In September 1943 when I was in the RAF, and posted to Canada via New York, to continue my flying training, I was witness to a dramatic incident.
We were crossing the Atlantic on the Queen Mary, then the largest ship afloat, weighing over 80,000 tons. The QM was a very valuable weapon to the Allies, as it was equipped as a troopship, and when necessary could carry as many as 20,000 troops at a time, although on this occasion there were only about 2,000 of us.
This was not the height of the U-boat war, but thousands of tons of shipping were being sunk every month with enormous loss of life, and the ship was known to be one of the prime German targets. Nevertheless the QM was so enormous and fast, besides being protected with state of the art weaponry, I don’t remember feeling very vulnerable, although being very young in years might have had something to do with it.
On board as well as the British was a mixed bag of allied servicemen, Free French, Belgians, Norwegians Dutch, in a variety of uniforms as well as several hundred German paratroopers still in their paratroopers’ overalls and helmets, recently captured in Tunisia. They were escorted by a small US Army unit, on their way to POW camps in America.
The Germans were elite troops and from their arrogant and aggressive demeanour seemed to feel this was a temporary inconvenience which would end shortly when they had won the war. They were locked in the capacious hold of the ship.
The ship had a small well equipped synagogue, seating about 40 or 50 persons, a left- over from its peacetime voyages. As it was Rosh Hashanah, all the Jewish servicemen aboard were excused most duties, and we all met up in the little synagogue to celebrate the New Year.
We were lucky to have a generous extra supply of tinned food including gefilte fish, pickled cucumbers, wine and other un-military goodies supplied by the American Jewish Congress. In short we had a homely celebration in a potentially dangerous situation.
A short informal religious service was conducted each morning by the senior officer, a US Army captain, who had some idea of the procedures, and we then got down to the serious business of demolishing the rather splendid kosher extra rations. After a couple of days the little hall got a bit untidy and littered.
The US captain promptly went down to the hold and dragged out half a dozen of the elite Nazis, collected scrubbing brushes and other cleaning equipment, brought them to the upper deck and made them scrub the synagogue out, polish everything in sight to his satisfaction and then repeat the performance.
This went on twice a day until we arrived at New York. They were literally on their knees scrubbing around our feet, and those unrepentant thugs knew very well what they were cleaning. We made it clear that we were Jews in uniform, and the situation on mainland Europe was dramatically reversed for a few precious hours.
I still remember vividly the vicious looks they gave us. One was scrubbing on his hands and knees around my feet where I was sitting. Our eyes met for a moment, and I felt a twinge of fear which I hope I concealed. None of them uttered a word of complaint. It was a satisfying thought that in 1943 we had made some Nazi paratroopers scrub and thoroughly clean a synagogue. Most of us were barely 20.
But sadly we knew little then of the horrors that were eventually to come to light in Europe. Our incident in mid-Atlantic seems now very trivial by comparison. At the time it certainly was not.
