Heroes

Eileen Nearne Mourned today

Crowds of people have paid their respects to World War II heroine Eileen Nearne during her funeral in Devon.  Mourners lined the streets of Torquay for the funeral of Miss Nearne, whose daring wartime spy work came to light following her death on 2 September.The fluent French speaker was captured three times by the Germans and endured spells in concentration camps, managing to escape each time.  She was due to have a council funeral but these plans changed as a result of the publicity about her past.Military charities donated cash and a local funeral director offered to fund a service more befitting a war heroine.
 
Hannah Sara Rigler’s story of survival is a remarkable one, even by the standards of the dark times she witnessed.
Now in her 80s, the still bright-eyed woman is currently in Britain, perhaps for the last time, telling schoolchildren how British prisoners of war saved her life during World War II. She was born in 1928 as Sara Matuson – later changing her name in honour of her sister who died in the Holocaust – into a Jewish family which had recently returned home to Lithuania following an abortive attempt to emigrate to Palestine. But her family life was destroyed following the Nazi occupation in the summer of 1941. Her father was taken away, never to be seen again. With the war coming to an end the camp’s women – with no food, dressed in rags and with only wooden clogs on their feet – were driven by SS guards in a death march through the snow towards the Baltic sea.  With no hope in sight, Sara’s mother, Gita, begged her to try to escape.
Armed with a diamond ring smuggled by her mother, Hannah attempted to buy some bread from a Polish boy, only to be arrested by the police and threatened with public execution. “Then I went into a barn and I lay down in a trough. And then a man came into the barn and I said to him: ‘Are you Polish?’… and he said: ‘No, I’m British.’ And that was Stan Wells.”
Shortly afterwards the POWs, who were about to be evacuated to Germany, placed Sara in the care of a local woman, who looked after her until she was liberated by the Red Army.
But freedom proved to be bittersweet. Hannah discovered that she was her family’s only survivor: her father, mother, sister, two uncles, four aunts and six cousins were all killed in the Holocaust.

Both of the above stories were taken from the BBC News Page today – fascinated by both of them, the themes resonating with “I’m No Hero” and illustrating the strengths and accomplishments of women – so rarely celebrated.

And then on the radio this morning was also the story of Ingrid Betancourt a small, slight, well-coutured. Formerly a Colombian presidential candidate, she spent six years in captivity,the only outward sign of her ordeal is the rough crucifix she wears around her wrist – she fashioned it out of rope in the jungle – and, if you stare impertinently, some small marks around her neck where a chain once lay. For the last 18 months she has been working on a book, which has meant going back daily to her experiences as a hostage. “It was torture,” says the 48-year-old. “It was very difficult to write.”

The above is an extract from The Guardian – its all food for thought…..

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