High street retailer who helped liberate Belsen
Bernard Levy 1926-2022
In peacetime, Bernard Levy would not have been regarded as soldier material, said the Jewish News. At just seven stone and standing 5ft 3½in, he was 18, severely asthmatic, and had “only one good eye”. But it was April 1944; the Armed Forces could not afford to be choosy; and a few weeks after D Day, Levy found himself heading across the Channel with the Royal Army Service Corps. Having landed at Arromanches-les-Bains, his unit pushed through France and Belgium into northern Germany, and a year later, they arrived, war-weary, at Bergen-Belsen. The concentration camp had been liberated a few days earlier; typhoid was rampant; most of its 60,000 surviving inmates were only clinging to life; and all around, thousands of bodies lay unburied. So horrific were the scenes that greeted them, some of the British troops were physically sick; Levy, who was given the task of “sorting the living from the dead”, was so traumatised, it would be 70 years before he was able to talk about it. “It’s strangled me for all these years,” he told the Holocaust Educational Trust in 2015. “I was a soldier... Really, my view of a liberator wasn’t what I was: I was a kid, 19 years of age.”
Yet in the 18 months he worked on the relief operation, there were positives of sorts, said The Times. As well as the deaths, he witnessed a kind of rebirth, as Belsen’s inmates – many of whom stayed there for months after the War ended – began to recover. “He talked about people coming back from the dead, that people looked like skeletons, but he saw them gradually come back to life,” recalled his daughter Judith. Survivors started organising cultural activities; a school opened; babies were born; and for a period after the War, there were around 20 weddings a day at Belsen. Levy, who is believed to have been the camp’s last surviving British-Jewish liberator, was invited to many of them.
After being demobilised in 1947, Levy returned to his home town of Hull, to work at his father’s menswear store. Legend has it that one day it received in error a delivery of over-sized men’s suits. Instead of sending them back, Levy advertised them in the Daily Express. They sold out so fast, he ordered more. As a result of this, he started a company selling large-sized clothes via mail order which, in the 1970s, became the High and Mighty chain. At its height, it had 40 stores in Britain and beyond, though most of its business was still done by post. “Fat men don’t like turning up for fittings,” he explained. “So their wives send us the measurements and ask us to reply by plain envelope.”
Bernard Levy was born in Hull to parents of Lithuanian descent, and educated at Hull Grammar School. His walk to school took him past a British Union of Fascists building bearing “a huge poster of a hooked-nose Jewish banker”. In the late 1930s, boys from his school went on a cycling holiday to Germany, and “came back with swastikas on their bicycles and spat on me and my brother as we were walking home”. After the War, he married his wife Doreen, who survives him with their two daughters. She helped him run High and Mighty; and it remained a family business until its sale in 2009. Six years later, aged 88, Levy returned to the site of Belsen, to “say goodbye”. In a moving interview, he said that he’d not been a hero, just “a boy doing a job”; and he worried that he could have done it better – that he could have shown more humanity, as he moved and disinfected the bodies of the living and the dead. “Did I feel tremendous compassion for them? I don’t know if I did or not. And did I feel enough compassion; and was there anything else I could have done?”