Helen Fry
Sir Nick Young in Conversation with Helen Fry: The Story of the Special Rescue
Sir Nick Young in Conversation with Helen Fry: The Story of the Special Rescue | 02.13.24
- It’s a real pleasure to welcome Sir Nick Young on Lockdown University. Sir Nick was a corporate lawyer with one of the Magic Circle law firms before he began working for Sue Rider and Leonard Cheshire in a very fascinating career. And it’s a very distinguished career because he went on to become chief executive of Macmillan Cancer Support and then Chief Executive for 13 years of the British Red Cross until 2014. He was knighted for his services to cancer work in 2000, and then in 2013, he was honoured with the Queen’s badge of honour. Sir Nick, thank you for joining us on Lockdown University.
Thank you very much, Helen. It’s great to be here and good evening everybody.
And we are going to be discussing your father this evening, major Leslie Young, a World War veteran, and an incredibly distinguished career because, of course, he does as we’ll talk shortly go on to serving the commandos and do some incredible things in the war. But can you, before we start our in conversation proper, can you just talk us through the images that we can see on screen at the moment?
Yeah, certainly, well, the oil painting on the left hand-side of the screen is my dad painted in about 1940 by his second in command at the time, a chap called Tom La Fontaine, who’s quite a well known sort of secondary level artist here in the UK. Very good at painting horses and dogs and lots of lovely Christmas cards painted by Tom La Fontaine. But he also painted the his colleagues in the army. This is in the Bedfordshire and Hartfordshire regiment of the British Infantry. And so that was, that it’s a great likeness of my father, I mean total, total likeness and I’m very pleased that I’ve got it, the original up behind my left ear here in, in my little study in a tiny village in Suffolk. On the right hand, upper right-hand side of the screen is, well, it’s a building that used to be an orphanage. It’s situated in a little, a town called Fontanellato in northern Italy near Parma. And it was in this orphanage converted very quickly during the war to a prisoner of war camp that my father was incarcerated for about six months after he was captured in North Africa, in Tunisia in April of 1943.
Basically, if you were captured in the fighting in North Africa, you ended up in prison camp in Italy. There were about 80,000 PoWs in Italy at that period in the war in 1943. And then underneath is a picture of two people who are incredibly special to me and my family. On the left-hand side is Eugenio Elfer, a Jewish partisan. He was 23 years old at the time my father met him and next to him on that rock face is his sister Sylvia, who was 19 years old when my father met her. They both signed up as partisans to fight the fascists and the Germans in Italy in 1943, and as perhaps we’ll get onto Helen, they very bravely helped my father in his escape from that prison camp at Fontanellato.
Thank you, so can we possibly take the slides down? Lovely, great, thank you, so can I start by asking you then, why did you decide to write the book? You can see over my right shoulder, the book, “Escaping With His Life.” What was the trigger for you to decide to write his story? Why was that an important journey?
Well, like many of his generation, my father barely ever talked about his role in the Second World War. It was as if he had wanted to shut the door on the cupboard, world War II and really never opened the door again. He was very reticent in talking about it. Once or twice, I think I sort of in a fairly desultory way as a teenager, tried to get him talking about it, but he wasn’t interested. And so when he died in 1986, I was still none the wiser really, as to what he had done during the war. I had odd clues of places that he’d met. I knew about his involvement in Dunkirk, for example, and in the Commandos, but a little bit about Italy, but really not very much. And it was when I was clearing his bedroom, about two days after his death, I opened the drawer in his bedside table and I found this battered little notebook. Tiny, tiny thing was sort of oh, smaller than A5, and when I opened it up, it was filled, each page absolutely filled with tiny, tiny pencil scribbles. And after a great deal of puzzling, because dad’s handwriting was even worse than mine is, I realised it was a diary of some sort. And after a lot more puzzling, I worked out that it seemed to be a diary of when he was in a prison camp and then going on to a period on the run.
It was difficult to interpret ‘cause there were no place names, there were no people’s names. It was all done very anonymously, obviously, because if he’d been captured while he was on the run, he the finding of his diary, he would’ve given away all the people who helped him. So that’s what I had. I had this little diary and over the course of the next few months, I transcribed it. I began doing a bit of research and I found out a little bit about the war in Italy and the prison camps there. And then I suppose I took to wondering, well, actually what had he done the rest of the war? What had led up to this period in a prison camp in Italy and what followed? And so I started what has turned out to be a 30 year journey in my father’s footsteps. I visited every place that he fought. I’ve met as many as possible of the people he fought with. So though sadly, of course, most of them have passed on now, and I really collected an extraordinary account in thousands and thousands of pieces of paper, basically, of what my dad did. And then I really wanted to tell this story to my kids, and I thought, well, they’re never going to read all this lot. There was just piles of paper.
So I decided to write a book about it, and then I bumped into a publisher at a party and made the unforgivable error, social error of admitting that I was writing a book. And he asked me what kind of book it was. And I said, well, it’s about my father’s time in the World War II, and this, this guy said, “Well, actually, I specialise in publishing books on World War II so, we might be interested.” So when I eventually finished the book, I contacted him and good to his word, he, he took me on and that’s the book on the shelf behind me.
