Norman Kohen

Name of Interviewee: Norman Cohen Name of Interviewer: Ronit Wilder Cassette Number: VD – 790

Interviewer: This an interview with Mr. Norman Cohen. You were born in Coventry, England, 1923. Can you tell me something about your family, your background? Norman Cohen: Right. Well, firstly, my father, Morris Cohen, was born in Vilna in 1888 and that very year, when my father was three months old, he left with his family to come to England. To this day I don't know why England, but they came out and they settled in Manchester. Manchester was a place that many people from Vilna came to so everybody goes where they can find a "kvutzah", okay? My mother was very much English. She was born in Birmingham in 1892. Her mother was born in Glasgow. I now have a family tree that shows three young Polish boys came over to Glasgow - the other two left Glasgow, but the one had a furniture factory. He had stores, he had a bank - a very, very rich man. His brother went to Australia and became a millionaire and a member of the Australian Parliament back in 1850. This is the background of the family, which I have a family tree going way, way back. Anyway, they married in 1916, during the First World War. They had two children before me. My father had carpet and furniture business in Coventry. After some few years, ten or more years, they went to Manchester where all his family lived because he wanted a Jewish environment for the family, but after three years, wasn't happy business-wise so he came back to Coventry. So it was in 1929 the whole family came back to Coventry and now this is where I remember growing up, in Coventry. Interviewer: Were you an orthodox family? Norman Cohen: Orthodox Judaism in England is never the right word. You'd belong to a community that's part of an orthodox community, but... Interviewer: Yes, but Manchester has the stigma of a very religious Jewish community. Norman Cohen: Manchester has a branch, but the average Jew, the average Jew of England does not...many would drive to the synagogue on shabbat. Many would leave the car around the corner. Today they'd have the television on, turn lights on and off on shabbat and this sort of thing. Interviewer: But I'm talking about the '20's, the '30's. Norman Cohen: I'm talking about those times, too. My father in Coventry was president for fifteen years of the Beit Knesset there, so we were always involved. I went to "cheder" four times a week. I don't know why, but I went. So this is how my Judaism....yes, I have....with a name like Cohen I have always been very Jewish. I was educated in Coventry. My school, incidentally, was built and started in 1585. That's how old the school I went to was. I left school in '39. I wanted to be an accountant, a "roai heshbon", but the war had started and my father wanted me in the business. So I had to go in the business in '39. My brother went into the army and my sister had to do other work so I was in the business and really the story starts picking up from November the 14th, 1940. Interviewer: But before that, when the war broke out you were still in high school? Norman Cohen: I left school in August, '39. We all knew war was coming. July, '39. I would have gone back, but the school....nobody knew what was going to happen. A war had started. So schools were evacuated. Whole school moved. Coventry had grown up to be a place where there were factories for cars, so when the war started they went over to making parts for aeroplanes. It was a perfect target for the Germans. Many people left. We had a business - we stayed. It was known as the "false war", the first year. Nothing really happened, but then... Interviewer: And you really became calm? Norman Cohen: We were calm. You found you couldn't get things. Things that were imported you could no longer get. We never saw a banana for five years. Interviewer: And do you remember refugees at that time? '33 till '39? Norman Cohen: Thank you for reminding me. My father as president of the congregation arranged to bring out of Germany under the "Kindertransport" and placed fifty children in homes in the Coventry area. One I call my sister now lives in Indianapolis and I've got to phone her tomorrow - it's her seventy-third birthday tomorrow. Her parents died - they came from Fuerth, the same place Kissinger. They....I've always thought of her as my sister. So yes, I saw a lot of these children. None of them could speak anything but German. They were completely bewildered. Their ages ranged from seventeen, eighteen, fifteen, fourteen. Many of them were placed in non-Jewish homes, mainly Christidelphian, who were an organization, Christian organization, very much attached to the Jews, very helpful to the Jews, and made sure these children didn't become Christian. Interviewer: When you saw those refugees did you feel the danger of the Germans? Norman Cohen: Not at all. Not at all. It is worlds apart. What was wrong don't ask me, but as a Jew I felt isolated from.....is this going on for posterity if I tell you something? Because it doesn't apply to all Jews certainly, but it shows an example of the attitude of Jews. One young Jewish child was heard to say to her mother, because her mother with other women would arrange tea parties for these refugees. And this child in her prayers said: "Please G-d, don't make me a foreigner." The Jews of England, to say they felt superior may not be the right