(Vol. 70, No. 2, Rosh Hashanah 2015)
Editor’s Note: This year, the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II is, in all likelihood, the last significant milestone in which those who took part in the war will still be with us to tell their stories. In the course of planning this special SA Jewry and World War II issue, therefore, it was decided to conduct interviews with some of the remaining Jewish participants. The editor thanks all those who assisted him in compiling this feature.
A forthcoming book on the eminent lawyer, Zionist leader and human rights activist Advocate Jules Browde will include a photograph of the 6th South African Armoured Division victory parade that took place in Monza, Italy, on 14 May 1945. Printed on the side of one of the leading tanks is the legend ‘Flippie’, which is how Browde is able to identify the tank’s officer as himself. The name was placed there by Dudley ‘Flippie’ Fynn, Browde’s predecessor as forward observation officer, who had been killed many months before.
Browde’s participation in the parade was the culmination of five and a half years in the South African Artillery, during which he served in Abyssinia, North Africa and Italy. He was involved in some of the hardest fighting in the Italian theatre, from the battle of Monte Cassino through to the final surrender of the German forces in Italy at the end of April 1945.
At the time of the outbreak of the war, Browde was articled to his brother’s Johannesburg law firm Mendelow and Browde. He enlisted at the end of May 1940, soon after the fall of France. Originally intending to join the Transvaal Scottish (his old school, King Edward VII, was affiliated to the regiment), he was persuaded by a friend, Philip Denton, to sign up with the Artillery instead. Denton, also Jewish, was later killed at Sidi Rezegh.
6th SA Armoured Division victory parade, 14 May 1945
Browde’s real war service began in East Africa. His regiment was mainly Afrikaans-speaking, hence he learned to speak Afrikaans after hardly knowing a word of the language. He took part in the successful Abyssinian campaign against the Italians and was then sent for further training for a year to Egypt. During this time, he was one of four chosen to go on an officers’ training course in Potchefstroom, which meant that he missed the battle of El Alamein. Now a lieutenant, Browde did not return to North Africa immediately, but spent some six months in Madagascar, where a possible attack by Japan was anticipated.
Up until now, Browde’s wartime experiences had been relatively uneventful, but this changed abruptly following his arrival in Italy. As part of the 6th South African Armoured Division, he took part in the bloody battle of Monte Casino, and in all the subsequent hard-fought campaigning as the Allies fought their way up the boot of Italy. On the day of the D-Day Landings in France on 6 June 1944, he remembers being in his tank alongside the Tiber River in Rome. Around this time, he was appointed as forward observation officer, whose task it was to be on the frontline with the infantry to assess their situation and what their needs were. This job he held until almost the end of the war.
Browde’s tank was one of the first to enter Florence. Here, he and his companion had a narrow escape when a German sniper opened fire just as they were about to enter an intersection and killed an elderly Italian man in a cart. He was involved in a subsequent ‘clean-out’ operation to rid the town of concealed German troops.
During the 1944-5 winter campaign, Browde was the officer chosen to occupy what was known as the Pink House on Hill 826 south of Bologna. It was, he recalls, “very close to the German lines and an uncomfortable place to be”. Regular night patrols were conducted with the object of taking prisoners and obtaining information about enemy plans and positions. Browde accompanied the infantry on a number of these dangerous ventures.
With Germany’s surrender the war, so far as South Africa’s armed forces were concerned, was over, and for the troops it was now just a matter of waiting one’s turn to be sent home.
However, for Jules Browde one more harrowing experience lay ahead before he finally arrived safely in South Africa. Early in the flight home, the Dakota he and a number of other South Africans was travelling on got into difficulties when first one, then a second engine cut out. In the end the pilot, managed to make a forced landing in Crete, thanks in no small part to an American businessman on the ground who, seeing the fired distress sign, managed to get in touch with the pilot and provide him with the necessary landing information. Because the runway was so short, the plane ended up going over the beach and into the sea, but no-one on board was hurt in the end. Browde was gratified to see the mainly Afrikaans passengers lining up afterwards to shake the pilot’s hand, notwithstanding that he was an Indian.
Now aged 96, Browde still remembers his war service years with remarkable clarity yet –despite being well-known for his abilities as a raconteur – it is not something he has ever liked to talk about. He had himself lost quite a few friends, and had learned at first-hand what combat veterans throughout history have known – that little ultimately separates a living war hero from just another battlefield statistic. “If you’re lucky in war, you survive, if not, you don’t”, he says.