Yeah, we’re going to talk sort of around the book, and not necessarily at this point chronologically, but I want to dive in because of the impact that that Jewish brother and sister had in your father’s life. Do you want to tell us, I think it is appropriate that we do, you know, start fairly early on in the interview, in our in conversation about them, tell me who were they, what did they do for your father? Because it’s for you a profound story, isn’t it?
Oh, it really is, I mean, I owe my life to those two, there’s no question about it. And therefore, my whole family owes our lives to them. I think a little bit of background, Helen, first of all. As I said, if you were captured in Northern Africa, you ended up in a prison camp in Italy. There were about 83 prison camps all over Italy. Some of them were special camps for officers, that was the camp my father was in. Others were work camps where the prisoners were worked pretty hard by the Germans, who in 1943 overran Italy. Italy, as I’m sure everybody listening knows, that the Italians laid down their arms in September, 1943, 8th of September, it’s the armistizio in Italy, the armistice. The Italians laid down their arms and some 80,000 PoWs all over Italy thought, great, now is our chance to escape. But it wasn’t as easy as that, First of all, an order had come through from London to all the senior British officers in all the prison camps in Italy, stay put.
Yeah,
I think the Allied commanders didn’t want 80,000 PoWs running, running amuck in Italy and getting into difficulties and all sorts of trouble, so the order came stay put. And in many of the prison camps, and this is perhaps hard to understand, in many of the camps, the senior British officer actually mounted armed guards to keep the Brits and the Americans and the others in prison. But in other camps, including the camp my father was in, in Fontanellato in northern Italy, the senior British officer came to the conclusion this order was out of date, lacked any kind of understanding of what was going to happen in Italy and encouraged his men to get out while the going was good. And this was incredibly important, he made this decision on the first day, on the 8th of September, with the support of the Italian commandant, a very brave guy called Vicedomini because they knew they were situated in the north of Italy, and they knew that the Germans would be running in to Italy very fast indeed, and would quickly overrun the camp. There were other challenges facing the PoWs. First of all, these were all, you know, well-built Brits and South Africans and Americans, and none of them looked even vaguely like an impoverished Italian peasant, and none of them spoke the language and they didn’t have maps.
So they didn’t know which way to go. Was it best to go north and over the Alps into into neutral Switzerland? Was it better to head east or west and hope to find a boat? Or was it better to trek down through the Apennine mountains, which is the kind of backbone round runs the whole of the way down, the Italian mainland, to trek down through those mountains until they met up with the invading allied forces. The allies had invaded Sicily and Southern Italy and were slowly making their way up and that’s the point, it was slow going. I think the allied commanders thought that they would very quickly liberate the whole of Italy, but Italy is long and thin and mainly comprises very high mountains, crisscrossed with very deep and fast flowing rivers. And in that winter of 1943-44, the weather was absolutely appalling. So it was a real trudge up through Italy, and it became even more of a trudge as the Germans rushed down 70,000 Germans occupying Italy very, very quickly indeed, and forming extremely strong defensive lines up from southern it up from the middle of Italy up to the north. So that was the situation that my father found himself on the 8th of September, 1943. And he decided, he, he set out with a chum, an RAF colleague, who had met up, met up within the camp.
They decided to set out south over the Apennine chain to try and meet up with the Italians, sorry, with the advancing allied forces. And this is where, I think, one of the most extraordinary episodes of the Second World War begins, because, you know, it Italy had been our enemy and, you know, these guys who were on the run expected to get a pretty unfriendly welcome from Italians generally, and particularly from the fascists who was obviously still around in pretty much every town and village. Instead of that, they received from the Italians the most incredibly warm welcome. Italians, particularly, particularly the Italian sort of peasant, sharecropper farmers in the mountains welcomed these escaping prisoners. They took them in. They fed them. They sheltered them, and they either housed them for months until the allies managed to overrun that particular town or village, or they sent them on their way with a map and a good breakfast and having had a rest to, you know, regain their energies.
It is the most extraordinary story of mass kindness. Just, well, not only strangers, but people who the Italians had been at war with and what’s more, all the prisoners had a ransom on their heads, and the Germans very often shot whole villages if they thought that prisoners had been helped. So this was a really big deal for everybody. The prisoners were in danger every day. Many of them decided to trek south at night to avoid any possibility of being picked up. And they knew that if they were caught or if they were given away by the Italians, they were dead.
Yeah.
So my father trekked his way down Italy with this RAF guy. The RAF guy eventually decided he wanted to stay put in a little village. So dad chummed up with a New Zealander, a New Zealander called Charlie, Charlie Gatenby And together they set off over the mountains and they worked their way hundreds of miles south to a place called Corvaro about 70 miles northeast of Rome when the snow started. And they were forced to take shelter until the snows disappeared. And I mean, this was a bad winter, there was seven or eight feet of snow very, quickly in the mountains and no chance of moving on. It was while they were in Corvaro my father developed pneumonia. They were looked after by an incredibly brave Italian family called the de Michelis family. I’m in touch with that family now. I’m part of their family and they are part of mine. I visit them a lot, pretty much every year. And they looked after dad and the New Zealander, and in January they hidden out in a tiny little shepherd’s hut in the mountains.