word, but they felt different. Interviewer: Perfectly safe? Norman Cohen: And English, of course, and perfectly safe. Oh yes, one hundred percent safe. Never at any time did they feel that anything would happen to them personally in that way. No. Interviewer: The Hungarian Jews felt the same. Norman Cohen: The German Jews felt the same. I know. So...anyway. There it was. Interviewer: Till 1940 things were okay? Norman Cohen: Things were alright. Then the blitz started. Then it all happened. The 14th of November, 1940. On the 14th at about 2 o'clock I was horse-riding near one of the big car factories. A German plane came over, dropped a bomb - it was really a reconnaissance plane - why it dropped a bomb I'll never know. And went and my horse bolted, so that was my first fear of the war with my horse running away. I went back home, a bit frightened, after having put the horse back in the stables and about four o'clock another plane came over. By this time I was frightened. We had an air raid shelter - we had made one in the garden - and I went to run into the air raid shelter. Being me at that age I was always eating sweets and I was eating a big one. I go down the steps and it sticks here. The nearest I got to being killed, I think, the whole war was nearly choking on this sweet. And then about...November, it would have got dark about five o'clock, the planes started coming and we had planes non-stop for thirteen hours. A thousand planes came over Coventry. I think the figure is twenty-four thousand people died. It was the worst blitz of the...from a long time. Many other big ones happened like Dresden, like Hamburg, but at that time Coventry - there was a word in the English language called "coventrated", destroyed. My father had a very large store full of carpets, full of linoleum, furniture - everything burned. It burned for three days. It was the third largest fire in the whole of Coventry. Everything in the store went. In the morning I went down to have a look. There was unexploded bombs, some of them this big, seven foot, two meters high, just stuck in the road. I managed to get to the store to see it wasn't there anymore. Everything was gone. My father went grey overnight. Literally. He had black hair and then one day he was white - his whole life's work gone. We didn't lose the house, we didn't family - I lost my best friend in the blitz. We were without water, gas, electricity, of course. That made me realize there was a war. Interviewer: How was it during these thirteen hours in the shelter? Norman Cohen: Well, I had "shpilkes", I couldn't sit still, so I kep going out, my mother getting very angry. You get in a room, you know, "cheder ha'atoom", what it's like to be in there. We had water, we had food, we had electricity in there till it went off and then we had lamps. And we had beds. Everything was wet because in England it rains a lot so everything got moist and damp...(not clear), So everytime I'd go out and it was quiet and all of a sudden it would start again and then back down. We made a joke that if you can hear the bombs fall, it won't hit you and it's true. It's the ones you don't hear that are going to hit you. So everytime we heard, we said: "Don't worry." And the bangs were pretty close - it was frightening. Very, very, very frightening. To all of us because my parents who had lived through the First World War, nothing happened. Their children, their friends went to war and they didn't come back, but they themselves didn't know war as...1939-1945 brought the war into the homes of people. You're bringing it all back to me. Interviewer: What happens when you're out of the shelter? Norman Cohen: Well, the first thing you do is look for a wash, you look for some food. We had a car...we had no telephone either. We managed to get over to Birmingham, to my aunt, my mother's sister, who let us have a bath and let us have something to eat and we stayed there that day, but we can't stay here for long. We went back home and my father doesn't know what to do. We had three other places with "machsonim" and I went and had a look and they were all okay. So we went over to a little place called Leamington Spa which was fifteen kilometers from Coventry and we found a store there and we found a vehicle, a big lorry vehicle to bring everything out from Coventry and put it there and from about November the 18th, 19th, 1940 we moved to Leamington Spa and that's were I lived until I came to live in Israel. I grew up in Coventry. I watched the car trade in Coventry. There was an article in the paper about the new Jaguar car being sold in Israel and it mentioned a man named Sir William Lyons - I remember him coming to Coventry and I used to go on my way home from school to have a look at his first car, the first Jaguar. I remember the car trade very well. So Coventry, the place I grew up, the car trade grew up. My friends' fathers were involved in it and so on. But then I came to Leamington. I came to Leamington in 1940. Two years later I went in the army. Interviewer: When you moved to Leamington financially you were still okay? Norman Cohen: Well, let's say there was always a meal on the table. It made it very difficult to be Jewish. Very difficult. There was no Beit Knesset. There was no kosher food - you had to arrange to get it. It made it become very, very hard to be a Jew. If you lit the candles on Friday night, even that during