Jewish Nonagenarians review: ‘triumph over adversity’

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At first glance the lives of these 12 Jewish nonagenarians seem very ordinary. They were mostly men and women who living quite, unassuming lives in places such as Southend, Brighton and north London after working as dentists, journalists and people who dedicated much of their lives to Jewish charities. But in no time, you realise they lived extraordinary lives, full of the most dramatic and terrible adventures. Their stories are told clearly and very movingly by Lawrence Collin. As he writes, “Their stories demonstrate the triumph of spirit over adversity.”

These interviewees fall into two groups. The first group were born in England though that did not spare some of them dramatic experiences during the Second World War. David Arkush (1914-2015) was born in Glasgow and trained as a dentist in Liverpool. But he was captured in Singapore in 1942 and spent the rest of the war in the Japanese POW camp where the bridge of the River Kwai was built. Camp conditions were terrible and the prisoners were often brutally treated by the Japanese. Towards the end of his life, he returned twice, stopping to place a stone on the headstone of the Jewish dead and to say Kaddish. Mordaunt Cohen (1916-2019) served in Burma and didn’t return to England until November 1945 where he lived a long and peaceful life.

Donald Zec (1917-2021), the son of Russian immigrants, went on to become one of the most famous journalists in post-war Britain, interviewing everyone from The Beatles to Hollywood stars such as Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando and Orson Welles. He also wrote numerous books about the most famous film stars and singers of his time. Michael Sherbourne (1917-2014) was also the son of immigrants and moved to Palestine in 1939 but returned to England ten years later because of his wife’s ill health.

The second group of interviewees were Jewish refugees and, sadly, theirs are the most traumatic stories. Scarlett Epstein (1922-2014) was born Trude Grunwald in Vienna and had an extraordinary escape from Austria after the Anschluss, travelling to the UK via Albania, Italy and Germany. She never saw her uncle and his family again and her paternal grandmother died in the camps. Judy Benton (1921-2022) was born near Dresden but managed to escape to England with the Kindertransport. Both her parents and younger sister were killed at Auschwitz. Harry Grenville (born Heinz Greilsamer, 1926-2019) was also a Kindertransport refugee. Both his parents were killed in the Holocaust.

Gena Turgel (1923-2018) was born in Krakow, the youngest of nine children. Her sister-in-law and her child were marched away from the ghetto where they were living and “we never saw or heard from them again”. The child’s father was killed trying to escape from the ghetto. In 1942 the survivors were marched to the Plaszov labour camp, made famous by Schindler’s List, where her sister Miriam was shot. Gena later survived Auschwitz and then Bergen-Belsen, where her future husband was a British soldier who helped liberate the camp.

Despite these terrible experiences, these refugees went on to achieve so much. Epstein became a distinguished anthropologist and was awarded the OBE for “services rendered to rural and women’s development”; Benton spent many years working for World Jewish Relief; Suzanne Perlman (1923-2020), who had fled Hungary and then France for the Dutch West Indies, became a gifted artist; Grenville became a science teacher at several leading schools, including Repton.

Little did Collin know when he knocked on the doors of unassuming homes around the country that he would hear such extraordinary stories. We should be indebted to him for such a powerful book of testimonies.