He must be perishingly cold the whole time, and this family under the noses of the Germans, brought them food and hot, hot drinks and just kept them alive basically for this two month period. And then in January, dad and Charlie met up with two young Italians, Eugenio Elfer and his sister Sylvia. They were the children of a fur trader who had actually been born in Triste, but had left Triste and had gone to Austria where he met his wife. And then with the , they managed to get out of Austria and settled in Italy, in Rome, where he carried out an extremely profitable fur trading business. These young people had a pretty golden life actually in Rome before the war, sunning themselves on the beaches in the South, and then heading off into the Abruzzi Mountains to ski in the winter. So it was a nice life. But when their parent… So Germans suddenly overrun Italy and Jewish people were obviously in danger. They’d had a pretty difficult time under Mussolini.
But when the Germans came in, they knew they were, their lives were really seriously at risk. And so the Elfer family hightailed it up into the mountains to hide out. These two young people, Eugenio and Sylvia really didn’t fancy that sort of life. And they signed up with a local partisan band called Gealda. And the partisans were busy shooting fascists, disrupting German communications and supply lines whenever they could and helping escaping PoWs. And amazingly enough at around this time in Corvaro, there were about a hundred PoWs hiding out in various little cottages dotted around. But dad and Charlie met up with the Elfers. and the two Elfers offered to guide them through the mountains with the remainder of the mountain range to meet up with the allied forces, which, and this is the important point, the allied forces had just landed at Anzio, just south of Rome, huge invasion fleet, 360 odd ships depositing tens of thousands of allied troops on the beach at Anzio, where they were very quickly met by 50 or 60,000 German troops, well dug in, absolutely determined to blast them back into the city.
It was tough, wasn’t it? It really was, although the landing was a surprise to the Germans, they very quickly regrouped and they gave the troops on the beach as hell. So Dad and Charlie, and these two young Italians, Eugenio and Sylvia, got themselves five days trek over the mountains to a town called Norma, which literally overlooks the marshland just south of Rome, the Pontine Marshes. And they could see this battle, this pitch battle was going on all the time. Shells whizzing to and fro constantly, constant troop movements, constant sound of machine guns, you know, it must have looked a grim sight. But the Italians were fairly sure that they could guide Leslie and Charlie through the German lines, through the German minefields across no man’s land and into the allied lines on the beach at Anzio. I mean, they must have been crazy really, I mean-
I mean, to be actually, yeah to navigate their way through that. But they were also at risk because as you said, shortly short time ago, they were Jewish, they were Jewish partisans, absolutely fighting well with the Italian partisans. Unbelievable, wasn’t it? So did they make it? What happened? Well, so that night, this is the night of the 5th of February, 1944, they made their way down the track from Norma up on the mountains down to the plain. And they crept on hands and knees through the German lines, somehow. They crawled through a deep German minefield, everybody holding onto the ankles of the person in front and literally following in their footsteps. And amazingly they found their way out of the German minefield. And it was that point at that point that they ran into a German patrol, which immediately opened fire on them with mortars and rifles. And the boy Eugenio was hit in the chest and, you know, literally just in front of his sister and in front of Charlie and my father. Charlie crept over to his body and determined that he was, well, if not actually dead, certainly dying. And he came back to report to Sylvia and my father.
Sylvia was desperate to stay with her brother’s body and the two escapers combined to say, look, Sylvia, you can’t do that. We are all dead if we stay here, we’ve got to keep going. Look, the American lines are just, well, it was by this stage, a few hundred yards away, across no man’s land. We’ve got to keep going. that’s the only way we’re going to survive. So they carried on, crawling through no man’s land, and at a round dawn, they were spotted by an American patrol from a company called the Devil’s Brigade. This was a band of crack Canadian troops mixed in with a about of absolute American hoodlums from, you know, the sort of poorer parts of New York and other places really full of fight and determined to have a go. They’d only just arrived in Italy. And if ever there was a brigade whose motto was shoot first and asked questions later, I suspect it was that Devil’s Brigade, because they did, they shot first. Charlie was hit in the shoulder and collapsed into a ditch. My father jumped into another ditch, but Sylvia was caught and hit in the throat.
Well, my father by this stage was screaming himself horse at the Americans to get them to stop firing and eventually they did. And my father picked up Sylvia’s body and carried her towards the American soldiers. She was put in a jeep and they took her to the American field hospital, literally on the beach at Anzio, a mile or two away where she died the next morning. And in fact, it was my father’s first job back in the army, as it were, to arrange her burial. And, you know, then he jumped on a ship and was taken back to the UK, where very quickly he joined the invading army in Normandy, and carried on fighting right through to the German border, carrying with him all that time and all the time since the war until he died in 1986, the thought that those two young Italian people had died to save him.
Yeah, they had. How did you feel when you discovered that story? 'Cause he didn’t tell you that, did he?