the war disappeared a bit - it was very hard. I'm not saying that today, no matter where I was, I wouldn't want to keep the mitzvot to the best of my ability or I'm not saying that my parents had other worries and other things, but the British background towards Jewish education was not one that made it so terribly important. A Jew was a Jew, you know, regardless, but you didn't have to keep all these laws, rules and everything else. Interviewer: When you were a child, besides the "cheder", you studied in Jewish school or general school? Norman Cohen: There wasn't a Jewish school in my town. I went to a sort of public school - public school is sort of the higher grade - where you do Latin and Greek and all these subjects. I learned to speak properly, but, no, outside of "cheder", and even then my father being president meant I had to go along if there was a "yahrzeit" and there was only a "minyan" if somebody had a "yahrzeit" could you get one. Friday nights it was hard to get "minyan". Shabbat morning it was impossible to get one. We didn't have a rabbi - we were too small and we couldn't get. You had a man who - the one we had had been trained in a "yeshiva" in Poland, so he knew had to daven and so forth and he could teach of a sort and he was also the "shochat". He taught "cheder" and so on. But it was very, very - the word in English is "patchy". Not very good. Interviewer: You spoke only English at home? Norman Cohen: But of course. Interviewer: No Yiddish at all? Norman Cohen: My father who - his parents spoke Yiddish, obviously - knew some and if ever he didn't want us to understand, he used to say: "Talk in Yiddish a few words," so I became very fluent in the Yiddish I learned. I learned German in the army so today I can understand Yiddish, but no, not at all. English people were very English. Interviewer: I'm asking that only because I know that later on when you were amongst the liberators of the camps you didn't have a common language with the survivors if you didn't know Yiddish. Norman Cohen: Not at all, not at all. Impossible. Impossible, no. And even when I used to go to synagogue with my father I didn't know a word that was said. So many of us in England didn't understand anything. It was sad. It's a different story today. An entirely different story, but that's how it was up to those days. Which often makes me wonder why we stayed Jewish. It really is a wonder. Unfortunately, the assimilation figures are very high, terribly high, but I always wonder why I and my wife stayed Jewish because she had basically the same sort of education. Interviewer: Till '42 you lived your life as usual? Norman Cohen: Yes. I didn't know anybody in our town. It was very hard, I was very lonely. But yes, I was seventeen. I went in the army when I was eighteen, '42, nearly nineteen, nearly nineteen, but that eighteen months was very, very hard. We had...I used to go to work and come home from work and I would go to the pictures and listen to the radio - there was no television - and that was it, basically. And my father picked up some typical English interests like the Conservative Club and playing bowls and that was it. My mother joined one or two organizations - one Jewish one. She'd been very active in Coventry in the synagogue, but...ladies' guild and so forth, but not from the time we went to Leamington. Interviewer: What brought you to the British army? Norman Cohen: Conscription. I was called up. Everybody was called up. They had the lists of everybody in the country and everybody, when they reached an age, was called up. They had to give reasons why they were not fit for the army or whatever. Some were conscientious objectors, which meant they objected to fighting and they were given other jobs, perhaps in the mines, perhaps on the farms, perhaps in a factory, but even then they objected to making something that was to be used in a war, but they had to be put to other work. Maybe in the hospital. So I had no choice. The only thing I did have a choice was what I was going to do: army, air force or navy. I didn't want to go in the navy - I don't like water. Air force - I had been in a cadet unit in school so I knew a little - nearly two years of that - so I knew a little about that. My brother had been in the army in the signals so I went into the signals. Interviewer: But what were your feelings towards joining the army? Norman Cohen: Frightened. Frightened. If I tell you through that door you're going to find a very big step and it's black and you're going to have to jump - what you're going to jump into, onto, you don't know - you'd be frightened. That's how I was. I didn't know. Interviewer: But sort of patriotism or something like that? Norman Cohen: Not then, no, no, no. Not really. Because - how can I say it? - During the First World War, what was the war? It was in a trench and the expression was "going over the top", right? Now, can you tell me every soldier who went over the top was filled with patriotism - I'll call you a liar. I landed on D-Day. I didn't land on D-Day with patriotism. It was my job, I had to do it. So that's how I joined the army. Interviewer: We're talking about two years of war before you joined the army. Did you read in the papers or were you interested in what happened to the British army in Africa, in Iraq, in Egypt, because it was very far away? Norman Cohen: Oh you followed it, oh yes. More interesting