Or how she found her aunt at Auschwitz
and then again on a “death march” , or
forced evacuation, to Bergen-Belsen in
Germany. “People died on the way,” she
says. “Eventually the guards became so
hungry and lethargic that they didn’t have
the energy to shoot people.” She discovered
her aunt again at Belsen. “She was in a hut
sleeping on the floor,” Rachel recalls. “I went
in with her as I couldn’t walk any more.
One night I woke up and she was dead.
They threw her out on a heap with all the
other bodies.”
Eventually the Nazi guards fled, leaving
some 60,000 starving prisoners to be
liberated by British soldiers, many of whom
were astonished to discover the horrors
within. The pictures of Belsen’s liberation
on April 15, 1945, were the British public’s
first introduction to the true nature of the
Holocaust. On that day Richard Dimbleby
made a famous radio broadcast from the
camp. It was a searing piece of journalism,
yet not only was Dimbleby’s initial report
rejected by his bosses at the BBC — until
he threatened to resign — but the word
“Jews” was removed from his broadcast. The
British establishment wasn’t comfortable
with particularising what had happened in
the Holocaust. Dimbleby’s son Jonathan
speculated in 2015 that the BBC was
concerned at the time that mentioning
one group of people and not others “might
seem biased or wrong”.T
his ambivalence about
discussing the reality of the
Holocaust continued after
the war. The subject was not
ignored — attention was
paid to Nazi atrocities and
the depths that the Germans sank to. But
it was subsumed into a greater narrativeabout Britain alone, the finest hour, the
Blitz spirit and the triumph of the few.
“Throughout the war there had been an
emphasis on not mentioning Jewishness,”
says Tony Kushner, professor of history at
Southampton University. “There was a fear
of raising antisemitism in Britain.” During
the war the memory of Oswald Mosley’s
Blackshirts was still fresh. Afterwards it
didn’t fit neatly into the narrative of Britain
suffering and grinding its way to victory to
focus on the specifics of Jewish trauma.
Nor did Britain open its doors widely to
Holocaust survivors, allowing only a fewthousand in, mostly children, echoing
the Kindertransport operation that brought
10,000 Jewish child refugees to Britain
from Nazi-controlled territory in 1938-40.
“[Most] Jews were not welcomed,”
Kushner says. “They were not seen as
desirable immigrants.”
Manfred came to Britain only because
his father, Baruch, had fled here from their
home town of Kassel, in Germany, just
before the war began. Baruch had been given
a visa in Berlin by Frank Foley, a British
spy and passport officer who operated a
clandestine operation to help Jews escape.
Foley promised to send the rest of the
family in Baruch’s wake, but then war
broke out and their hopes were dashed.
In September 1946 Manfred and his
mother, Rosa, arrived at Victoria station in
London to meet their father, who had spent
six years of the war not knowing if they
were dead or alive. He went to the wrong
platform to meet their train and so,
dejectedly, made his way back to Stamford
Hill, only to find his long-lost family had
arrived and were waiting for him there.
Rachel was able to come to Britain as
one of “the Boys”. This was the name given
to a group of just over 700 children, mostly
male, who survived the Holocaust and were
brought to Britain after the war. The plan,
which was financed by Jewish charitable
donations rather than the government,
was supposed to bring 1,000 children over
but raised enough money for only 700 or
so. Rachel and her brother Chaskel were
two of that group. Separated at the entrance
to Auschwitz, the two orphans had been
reunited when Chaskel tracked Rachel down
to a family friend’s farm outside Bratislava
after the war. Rachel first arrived in Millisle,
Northern Ireland, in 1946 before eventually
settling in Bromley, south London.The word Auschwitz
barely appeared in
British newspapers
for 30 years after the
war. The public wasn’t
hugely interested
Above: children liberated from Auschwitz,
February 1945. Top right: Rachel Levy,
91, spent decades unable to discuss her
captivity there and at Bergen-Belsen. Top
left: her portrait by Stuart Pearson WrightLAURA PANNACK FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE, GETTY IMAGES
The Sunday Times Magazine • 23