He didn’t tell me it, he never mentioned it. But Charlie, who I did meet after dad had died, Charlie gave me an account of, or his account of what had happened. And it tied up with a funny, a little paper cutting that I’d found amongst my dad’s papers, which referred to the burial of a person called Sylvia Elfer in the Jewish cemetery in Rome. And one idol Sunday afternoon, I googled her name and incredibly up on my screen came a letter from an American who was writing to an Italian magazine asking this magazine if its readers, if any of its readers happened to know what had happened to a Jewish woman called Sylvia Elfer, who he, this American believed had died, helping allied prisoners escape. Well, I just fell off my chair. I mean, this came up on my screen in sort of two clicks, and I was completely astonished. I wrote. I emailed him, changed his email address. I wrote to him, he’d moved house, but months later, a letter got through to him and he contacted me, a chap called Don Lee. He’s a quite a senior CBS news cameraman now. And he said, yes, well, we have this idea that Sylvia and Eugenio died helping allied prisoners and I said, yes, they did, my father was one of them.
So of course I’m now linked in with his family. I’ve met them all, they’ve sent me wonderful pictures of the family and pictures of their life in Rome and their history and just to sort of carry on the story, amazingly, about a year later, a London solicitor, a London lawyer, got in touch with me, whose name was Elfer and so I talked to him as well. He was also connected to Sylvia/Eugenio. And I said, “Well, it’s great Peter, that you know, we are talking because I’ve been in touch with Don Lee as well in America.” And he looked at me and he said, “Well, who’s Don Lee?” I said, “Well, Don Lee’s one of your cousins,” and they didn’t know each other. So I’ve been able to sort of reunite the Elfer family who all just got out of Germany as fast as they could at the end of the war, out of Italy at the end of the war. And just to finish the story, I have now been able to find the grave of the Elfer family in the Jewish–
- So you visited, you have visited Rome? Yeah, I have. I visited, every time I go to Rome, I go and spend some time at the grave. And there are buried Antonio, the father, who died within a couple of months of hearing that his children had been killed. The mother Elisa died aged 105 in 1995. And she had managed to find her daughter’s body in the American War cemetery in Anzio at the end of the war. And she had also, thanks to an amazing chance, seen an article in an Anzio newspaper two years after the war, referring to a body of a young man that had been found in a ditch. And something told her that this might be Eugenio’s body, she contacted my dad, who was able to confirm what he was wearing and what he had on him when he died.
And armed with that information, she was able positively to identify the body as her son’s. So her son’s grave, her son was brought back to be buried in the family grave in Rome as well. And that’s where all four of them now lie, as I say, I visit regularly. And the first time I visited, I found quite oddly a fresh white flower on the grave. And I was puzzled by this. So I left a message in Italian for whoever had left the flower. And a couple of weeks later I got an email from him to say that his mother had died a couple of months previously. And in visiting her grave, he’d also seen the grave of the Elfer family, where the story is told very briefly. And he decided that every time he goes to visit his mother’s grave, he’ll leave a flower on the grave of the Elfers as well. And I just love that because we will remember.
Extraordinary, isn’t it? Because we think of and commemorate the righteous Gentiles, don’t we? Those that saved and we think of a number of figures and those spies and diplomats in Europe in the thirties, and then during the wartime, of course, even Oskar Schindler. We’ve got Nicholas Winton And Frank Foley in that. But we don’t think of it the other way that the word Jewish rescuers. And that’s so important that you’ve written your father’s story, that at the heart of it is this incredible sacrifice.
Yes
In reverse, isn’t it? And how wonderful that they’re remembered what more can be done to remember their legacy? I mean, I know you give a lot of talks and things, but you do something with the Monte San Martino Trust, don’t you?
Yes, I’m chair of a wonderful little charity that was set up in the 1990s by a group of former PoWs in Italy. And they all had had this extraordinary experience of being helped by impoverished, often very impoverished Italian people, by partisans. And you know, some of them too, by partisans, not just Italian partisans, but Jewish partisans and people from different parts of the world and they all wanted to find a way of just saying thank you to those brave people who helped their fathers and grandfathers escape on pain of death, really. And what we do as a charity, first of all, we have dedicated ourselves to commemorating and memorialising these incredible stories, as far and wide as we can.
We have an extraordinary archive of about 300 escape stories, all of which we’ve put on our website, all of which can be viewed and we are now supplementing those escape stories with the stories of the Italian helpers, including of course the Elfer family. And then what we also do is we raise money each year to bring about 40 young Italians from the villages that helped escape us over to the UK to learn English for a month and it’s just our little way of paying back in some small way to those incredibly brave families. We’ve also set up permanent memorials in both England and in Italy. And we’ve now reached an agreement, It’s a very exciting thing, you’ll be interested in this, Helen, with your great historical capacity and interest, we have persuaded the America National Archive, which has in its basement an extraordinary cash of about a one and a half million files, pieces of paper. And these are the files of Italian families who claimed compensation or some kind of reward for what they had done to help the allied escaping prisoners during the war.