was with Churchill. Churchill after Dunkerque - that was a turning point, of course - after Dunkerque when the British Isles surrounded by water was on its own. The whole of Europe had fallen and there is this little island. America hadn't come into the war. Churchill said: "We will not surrender to that Nazi thug, that criminial. We will fight on the beaches, we will fight on the shores. We will fight for my very homes, but we will not give in." That was the message from then on. We all rolled up our sleeves and prepared to work. That was the feeling that we went in the army, thank you. That was it. So when your number came, you were off. You were frightened, sure. Your time had come to do something. The married women, the young girls from school would go straight and work in the factories. Their hands that they used to have so beautifully manicured now were red-raw from working, but they did it, making the ammunition and forth. Whatever. Everybody worked And they worked all the clock round, so yes, 1940 was the turning point. Everything was rationed. You had enough food, but it was rationed. The convoys used to come across from Canada and America, so bearing in mind the sailors who brought them were risking their very lives for us, we really didn't pay more than we should. If you could get it on the black market you basically didn't. Everybody was very good - that's the English mentality. Interviewer: One more question before you're joining the army. With the name of Cohen, did you feel in any occasion sort of anti-semitism, as a child, as a teenager? Norman Cohen: I did in the army. I actually did in the army. Interviewer: That's why I'm asking before the army, to compare. Norman Cohen: Yes, but basic...so slight....yes, yes, but it was not enough to trouble me. For instance, I can't give you the year, Sir Oswell Mosely. Do you know who I mean? Sir Oswell Mosely with his Black Shirts in London... Interviewer: The English fascists. Norman Cohen: He aroused a lot of anti-semitism, a great deal. Now, people would read this and get the feeling of anti-semitism. My father told me that in the First World War, anybody with a foreign-sounding name, a Jewish foreign-sounding name, had stones thrown at them because they were called Germans much more so than Jewish. But yes, I did meet a little, but it wasn't enough to upset my balance, my equilibrium. Not really. I did meet it in the army, I will admit. Occasionally. Interviewer: Okay. Now we are joining the army. What's happening there? Norman Cohen: I joined the army and I went to little town on the...called Prestatyn which was near Wales, on the coast near Wales. I had to do my basic six-week training there, learning how to use a gun, learning to be a soldier, learning how to polish my boots. I look at every Israeli soldier and I'm aware that every day of my army life I polished my boots. It is excellent discipline. We had coats with brass buttons and every one had to be polished. Interviewer: With Brasso? Norman Cohen: Brasso. Everyday, even in the war and you were resting for a week, you had to do it. And it was called "kit inspection". Oh wow! So this was the six weeks basic training. What was most difficult for me - food. I missed my mother's food. I missed - I told you I went to a good school - I was a soldier only. Maybe I was clever not being an officer, without the responsibility or whatever. My education background was good enough for it, but I never was. Interviewer: What about kosher food? Norman Cohen: What's kosher food? Forget it. I went hungry for years because I wouldn't touch bacon. I wouldn't touch it at all. Don't ask me why - I don't know. I didn't lay tefillin, I didn't go to any services anywhere, but I didn't eat bacon. I kept nothing. So yes, I missed food, but I found enough to live on and I got used to it - I was that sort of person. After my six weeks basic training I went to a place called Catterick in Yorkshire. Now, you've heard of York because there was the great massacre of the Jews in York - it wasn't far from there. Catterick I always say is: "Besof ha'olam and then you turn left."It's awful. They should have pulled the whole place down after the First World War. They intended to, they never did, and they were still using it in the Second World War. The buildings were very old, very cold and Catterick is like being on the top of the Hermon in winter - it's freezing all the time. You might get three nice days in summer, but that's it. It was very cold and very nasty. And there I learned to be a wireless operator. I did about eight hours Morse code learning a day. It nearly made you "meshugge" - I have seen two people commit suicide - the strain of doing it all the time is terrible. The expression in English is: "Where there's no sense, there's no feeling," so I just carried on doing it. After we had finished - we had more or less finished there and we were...it's what is called "posting". You are transferred. Out comes orders and we were sent to a place called Merstham, not far from London in Surrey. The house had belonged to the Coleman family - Coleman mustard family. It probably had fifty, sixty bedrooms, maybe more. The area was like a palace. Unbelievable. It would take you ten or fifteen minutes to drive a car from their private road - that's how big it was. And there we discovered we were to be the Second Army Signals. It meant nothing to