TV STAR TALKS
IT was nearly 80 years ago but Joanna Millan remembers being terrified by the deafening noise of the engines as the RAF airlifted her to freedom aged three.
She and her five brothers and sisters, all aged three and four, were among over 300 Jewish orphans flown to the Lake District in converted Stirling bombers at the end of the Second World War.
The emaciated survivors of Nazi death camps in eastern Europe were given new lives and dubbed the Windermere Children – the title of a 2020 BBC film about their story.
Joanna, 81, says: “I only have flashes of memory but we weren’t told where we were going. Our understanding was that if you left the camp it was bad news – nobody ever came back.”
After being adopted in England, and renamed from Bela to Joanna, she went on to marry and have three children and eight grandchildren. And she has formed a special bond with TV star Rob Rinder – whose grandad, Morris Malenicky, was also flown here on one of the bombers in August 1945.
HEALING
Rob told Morris’s harrowing story on Who Do You Think You Are? in 2018.
Now, he will join forces with Joanna for Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27. “Joanna is family. We are all family,” says Rob, speaking to her over Zoom from Malaysia, where he is filming his Amazing Hotels show.
“So many of them – very young children like Joanna and others, older, like my grandfather – had no family or little surviving family. So they forged, it seems, this bond of trauma, to be alongside one another.
“Those bonds began the work of healing. For me, it’s a spiritual complexion and connection between the survivors.
“Because they had experienced so much trauma and loss, they chose to live their life in hope.
“When that’s the foundation for families over the years, it’s like being among a family that’s even richer than your own.”
Both Joanna and Morris ended up in Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia before it was liberated by the Russians in April 1945.
During years of persecution, they had starved in ghettos and seen their parents and most of their relatives and friends murdered by the Nazis.
Polish-born Morris was a starving slave labourer making tank shells for the German army before ending up in Theresienstadt – and had to lie about his age to escape to the UK like Joanna.
He went on to marry and have children and grandchildren, and died aged 78 in 2001. Joanna, living in a selfcontained flat in a Jewish-run Hertfordshire care home, counts her blessings daily. “In a way, it’s like we’ve been gifted these extra years,” she explains. “We shouldn’t have survived. Yet 70 years on, we’re living a full life. I think of each year as a gift, so we should enjoy it.” Smiling in agreement, Rob says: “There’s a word in Yiddish, ‘davka’, which means ‘to be contrary’. You’ll never meet people who have grabbed back the pen in life from the narrative that others have written for them with more force or power. It makes you feel more profoundly hopeful than you’ll ever be among any other group.” Morris once told Rob that to be in Windermere was “as if he’d come from