They were all allowed to claim an Alexander certificate, which was a certificate of gratitude signed by General Alexander, but they were also allowed to claim small amounts of compensation for the losses they had suffered. And, of course, in the case of Elisa Elfer, she had suffered the loss of her two children, and these files were all buried away in the archives in America. We discovered their existence and we are now funding the resuscitation and the digitization of that extraordinary archive, which means, and let’s just be clear about that. This means that 60,000 Italian families at least, will be able to discover what their grandparents now did to help escapers, Allied escapers during the war.
It’s so exciting.
They’ll be able to find out those.
We’ll all over the moon about this.
I know 'cause we know so much about France, about the agents and the resistance movement in France and that’s great. There’s been a lot of concentration on that. But Italy, there have been some fabulous books written about Italy as by some of my contemporary historians. But you know, so much still to recover about Italy. We are going to allow time for questions in about 10 minutes. So if you want to think about questions you’d like to ask Sir Nick, then please do so. It leads me on to ask actually, you passionately believe, don’t you, that people should tell their family stories and so there must be lots within our audience, lots of people with very particular and important stories, which need to be told. So what would you say, what would your advice be?
Well, first of all, I mean obviously, if your relatives are still alive, just ask them the question. You know, I knew virtually nothing about my dad and God, I so regret that now. And I, and so many of my contemporaries say exactly the same that their fathers or/and mothers were reticent about what they did in the war and so the stories have often died with them. So yes, of course, if they’re still alive, ask them if they’re not, you can do so much now to track down the military career of your relatives online and with, you know, the national archive at Kew in Britain, the American archives held in Washington, the NARA and indeed all over the world, there are archives that exist, which contain the histories of soldiers. I mean, I was able with, for my father to get in touch with the Ministry of Defence, who let me have a very prosaic looking 2A four pages of a CV, his military CV.
I was able to discover exactly where he was on pretty much every day of the war using that CV that I got from the Ministry of Defence and spending hours in the National archives at Kew, looking at what are called the Commander’s War Diaries. Every commander in the field had to keep a daily diary of what his men did that day. It’s foot that these diaries are extraordinary. They were obviously written sort of late at night, often sort of sitting on a upturned oil can beside a little fire outside a tent. Oh, I haven’t written up the diary for today. What did we do, corporal, where did we go after that? And you know, these records still exist, often written in that’s about in pen ink. They are the most extraordinary documents and I was able to trace my dad through all of those, and that was really form the basis of the book that I eventually ended up writing.
So, yeah, start asking those questions and telling those stories because if our generation doesn’t do it, they’ll be gone.
They will be lost. You are absolutely right. It’s a moral imperative to our audience if you have those stories. And I often say to people, because I get asked you, oh, well I’m not sure if I can write the book. I’m sure you’ll agree, Sir Nick, just get the material down. Don’t worry if it’s not perfect, isn’t it? Don’t worry about being a final edit that’s publishable quantity, quality. Just make sure the stories are written down and then maybe someone else can take up the editing or something. But it’s important, isn’t it, to get the stories down, otherwise they really are lost.
And have a look in the attic as well. Maybe you’ve got a little cache of papers or a little diary hidden away that looked rather boring, but actually may well repay further examination.
I mean, reading the book your father’s war in itself without the whole escaping story. and that, that marvellous, incredible self-sacrifice by those two young Jewish teenagers, effectively, not more just out of teenage years, really. You know, he’s been involved in the commando raids in 1941 into the Islands in Norway. I mean, I find that extraordinary. I didn’t know when I was going to open the book and start reading that he had this heroic war in itself, and then having made it back to the UK after this time, six months on the run in Italy, having been saved by this brother and sister. He is back in the UK and he wants to go back on operations. He lands after D-Day fights all the way through to Germany. So that must have impacted on him.
So I want to ask you, and then we’re going to ask my last question before we look at our questions from our audience, did your dad ever attend any of the reunions? How do you think his war affected him? Because I know you have a very specific view we discussed before about the letter and he attended just one reunion, didn’t he?
- He did, he didn’t go to reunions as many of his colleagues did. And I think he didn’t because, you know, the war was an unhappy time for him, actually. You know, he lost several very close friends, right from the early stages, right during the Phoney War in northern France. He lost a whole group of friends who were blown up in a terribly unfortunate training accident. There were the two Elfers and then when he was captured trying to hold a ridge in Tunisia from a very determined counter attack by the Germans, a number of his men died and eventually my father was forced to surrender the trench. And it became very clear to me actually when I was looking through my dad’s papers, that this particular event, when he had lost so many men had haunted him because he’d written to Tom La Fontaine, the guy who painted that picture, he’d written to Tom to say, look, Tom, you know, do people blame me for having had to surrender that day? Do people blame me for having lost that battle on the ridge in Tunisia?
