, it was the 79th Anniversary of the D-Day Landings. On 6th June 1944, Allied forces landed on the beaches of Normandy and started the liberation of France. Within a year, the Third Reich had been toppled and the war in Europe was over.
Whenever this anniversary passes, I am reminded of one of the most amazing train journeys I have ever experienced. It was around 2003 or 2004 and I had been in a meeting in Birmingham. As soon as the meeting finished, I hot-footed it to Birmingham New Street station to get the train home to London. The train was pretty crowded but I managed to get a window seat and settled down for a doze – I love a doze on a train and, having had an early start, was keen to catch up on much needed beauty sleep. The seat next to me was empty and so I had the added bonus of being able to spread out.
But, just as the train was about to depart, three older folks got on and the lady in the group headed for the vacant seat next to me. I made the fatal mistake of catching her eye and I smiled at her, a natural thing to do but definitely something to be avoided if you want to make sure there is no risk of conversation. As soon as I had done it, I knew I’d made a mistake and, inevitably, she started talking to me. My heart sank !
She had a really unusual accent that I couldn’t place – it was pretty obvious she wasn’t British but quite where she came from, I just couldn’t guess. So I asked her and she told me she’d been born in Hungary, had moved to Sweden when she was 12, then onto Canada and, finally, to England in 1962. When I asked her what had taken her on such an unusual journey, she gave me an answer that stunned me – she was a holocaust survivor. She spent her time now touring schools and telling them about her experience and she was, to my eternal gratitude, more than willing to spend the time we spent on the train to London telling me about her life and answering my many questions.
She had been in Belsen and had been there on 15th April 1945, aged 12 years, when it was liberated by the British Army, a day that Richard Dimbleby, a war reporter who was there, described as the “most horrible of my life”. My first question was how easy she found it to engage young teenagers in England in the early 21st Century in her story – she said that started by asking them to think of every single person that they knew and then imagine that all of them were killed, because that was what had happened to her when she was 12.
After liberation, when she was close to death, she was moved to Sweden – she said that this was difficult because she spoke only Hungarian and couldn’t understand or be understood. Eventually, she was moved to Canada and them, when she married, she moved to England and had been there ever since.
The journey was over too soon and, as we said our goodbyes, she told me that I knew more about what had happened to her than her own children, which I found amazing.
I really wish that I had written down more of what she told me when it was fresh in my mind – it was such a rare opportunity and I felt so privileged – bizarrely, I feel closer to the Holocaust now simply because of this experience.
The one thing that she said that really stuck with me was that the first thing she did when she returned to Europe in the early 1960s was to visit the war graves around the Normandy beaches. She told me that she was eternally grateful to those men because, without their sacrifice, she would not have survived to tell her story. Often when one reads about events in history, its easy to forget the human experience of people who were there or were impacted by the outcome and this train journey was a reminder that we should never forget.
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