'Holocaust hero was just my dad'

Published on Wednesday 26 January 2011 11:02

IN Judy Russell's young eyes her dad was simply that - her dad, the man who raised and loved her, the head of the family whom she adored and respected in return.

&#149 Judy's dad was held at Auschwitz, and was later immortalised in a painting by David Reid

An "ordinary" man, she says, someone you would pass on the street without paying much attention to.

Just her dad, her devoted, kind and quick-witted father.

As a child she would hear talk of "the camps", yet only in passing reference to the life her parents lived before she and her younger brother were born. Just where these camps were and what went on in them, she had no idea.

It was only when Judy was well into her teenage years that she discovered her father was anything but "ordinary". Learning of the true devastation of the Nazi concentration camps, she made the spine-tingling discovery that both he and her mother had survived the torture of the Holocaust; her mum enduring the misery of two camps, her father a jaw-dropping seven. Until his dying day, her dad maintained that he first laid eyes on his future wife in Belsen as they struggled through the atrocities of life at the notorious camp.

"I remember when my dad got his OBE he said he would never have believed a little Jewish man would find himself standing in front of Prince Charles," says Judy, 57, from Meadowbank.

"He told me he survived the Holocaust for a reason and he felt he could use his survival to educate others."

Her dad, Ernest Levy, went on to become one of Scotland's most respected and loved religious leaders, writing two harrowing memoirs and earning praise for his commitment to enlightening younger generations of one of history's most appalling episodes. He died in August 2009 aged 84, her mother Kathy Freeman two years' earlier.

The passing of the generations may have spelled the end of Ernest's remarkable story of survival. Instead, Judy, now a teacher in Gilmerton, is determined to continue her father's relentless work; committed, just as he was, to ensuring the suffering of "ordinary" people like him and her mother is never forgotten.

She has started working with the Holocaust Educational Trust to give talks to school children, the first of which she did last week in Glasgow.

Today, Holocaust Memorial Day, she speaks proudly of how he refused to be broken by his suffering and instead used it to teach others.

"I owe this to him," she says. "To have suffered so much, to have put so much of himself into helping to educate others, I feel this is incredibly important. My mum was very supportive of everything he did too and could always be found by his side at all the different events he went to."

Ernest arrived in her life when she was just a young girl - her biological dad had died from an illness when she was very young - but she insists he was the only father she ever knew and was in every way a "dad".

But in the 1950s, the realities of the Holocaust were still very much at the forefront of the minds of those who had survived or witnessed what happened in the concentration camps where more than six million people were killed.

"Nobody spoke about what went on like they did later," says Judy. "I think it wasn't until the 1980s that there was a real change in attitude regarding the subject. The survivors needed a cooling off period, and time."

By that point, in her late teens, Judy had moved from her family home in Glasgow to attend Moray House in Edinburgh where she became a teacher, and has made the city her adopted home ever since.

Meanwhile, back in Glasgow, her father was becoming something of a rising star in the Jewish community, being chosen as cantor of the Pollokshields synagogue, before taking up the same post in Scotland's largest synagogue, Giffnock and Newlands. It was more than a dream come true for Ernest, who had arrived in Glasgow in the 1960s at the recommendation of his mother and siblings who had fled the terror of the Nazis for a new life in Scotland. As one of eight children, he was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Bratislava, ending up at the mercy of the Nazis, firstly in Auschwitz, when he was just a teenager, along with his father, sister and brother.

In his first book, One More Dance, Ernest writes about Scotland, "For the first time it looked as though I had a good and secure future ahead of me. I had found a home".

"He felt the people here were quite removed from the war," says Judy. "He felt free. Nobody was looking down on him and they accepted him for who he was."

He went on to marry Kathy after spotting her one day in the city, convinced he had seen her before in their final days at Belsen.

Not only had the Hungarian widow survived the terrors, but her father - Judy's grandfather - had too.

They had also moved to Scotland for a new life on the advice of relatives who had found refuge here.

"I've always liked to think he did see her in Belsen," says Judy. "It is a lovely story."

As historians have shown since, life for prisoners in such camps was nothing short of a living nightmare, so much so that Judy's maternal grandfather never once spoke about what he witnessed, even in the company of his daughter or son-in-law, Ernest.

In his second book, The Single Light, Ernest describes being dumped in a giant pit of dead, or dying prisoners, fighting with every last ounce of energy to try to climb out. He was aged only 20 and was now in his seventh and final camp, Belsen.

He writes: "I cry out and all I hear is a cracked gasp. In tears, I sit back and weep with the rain. I think on my father. I lean back, mouth open, to receive the rain. It helps my mouth taste less metallic, eases the soreness around my gums." He was eventually heaved out by a soldier, sent there to liberate the small number of prisoners who had managed to survive.

"I think the period he was set free are the days my dad remembered the least," says Judy. "He was so weak by then. He always said that it was a German nurse, a woman called Emma, who nursed him back to health in hospital. He said he survived because of the goodness of individuals like her."

Years later, he and Kathy returned to Belsen to "lay their ghosts to rest".

"He was never an angry man," says Judy. "Just a really special person."

A day to teach and remember

Since 2001, the UK has marked Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27 - the date in 1945 that the largest Nazi killing camp Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated.

The Holocaust Educational Trust - which regularly takes students from Edinburgh to visit the Polish camp - uses the day to further educate the public about what happened to the millions of people who perished at the hands of the Nazis.

The trust formed in 1988 with a sole aim to educate people about the Holocaust, working in schools, universities and the wider community to raise awareness and understanding.

In Edinburgh, further education will come through yesterday's announcement in the Evening News that the entire archive once belonging to Ernest Levy - including his manuscripts, pictures and memoirs - is to be given to the city's library service to be made available online for use by the public.

"It will be available for people to see and to listen to all the things he actually said," says Judy.

A concert in Ernest's memory is also scheduled to take place on June 19 at the Royal Concert Hall in Glasgow with all proceeds going to the Holocaust Educational Trust.

For more information, visit www.het.org.uk.