And Tom, who as I say had been his second in command, wrote back very quickly and said, Leslie, you absolutely must not think that everybody knows it’s completely impossible to hold a ridge against the determined opposition. You didn’t have sufficient ammunition. You were given very poor instructions. There weren’t enough men with you to do it effectively. You must not and should never blame yourself. And he wrote to me with a copy of this correspondence, 'cause I’d been in touch with him having found this letter from Tom to my father. I got in touch with Tom and he said, Nick, your father was completely wrong to be so tormented by that event. I want to tell you that he was an absolutely first class man and a first class soldier who had nothing to reproach himself with. And that was kind of comforting to me, but at the same time I thought, oh my God, my dad went through his life carrying these burdens of the Elfers and these men on the hill in North Africa.
I mean, I’ve been to all these places. I’ve been to the prison camp. I climbed the hill in North Africa where all those men died. I’ve seen their graves in the nearby war cemetery. I’ve been to Dunkirk. I’ve been to Normandy beaches. I’ve followed him through, haven’t yet, the final bit of the jigsaw is to follow him through to the German border. And yeah, it does, it really does disturb me he died still carrying all those memories, but he never shared them, and I dunno whether I could have done anything to help. And, and I do, of course, wonder what he would feel that I’ve now brought all those memories out into the, you know, clear light of day, how he feels about that? He’s right there on my shoulder and I do sometimes wonder what he’s thinking as all that. But I hope he’s pleased because he was a brave guy as were so many. He wasn’t by any means you unique, there was so many brave, brave men and women. But, so we’ve got some my dad, so he’s special to me.
So we’ve got some comments and questions. So Adrian says with you and looking forward, enjoying the presentation and Neville says, I’m very fortunate to have obtained a copy of Nick’s book, “Escaping With His Life.” And I recommend it highly, well done, Nick.
Hello Neville, very nice to to have you online, Neville. Neville was a great supporter of the British Red Cross when I was chief executive there, very generous supporter of the British Red Cross. And we worked together a a bit then and we’ve been in touch with each other since and I’m great. Great that you are online, Neville, that’s fantastic, hello.
Well, we are hoping it’s a bit of a spoiler alert. We are hoping, so Nick is going to come back and talk about his incredible career with, with Sue Ryder and also later of course with the Red Cross, et cetera. So yeah, we won’t do any spoilers about that. So question from Marilyn, actually, there’s a very well known company in the UK of Monumental Masons whose name is Elfes, are they the same family, do you know?
Well, I think not Marilyn. I mean the, the name Eugenio and Sylvia were Elfer, E-L-F-E-R. And I think the name you are referring to as E-L-F-E-S so far as I know there’s no relation. But you know, as we know, there was quite a substantial Jewish diaspora both before the war and possible to some extent during the war and then again after the war. So, you know, these families, like the Elfer family had a spread all over the world. And you know, they, of course, carry such a heavy burden of memory too. And I’m just pleased that I can say a little bit about these two very particular Jewish people who, who made such a difference and yeah, I’m keen to promote that story wherever I can.
Well, simply they, they did, they saved your father’s life, didn’t they?
They really did, yeah, I wouldn’t be here if wasn’t for them, there’s no question. He’d never have got through those lines and without their special knowledge of the countryside and the two of them.
Well, Barbara has said thank you for its most inspiring and Adrian says, Eric Newby’s book, “Love and War in the Apennines” is very good. And I know you recommend that book, don’t you?
Yeah, it a, I mean, Eric Newbie is the most fantastic travel writer. His famous book, “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush,” is an absolute classic and a must read, I would say. I was puzzling through this diary I mentioned of my father’s. And quite by chance I got Eric’s book, “Love and War in the Apennines” out of the local Library. It was just the next book on my list of Newby books that I wanted to read. And I got about 20 pages in and he started referring to incidents that I thought I recognised from my father’s diary. So I went back to the diary and, of course, sure enough, I realised that they must have been in the same prison camp. So Eric gave me the clue as to where exactly my father had been a prisoner. And I wrote to him and he came back with a lovely, “Oh, I remember your father. Well we used to gamble in the cellar together.”
They’d had quite a sort of gambling school going on and indeed in this prison camp they used to gamble on pooh sticks. There was a tiny little stream running through the camp and you know, being British, pooh sticks was a great sport. You know, you put a couple of twigs in the stream and see whose twig gets down to the bottom first. And I don’t think dad made much money either on the cards or the pooh sticks, but I’m sure he had a good time.
So we’ve got lots of comments today. So Linda’s asked about the name of the archives so that she can read some of the stories of the Italian people who save PoWs, like your father. So this is the National Archives in Washington. So Sir Nick, can you give us an idea, This is a project–
Well, I would say first of all, if you want to read it’s lots of escaper stories, have a look at the Monte San Martino website. And I’m sure Helen, we can flash that up, that up on the screen perhaps afterwards. I think I’ve sent a link–
Yes, we’ll send it out.
To the Montes San Martino website and you’ll find three or 400 escapers stories there and indeed stories of the helpers. And then yes, if you want more information, the National Archive at Kew in London has a vast archive of reports from escapers who got away in Italy. And then yes, the National Archive and Research Administration, that’s the American National Archives in Washington. Again, you’ll find them online and increasingly you will find on their website the stories of these brave Italians who helped escape us. And they’re amazing, they’re amazing files. I mean, some of them have got, they’re all original papers. Some of them have got little chits written on the backs of cigarette packets by PoWs saying, you know, Giovanni gave me a wonderful meal and he let me stay the night. You know, wonderful man.
