The day started like any other for 19-year-old Millie Henderson. She was in the kitchen getting ready for work when at 7.21am life changed forever.
“There was a very very bright flash and that was it. No noise, no nothing,” recalled Millie, who is now 94 and goes by her married name, Halpern.
She is one of the few living survivors of the penultimate V2 bombing on London in 1945, which killed 134 people, 120 of whom were Jewish. A further 49 people were seriously injured.
“My mother wasn’t very well. She was sitting up in bed and my father was taking her a cup of tea,” Mrs Halpern told the JC.
“All I saw was a flash. I shouted for my father... I wanted to come out of the kitchen and go into the hall to my mother’s bedroom… but there was no hall. There was flat after flat after flat and they had just been taken down to the ground.
“My father came running out but there was nothing there. It was just piles and piles of rubble,” said the great-grandmother of five.
The lifeless body of Annie Henderson, Mrs Halpern’s 39-year-old mother, was pulled from the rubble hours later.
Today marks the 75th anniversary of the tragic event which devastated dozens of families in morning before first Seder night.
But there will be no ceremony to mark the occasion. Few survivors remain, with many now too frail too attend — even before the coronavirus hit. In addition some, like Mrs Halpern, are reluctant to return to the East End following the “disgraceful” reception they received when they revisited the reconstructed apartment block on the 60th anniversary.
Back in 2005, the assembled crowd — which included then MP Oona King and Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, whose maternal grandmother perished in the attack — were met with verbal abuse from some of the block’s young Muslim residents, who went on to pelt the elderly and disabled attendees with stones and eggs.
The scene could not have been further from the place so many remembered as their home and the heart of the Jewish East End.
Named after the social reformer Mary Hughes who lived locally, Hughes Mansions were built by Stepney Borough Council in 1928. There were three identical five-storey blocks with 30 flats each, all with their own bathroom — considered the height of luxury.
When the rocket crashed into Hughes Mansions, it razed the central block and left more than 30 children among the dead. Among them were 21 members of the Brady Club and Settlement, the Jewish boys and girls clubs. Hours later a woman was killed when another V2 bomb — the last of the war — hit south London.
The Hughes Mansions disaster was not reported until a month after the event due the wartime news blackout.
A reporter for the News Chronicle attended the scene and published an extensive account on April 27. The unnamed writer said: “The site was like a madman’s dream. A huge pit ringed by ripped open homes.”
In 1952, Mrs Halpern moved back into the renovated Hughes Mansions with her husband and two-year-old daughter Annette, whom she had named after her mother. The family stayed there until Annette, who now lives close to her mother in Redbridge, was 16.
Though born after the war, Annette — now Kirsh — says the events of March 1945 “have always been there in the background,” a sentiment her mother shares.
“The impact has never left me no matter what age I am. It’s tragic, I lost my mother, my home and I was penniless… it was absolutely terrible,” recalled Mrs Halpern.
Barry Mordsley never had the opportunity to meet his grandparents — Abraham and Annie Mordsky. The 73-year-old from north London told the JC: “My father was in charge of civil defence for Stepney and he found their bodies. He never talked about it. The only thing he did say was that they were intact when he found them.”
The episode is all the more heartbreaking because the war was in its final throes. Auschwitz had been liberated two months earlier and VE day came within weeks.
Some of those who perished included soldiers who had fought on the battlefields — only to die while on leave for Passover.
Clive Bettington, chairman of the Jewish East End Celebration Society (JEECS), told the JC of one such case. “Gerald Mantus was a pilot fighting in Burma. He came back to visit his father. Having fought all through the war he came back and died in a block of flats in the East End.”
Mr Bettington had organised the 2005 event and continues to lead walking tours to the area, including Hughes Mansions — but with police protection. “Quite a lot of people have insulted me but we have the right to go there and pay tribute to people who died."
Mr Bettington has been fundraising without success for a new memorial at Hughes Mansions. The existing memorial is, he says, “rusting over. It isn’t a suitable tribute to the 144 people who died,” he said, adding that something more permanent would only cost around £3,000.
“It was probably the worst civil disaster in the Second World War perhaps after Bethnal Green. Those people deserve to be remembered.”
To support the memorial, visit www.jeecs.org.uk