For many years, Zelick Bedell has been a familiar sight at the annual Yom Hashoah ceremony in Johannesburg as a representative of the South African Jewish Ex-Servicemen’s League. Born in Dvinsk, Latvia, in 1920, he came to South Africa in 1937. On enlisting at the start of the war, he was assigned to the Engineering Corps, and duly became a ‘Sapper’. Fears of a Japanese attack on Simonstown in the wake of Pearl Harbour saw him dispatched to the naval base at Simonstown for anti-aircraft training. Thereafter, he was sent to join the 6thSA Armoured Division in Italy, arriving shortly before the prolonged and bloody Monte Casino campaign in the early months of 1944. Prior to the war, Bedell and his friend Mendel Flior – the two had met through their involvement in the left-wing Jewish Workers’ Club – had come to an agreement that in the event of South Africa going to war with Germany, both would join up. He learned later that Flior had been killed in his very first engagement after arriving in Italy. Bedell himself served in the 6th SA Armoured Division until the end of the war, mainly working on the roads, along with members of the Polish and Jewish Brigade, and Indian and other Colonial troops.
Zelick Bedell (holding flag) at the 2010 Yom Hashoah ceremony, held at West Park Cemetery, Johannesburg (Photo: Ilan Ossendryver).
Born and bred in Doornfontein, Mike Feldman went straight from school into the army, doing his basic training in Potchefstroom and going on to being trained as a Signalman at Roberts Heights (today Voortrekkerhoogte). In the middle of 1944, he arrived at the front just outside Florence, and served in the Signals Corps until the conclusion of the war just under a year later. As he acknowledges, this was the tail-end of the war, and his own involvement was essentially in a reserve and support capacity. With the coming of winter, not much happened in the Italian theatre until the final big push in April 1945, when the Allies continued their northward advance until reaching Milan and the remaining German forces in Italy surrendered.
Throughout his training and active service, Feldman was accompanied by his two close friends, Joe Slovo and Barney Feller. Prior to the war, he and Slovo had been instrumental in founding the Young Communist League, with Feldman being in charge of the Doornfontein branch. Feldman recalls with amusement a photograph taken of the three of them in Italy – much reproduced since then, in light of Slovo’s subsequent career – showing “the three little Jew-boys with their berets and round glasses”.
Mike Feldman (left) with Joe Slovo and Barney Feller, Italy, 1944.
In his autobiography, Slovo devotes little more than a page or two to his wartime service, likewise observing that by the time he arrived, the war was in its final stages: “Apart from spectacular artillery bombardments from our side and some stray bombing by German aircraft on road convoys, I neither experienced nor witnessed any major war action. I never saw a dead or wounded body, although I knew that we were suffering casualties from the messages I received and forwarded to the brigade signal communications centre.”1
Unlike most servicemen, Feldman was able to return to South Africa fairly quickly, on “compassionate grounds” (his father was very ill at the time). He went on to qualify as an optometrist, in which capacity he worked for fifty years before his retirement soon after the turn of the century.
Wilfred ‘Wolfie’ Tobiansky (a nephew of Johannesburg pioneer and founder of Sophiatown Herman Tobiansky) served in the SA Air Force in the North African and Italian theatres. An aircraft mechanic, he was assigned his first plane to look after shortly after his arrival in Egypt, and is proud of the fact that in the ensuing two and a half years, he never lost a plane. Tobiansky served under various senior Jewish commanding officers, both in training and on active service. In Kimberley, he recalls, the training of pupil pilots was in the hands of a German-Jewish World War I veteran (“a legend and the most marvellous pilot”), who had been in the same Luftwaffe squad as Herman Goering. After being sent to the front, Tobiansky had the rare experience of being under two Jewish commanding officers in the course of his service, Lt-Colonels Cecil Margo and Oscar Galgut. Both became distinguished members of the South African Bench after the war, and Margo is additionally remembered as being one of the founders of the fledgling Israeli Air Force.
The North African campaign concluded with the surrender of the remaining Axis forces in Tunisia on 13 May 1943. Tobiansky recalls how shortly before this, a Pesach service for all Jewish personnel was cancelled shortly after it began when German planes flew over and dropped a number of what the men referred to as “daisy cutters” (cluster bombs). On arriving at the marquee where the abortive service was to have been held, he had nevertheless had the pleasure of meeting up with his cousin Basil Levitt, whom he had not seen since the start of the war.
