Family buries a lost son, 75 years after jungle tragedy
THE NEPHEW of a Second World War gunner whose plane crashed on Mount Kenya 75 years ago has said that his family could finally complete their mourning and bury him after hearing only last month that his remains had been discovered.
The bodies of rear gunner Simon Eliastam and his three South African Air Force colleagues were found by a jungle logger in 2002. The following year, a British Army expedition was dispatched to the forest, dug out the remains of the four and placed them in plastic bags under the wing of their Bristol Blenheim bomber, where they have stayed until now.
Inexplicably, Simon’s nephew, Dr Michael Eliastam of Massachusetts, USA, was only informed of the find when he opened an email from the South African War Graves Commission early last month.
Speaking to the Michael said he was “stunned and became emotional. I still am. I still choke up thinking about it. It feels a little bit like delayed mourning.”
It is hoped that Simon’s remains will be retrieved in October. The burial is scheduled for January at the base of the mountain in the Nanyuki War Cemetery.
All four crew members will be buried in one grave, with four headstones. “Ours will have a Magen David on the headstone,” said Michael, adding he would “absolutely” be attending both events.
Simon’s plane crashed on July 23, 1942, the day after his 21st birthday.
Michael said the fact that his remains were never found “destroyed his mother. She was already highly neurotic and terrified of the world, having run twice, from the Commu-
nists and Bolsheviks, and then come to South Africa. I think it was hard, they didn’t have money and then she lost her beautiful son on his 21st birthday. She never recovered.
“I think they knew he’d crashed, but they always thought he’d walk through the door one day. To my mother he was the perfect brother, she adored him and then he was gone.”
Simon, who was born in Latvia, came to Cape Town in 1930 at the age of nine.