These little sort of little chits to say, look, this man helped me and if there’s any compensation going at the end of the war, he should get it, very moving. It’s an interesting difference, isn’t it, from the UK because of course you are quite right. There are thousands of escaper files, of reports. When they make it back to the UK, they’re interrogated and/or questioned, we say interrogated, but they’re just questioned about how they escape. But the British Intelligence Services haven’t released the helpers files because they vowed never to release 'em. Now this, I don’t know whether this is going to change as a result of what’s happening in America, but the American archives have all the helpers files, which of course now your funding to have digitised. How long before that’s digitised already?
Well, there are, it’s some nearly a thousand boxes of files, but they’ve done the first box already and we haven’t paid them any money yet and they’re rolling through the second box now. But I mean, you will imagine each file comprises of numerous, quite fragile papers. They’ve been lying in a basement literally since the end of the second World War. The Brits didn’t want them, the war cabinet said, no, no dusty old papers, we don’t need those old chap. Let’s burn them, and they were about to set fire to them literally when the Americans said, well actually wait a minute, those might be useful those files, we’ve got plenty of room in Washington. We’ll take them. So thank goodness the dear Americans did that. And we can now get at them and reveal them to the world for the treasure trove they are and an incredible story of the bravery of thousands of Italian families who risked their lives to help allied escapers.
So maybe that’s a true story. We haven’t actually got any version of the this there’s not much you gave them up.
You are right, there’s not very much at Kew in terms of helper files. We’ve got somebody researching that now to try and make sure we’ve got the complete picture and–
Fantastic, so David, I mean David’s saying, my father served in the front lines at Anzio and wrote a book of his World War II experiences. David said, and thank you for sharing that. We’ve got comments coming in from all over the world. It’s wonderful, you’ve really engaged our audience, Jackie from Chicago says her father was a PoW Latino and the camp was sent, sorry, I’ve just… The camp was sent by the Germans to the Sudeten area. Of course, that was what happened, wasn’t it? The German–
Oh yes, I mean, I shouldn’t explained that of the sort of, I think about 50,000 PoWs initially got away, but they were very quickly picked up by the Germans, betrayed by the fascists, or else taken in by Italian families and just kind of disappeared into the Italian wilderness. Only about 12,000 finally made it home. And so, you know, the ones who got through did well, the ones who didn’t get through as our listener reports ended up in prison camp in Germany or Czechoslovakia or Poland and had a miserable two more years before the war finally finished.
I mean, there was concern wasn’t there by that branch of military intelligence, MI9 that was doing the escaping of that the prisoners would be, well, it, it was true the prisoners were transported, weren’t they transferred from some camps in Italy and elsewhere to Germany. And there was a concern that the Germans might, once they knew they were really losing the war, they might start shooting the prisoners. I mean, they didn’t, fortunately. But it was a very difficult time, wasn’t it? I mean, the chance of survival.
It was, of course, and I mean, thousands of Italians ended up in work camps in Germany and as, of course, did many of the Jews who had managed to survive in Italy throughout the war up 'til 1943. and were then very swiftly taken away by the Germans and, of course, that’s another whole story. I mean that’s the story of the treatment of Jewish people in Italy has been told a bit, but it hasn’t had the attention it deserves because it’s an interesting story. Many Italians treated their Jewish neighbours very generously and very well, but many didn’t and they had a difficult time in Italy. Jewish people could not own land, couldn’t work, get a good decent job. They had a, a tough time under the Mussolini regime. And that’s, I think perhaps a story that deserves more attention than it’s had.
Yeah, absolutely.
[Nicholas] Book for you there, Helen, maybe.
I Was just thinking I might pass you that one. But no, seriously, it’s a mixed history and we have this blanket theory that well likewise, you know, discoveries that we can’t go into now, that the Vatican did help some of the prisoners of war. It wasn’t as neutral or as a collaborators as we we believed, but then there was this dark side where there was collaboration. So I think in Italy there’s so much more research for our historians to do, to do a proper assessment and it is a mixed history. It’s not so black and white, there are grey areas
As, of course, it would’ve been here had we been occupied. I think it’s very easy for us to, you know, look down rather on the those who collaborated with the Nazi regime. But, of course, you know, if you wanted to work, if you wanted to be sure that your family was reasonably safe, you had very little alternative, unless you were really prepared to stick your neck out and risk your life. And so, you know, I think we would’ve had, there would’ve been exactly that same dichotomy between those who were prepared to fight and resist and those who preferred safety and in collaboration
Because it sort of helps us to understand, doesn’t it to root the sheer bravery, but we can’t say it’s anything of them, Just sheer bravery of those resistance fighters, incredible. We’ve got a time for just two or three more comments here or questions. So from Michael, a friend of mine in Israel, a former South African’s father was assisted by an Italian family when he’d escaped from a German PoW camp. And he wrote a long essay about his experiences and he was Isaac Richter from Durban in South Africa. So Michael, that’s lovely, thank you. And Janet would like to share the fact that her beloved mother, her late mother, Theodore Ginsburg in Toronto was only 21 years old and served in Bletchley Park, the code breaking side sworn to secrecy. And, of course, like your father’s never talked about her war, despite their request to do so. So she says, thank you for the fascinating presentation.
