Forgotten war heroes who kept Britain WÔeWj
shiva for her husband. Pressman magically appeared to attend the ceremony in person.
Some Jews who served in the Merchant Navy were escapees from Nazism. Charles Schaja Stenham belonged to Zionist youth groups in Leipzig and Dresden and fled Germany in July 1936 for kibbutz Degania (Aleph) in Palestine. He served on the ship MV Verbania and visited Jewish internees in Mauritius — they were refugees from Captain Moshe Abramski
the Patria, disastrously blown up by the Haganah in Haifa harbour, after the British had refused to allow them into Palestine.
Prisoner 82512, his number tattooed on his arm, served as a doctor at Auschwitz where the Nazis needed his medical expertise. Before the war, he was Dr Karel Sperber from Czechoslovakia. Escaping the Nazis in 1939, he joined the Merchant Navy as the ship’s purser on the SS Automedon. It was sunk and Sperber eventually found himself in German internment camps where he operated under the most primitive of conditions. He was credited with saving the lives of thousands of British prisoners when a typhus epidemic broke out in Stalag XB in the summer of 1941.
He survived Auschwitz and was awarded the OBE in 1946 for his services as a PoW doctor.
Henry Sless was born in the Gorbals in Glasgow, the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe. A marine engineer by profession, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery in bringing the badly damaged SS Ohio to port from Gibraltar while under constant attack from the Luftwaffe. He was made an MBE (military) for staying at his post aboard the tanker, MV San Cipriano, on the Murmansk run.
Also from the Gorbals, Barnet Hanniford was a gunner aboard a DEMS (defensively equipped merchant ship) and is believed to have been awarded the BEM (British Empire Medal) for courage. In May 1943, he was serving on the SS Kanbe, carrying copper from Alexandria to the
UK, when a U-boat torpedoed the
Barnet Hanniford with his children. He died when his ship was torpedoed ship off Liberia. The vessel went down within a couple of minutes. Most of the crew including Hanniford were killed. He left behind two young daughters who were brought up by his parents Merchant shipman Captain Moshe Abramski of Palestine received the MBE for his gallantry in unloading fuel and ammunition from his ship under fire from Stuka fighter planes while docked in Tobruk, in Libya. Churchill wrote that “the only thing that really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril”. Many who waved their fist at Hitler paid with their lives— and their heroism was remembered privately only by family and friends. Primo Levi reminded us that those today “who live secure in your warm house” have an obligation to recall what happened so long ago and to pass these stories on to those who come after us. This is why Mr Sugarman’s book, and works like it, are so important.
Alec Pressman’s family were incorrectly told he had drowned — he turned up at his own shiva’
‘Jews in the Merchant Navy in the Second World War’ is published by Vallentine Mitchell Colin Shindler is a historian. His book ‘The Hebrew Republic: Israel’s Return to History’ is published by Rowman and Littlefield