From Tunisia, Tobiansky was sent on to Malta and from there took part – by this time, largely under the overall control of the Americans – in the capture of Sycily and the subsequent Allied push up the Italian peninsula. Finally, after serving in 24 Squadron for 33 months (“The normal tour was 18 months – I don’t know why they kept me so long”), he returned to South Africa. By this time a Corporal, he was put in charge of a team of Italian POWs in Kimberley, whose task was to break up the hundreds of US-made Harvard planes (which, in terms of the Lend Lease agreement, could not be sold). The Italians were all skilled craftsmen, he remembers, and cooked the best food on the base.
Cpl Wolfie Tobiansky (left) with fellow 24 Squadron veteran Lt Dick Haig. Both are wearing their fathers’ World War I medals, in addition to their own.
Durbanite Esmond Jacobson’s real wartime ordeal started after he was captured at Tobruk on 21 June 1941. At the time, he was serving in the Signals Corps of the 2nd SA Police Battalion. The early months of captivity were ones of stark deprivation, but the situation improved once regular Red Cross parcels began arriving. In common with what seems to have been the general experience of South African Jewish POWs, the fact of his being Jewish did not affect his position at all during the time he spent in Italian camps. It very much became an issue, however, when the prisoners were evacuated to Germany ahead of the Allied advance. Jacobson was one of those who chose to identify themselves as Jewish when questioned about this by their captors. As a result, he was sent to Camp E593 in Shomberg, a camp for British Jews, the majority of whom were from the British Mandate territory of Palestine.
In his memoir of his time in captivity, published in the September 1946 issue of Jewish Affairs, Jacobson looks back on the fateful decision he made and its consequences:
We had to make up our minds quickly – and the gamble was between life and death. We gambled with death, and the decision opened many new doors to us. I take my mind back to that day, September, 1943, when 2000 South African prisoners of war reached Sagan in Upper Silesia, Germany, from Italy. Each Jew had to decide for himself: should he disclose his religion and race to the Nazis or should he conceal them? The majority of Jews decided on diplomacy. Twenty-three of us, having faith that Germany would not violate the Geneva Convention, registered as Jews. The first door to richer experience opened to us.
As a result of their decision, the remaining twenty months of captivity for Jacobson and the other self-identifying Jews differed dramatically from those of other South African POWs. Until 19 January, when the prisoners were evacuated to the west ahead of the Russian advance, the experience was, as he remembers, “not unpleasant”. While they were made to work, in the coal mines of the Hohenzollerngrube and elsewhere, it was under reasonable conditions, and a strong spirit of camaraderie animated all the working parties. In camp, it was possible to hold regular Yom Tov services, as well as organise plays, concerts and sporting events. It even proved possible for Palestinians in the camp to organise a drive for Keren Kayemet. £600 was ultimately raised and paid into the fund by the Paymaster-General on receipt of the men’s stop-orders.
Some of the players in the play ‘David and Goliath’ produced by Shmuel Stern (arm on hip) in the all-Jewish Shomberg POW camp.
The final months of Jacobson’s captivity, by contrast, were harrowing ones. It was mid-winter, and the prisoners were made to march for 700 kilometres through Germany and Czechoslovakia:
During these first days, we passed countless Jews, Russians and other prisoners who, unable to continue marching, froze to death or were shot by the relentless SS. On those black days, many hundreds of Jews fell. We walked in the grey, snow-covered country – passed countless frozen bodies, blood-stained, horrible. Our newly found comrades [four Polish Jews who had joined them several days before] signified those of our race who no longer suffered – ‘Achad MiShelanu’ (One of Ours).
Eventually, the prisoners arrived at a detention camp in Brüx in the Western Sudetenland, where Jews from all over Europe were being held (“all unbelievably herded together”). The camp was liberated by the Russians on 7 May 1945, and Jacobson and two others were able to make their way, by bicycle, to the American lines at Karlsbad.
Esmond Jacobson still lives in Durban, where he has been a long-serving member of the Durban branch of the SA Jewish Ex-Service League. Just three of its members today are World War II veterans; the remainder served in the SADF during the Border War.
NOTES
- Slovo, J M, Slovo – The Unfinished Autobiography, Ravan Press, 1995, p29