I’ve been to Bletchley Park. I was very interested in Bletchley Park because when my father was one of the first to volunteer for the commandos and he went on the first commando raid of the war, which was the raid on the Lofoten Islands off the northwest coast of Norway, where their mission was to destroy the fish oil factories, which were providing oil for the German munitions and armaments. And while they were there, they discovered an enigma machine. This is the Nazi code making machine and they brought that back to the UK to Bletchley Park where for a period of several months the Codebreakers at Bletchley Park were able to read all the movements of German shipping all over the world thanks to this enigma machine that was captured in Norway on that commando raid. So I have a great fondness for Bletchley Park and it is a fascinating place to visit.
Yeah, if you haven’t had a chance to visit and you’re in the UK already or you’re visiting, please do. So someone’s asked here, yes, Shelly’s asked, how old was your father when he started the war?
So he was 28 when he was relatively elderly actually for that time. I mean, so many of them signed up in their sort of very late teens and early twenties. Dad was 28 when he signed up. He joined the TA, I mean, long before the war started. And he signed up literally on the first day he could and was immediately started training and was quickly out with the British Expeditionary Force into Northern France, during the Phoney War and then had the horrendous experience that they all had at Dunkirk. And I think, I mean, just to sort of sidetrack slightly, that was the worst time for me in writing the book was A, researching kind of exactly what happened happened at Dunkirk. And it’s not really like those rather romanticised films that we’ve seen.
It was hell yeah, it was absolute hell and having researched that and got that full picture in my head and actually been out to Dunkirk with one of the people who served with my father and heard his stories, just imagining dad in the middle of that hell was incredibly difficult. And for two or three days I can remember just sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper just not knowing where to start, and absolutely not understanding how anyone could have come back from that experience with their sanity. It was awful. The condition, particularly in the early days, a lot of people broke into the cafes along the waterfront and got drunk. Discipline pretty much broke down in the first couple of days at Dunkirk. And it wasn’t till the Navy came in with the ships coming in the coming in the little, the smaller craft coming in off the big warships moored off the coast.
And you know, actually, in order to avoid their little rowing boats or whatever they were lifeboats being overwhelmed, actually had to shoot people just to restore discipline on the beaches and that didn’t last long. And I mean, god knows, you can understand how it might have happened, but those very disciplined long cues of people that we see up to their necks in water, that only happened later on when disciplines fully restored and yeah, people started behaving like British people really, and obeying orders. It was a terrible, terrible time. And I have so much admiration for anybody who survived that.
We’ve got a comment from Rita who said, in memory of my beloved late parents, Holocaust survivors and resistance fighters. Rita, thank you for sharing that. There are so many comments here. Just want to ask one final question here, or comment from Adrian. I befriended a German Jewish lady whose family was saved by living in a farmer’s hut near Aspio Panchano She told me that there were— Helen, let’s call it please.
I wouldn’t pass as an Italian on the run, would I?
No.
Thank you. I knew I would’ve problem with that. She told me there were more Jews in hiding in this area and the local Italians never informed the Germans of those Jews that were in hiding.
That’s true. You know, so many Italians were indeed bravely defended the Jewish people in the area. And it’s great that so many did and sad that some weren’t able to.
And our final comment question for today, Jean says, my father who served in Italy, north Africa, ended up in Germany driving also would not talk about his war, but only once at their diamond wedding did he talk about how my mother had helped him to get, get used to living a normal life. Thanks for your inspiring talk and glad to reconnect.
This is Yeah, that’s interesting, it’s interesting Jean, 'cause my mother knew nothing at all about my father’s war history.
I was going to ask you that.
She was astonished when I started producing all this information, absolutely astonished.
Well Sir Nick, thank you for such well a really inspirational time for us on Lockdown University. You’ve given us so much to think about and the memory of your dear father, such an incredibly brave man, but also to the memory of those, the wonderful brother and sister who gave their life so that others could live. I mean it’s an incredible story, thank you so much. And I do urge you here, please do get hold of a copy of the book and read, it is totally inspirational Please tell others because it’s a story which needs to be told. We need to understand that there were Jewish resistance fighters who made the ultimate sacrifice to save others. So Nick, one last word before we say goodbye.
Yes, thank you. I mean all the proceeds from the sale of that book go to the Montes San Martino Trust, which is doing such wonderful work to promote the story of the Italians who helped escaper in the second World War. I’ve been so grateful to you, Helen, for this lovely opportunity to tell my dad’s story and thank you to everybody all over the world for listening. It’s been great to be with you. And I can see there are lots of really interesting stories coming up on the chat and I hope yeah, let’s keep talking about this 'cause we shouldn’t forget these stories. It was an extraordinary time and we’ve all enjoyed the freedoms we’ve enjoyed, thanks to our brave forefathers.