Uncle Sam’s treacherous journey to Britain
Miranda Levy recalls how her uncle, just a young boy, was freed from the Nazis and given a new life by a Jewish aid programme
When I think of Uncle Sam, I remember a big gappy smile, the smell of tobacco – and a Polish accent full of laughter, which belied the trauma he had been through.
Samuel Cooper (né Kuczer) was my mum’s sister’s husband. He died in February 1978, when I was nineyears-old. I always knew Uncle Sam had survived the Holocaust, but had never asked too many questions until last summer, when, apropos of nothing, I asked my 86-year-old Aunty Valerie to tell me about his life so I could pass the story on to my children.
She told me he was one of “the boys” – 732 children who were brought to England by the Central British Fund (now World Jewish Relief) in autumn 1945.
Last week, I heard about a one-off drama coming up on BBC Two: The
Windermere Children, starring Iain Glen and Romola Garai – a beautiful and heartbreaking film about a coachload of Holocaust survivors arriving in the Lake District at the end of the war, and their struggles to adapt to freedom after years of trauma. I made some investigations, and discovered that Uncle Sam was part of the same aid programme.
As well as Windermere, the children were also sent to Northern Ireland, Scotland and Southampton, where my uncle ended up.
The rescue happened after Leonard Montefiore, a leading figure in the Anglo-jewish Association, persuaded the British government to accept a number of children aged eight to 16. The Home Office agreed on condition that the funds were found by the Jewish community.
However, most of the boys (there were only 80 girls) eventually made their way to London. It was at the Woodberry Down Centre in Stamford Hill that young men, mainly from Poland, made lifelong friendships. The group included Sir Ben Helfgott, one of the “stars” of The Windermere Children, and my Uncle Sam.
“Benny” Helfgott, as my aunt remembers him, is the chairman of the ’45 Aid Society for Holocaust survivors. He is 90 now, and not in the best of health. On the website www.45aid.org, he writes: “Our childhood years were spent in the ghettos, in hiding and in the concentration camps of Occupied Europe. Our teenage years were spent coming to terms with great loss, coupled with a new beginning in a new country. Adulthood offered us independence. The experience of friendship and brotherhood is our strength.”
Helfgott was imprisoned in a ghetto in the Polish town of Piotrków, before being sent to Buchenwald and Theresienstadt camps. Uncle Sam, who was born in 1931, started his years of captivity in the Hrubieszow ghetto, also in Poland. Hrubrieszow was invaded by the Nazis on September 15 1939, and a series of pogroms immediately began before a ghetto was set up in early 1940.
Sam was only nine when his ordeal started, and just 13 at the end of the war.
“Everyone around him in Hrubrieszow was killed: he didn’t know why,” says my aunt. “Only he and his mother survived.” There was an uprising in 1942, in which 1,343 Jews were sent to the gas chambers at Belzec. Separately, 1,800 Jews deemed fit for work were sent to Budzyn labour camp – Sam and his mother appear to have been among them. They were spared, according to Sam’s friend Romek Weinstock, because they had small hands, ideal for making parts for fighter planes.
At some point Sam and his mother were sent to the Wieliczka salt mine, near Krakow. Then they were separated. Sam, then not even in his teens, somehow survived a “death march” to Flossenbürg camp in Bavaria, a journey of 457 miles. His mother was sent to Auschwitz; my aunt tells me “there was a rumour that some [German] prisoners in Flossenbürg were involved in the attempt on Hitler’s life”. This was the failed July 20 1944 plot led by Claus von Stauffenberg, which led to the execution of almost 5,000 people.
Amazingly, Sam survived this ordeal, too, helped by the fact he was blond, blue-eyed and had picked up some German over the years. He was finally liberated in the summer of 1945 by the Americans. His mother had died three days before the end of the war.
Sam and other Jewish survivors, including many of those who would become the Windermere children, were housed in Indersdorf: a 12thcentury monastery adapted into a displaced children’s home by the United Nations.
After being sent to Southampton, Sam moved to London. He went to school but had poor English; Aunty Valerie tells me he stayed with a religious family in Stoke Newington, north London, for a while but they wanted to cut his curly hair. “Sam didn’t like restrictions. So he left.”
He started an apprenticeship with Moss Bros, showing an aptitude for tailoring. When it became clear in 1948 there was going to be a war of independence for the fledgling state of Israel, Sam and friends went over to fight, via Marseille and Greece. Only 16, and not very tall, he lied about his age and got a job driving lorries full of ammunition.
“They had to put a wooden block on the pedals so he could reach them,” says Aunty Valerie. Eventually, he came back to the UK hoping for a visa to America, then he met my aunt at a dance in November 1953, when he was 21 and she was 19. “Ronnie Scott was playing,” Valerie recalls. “Sam was dancing with another girl. He smiled at me over her shoulder, and well, that was it.”
The couple married in March 1955, opening a factory in Upper Clapton, moving later to Shoreditch and eventually taking over a menswear store in Kilburn. They had two children. “Sam was a lively person who brought joy to everyone,” says Valerie. “He used to say: ‘the worst thing has happened to me: nothing else could be as bad.’”
Valerie and Sam remained close to the rest of “the boys” including Ben Helfgott, who went on to represent Great Britain in weightlifting at the Olympic Games in 1956 and 1960. Sam and other survivors met up often, usually to play golf or cards.
In the following years, the ’45 Aid Society helped “the boys” stay in touch, originally raising money for those refugees who were struggling to make ends meet. When it transpired that most of them made independent successes of their lives, the society started to collect money for other charities. Today it raises funds to support Holocaust education through public speaking and the delivery of survivors’ testimonies to schools, universities and institutions.
Sadly, my Uncle Sam died of a heart attack in February 1978, just before his 23rd wedding anniversary. He was only 46. According to those who knew him, he never showed a moment’s self-pity. Says fellow traveller Harry Spiro, now 90. “Sam never talked about what happened to him. None of us did. We had all been through some terrible things,
The Windermere Children is on BBC Two on Monday Jan 27 at 9pm
‘Everyone around him was killed: he didn’t know why’