me. Interviewer: When are you going out of Britain? Norman Cohen: This...we went there...what? I went there in 1943. We went out of Britain in 1944. So we did training there. Then we moved, then we moved to Oxford. The house was called Headington Hill Hall. I lived in Robert Maxwell's house before he did. I always say that was my house before it was his. They put prefabricated places around for us to be in - billets - but the big house was where the high officers were. And where we used to do our messages from. And then we discovered that the Second Army Signals was to have a special unit called the Tactical Headquarters. Second Army Signals was run by General Dempsey. Now, the Second Army Signals might consist of five thousand, seven thousand people - I don't know - but all I know, he could not move quickly with a unit like that, so he established TacHQ - tactical headquarters. And we were then highly trained to be able to move at any moment. Any moment he said we had to go, which I'll explain later. So we were his special unit. So then we come to D-Day. The preparations for D-Day were unbelievable. Can you imagine having to send over from England to France thousands and thousands of men, vehicles - the tanks came a few days later - food, water, water-purifying machines. You've got to have the means to dig some sort of "sherutim". Everything has to be thought of beforehand. So can you imagine? Where do they go from? The south coast of England. It was...the roads are small. Imagine roads like Jerusalem roads where you have got thousands of people and vehicles - our vehicle was a big...we called it a ten-ton truck. It was big. It had wireless equipment in it and... Interviewer: Did that came to you as a surprise? Norman Cohen: No, no. A surprise when my major would be walking up and down with a French-English translation book - my French wasn't too bad so I would say to him, you know, in French: "Where are we going?" Then he would smile and show me his book. Everybody knew where we were going. We didn't know where in France, but we knew where we were going. And they took us down to a place near Porstmouth and transferred us onto ships called LCTs - landing craft tanks. If you go from England to France on any of these vehicles where you drive on and drive off, the front end, the back end comes down and you get in and then when you arrive, the front end and you drive off. That's what it was like and we were in those. We went into there and there were places for us to sleep and....That was quite comfortable and places to eat - it was an American craft. But the weather wasn't kind and we had to wait twenty-four hours in, off the English Channel, near the Isle of Wyte, and they are flat-bottomed boats so they can go straight into the sea, into the beach. And on the sea they were doing this for twenty-four hours. I swear more people were ill from that than there were bullets the first day. It was terrible. They rocked....Anyway, the next day is landing time. I don't know what time I landed, about ten, eleven o'clock in the morning. I landed near Arromanches Beach at a little place called Vers Sur Mers. It's taken me a lot of maps to find it, but I found it eventually - I've got one here. We drove our wireless trucks off, bit difficult. On the beach was a man who was, I swear he was two meters tall, and his stick was almost as high and he had a dog - I can't remember if it was a bulldog or what, but it was this big and very fierce. It turned out to be, I think, Lord Linlethgow - he was in charge of the beach and he had with him his Scottish piper, playing all the time. It wasn't till I saw a film it all came back to me and he was there as if nothing was happened and in fact, nothing did happen. There were no German snipers, there were no anything. The Americans took the problems of that. We were very fortunate in having our airborne divisions going in first, getting rid of the pillboxes, the German machine gun posts and we just landed. Interviewer: For you, after almost two years in the army with doing almost nothing, were you happy towards the invasion? At last, action? Norman Cohen: If you had to go to work in a factory, today it's all automatically done, but in the war it wasn't and there were women particularly who nearly went "meshugge" doing jobs. They would do this, that, pass it on. Do this, that, pass it on. Right? It's mechanical. I was a highly trained wireless operator to do a job of work. We were also trained to look after ourselves for food and so forth. We though of nothing else. The British army are very clever to me. By the end of the war I said the best soldier to have is a German soldier. The next best is the British soldier. Today it may be the Israeli one number one. Because the German soldier automatically does as he's told. He doesn't think - that's the way he's trained. The British soldier was nearly as good. He didn't say: "Why should I?" "Do it." It wasn't a case of having done nothing. We had worked. We were brain-washed to do a job of work. Sure we could think, but not when it came it action. We went straight it. So we arrived at this little village - Crevilly, I think it was. Behind a church, what's the first thing we did? Put up our wireless aerials and get in touch with England and start working radio. Immediately. Like fifteen minutes from the time we're stopping. What do you have to do? We're getting messages the whole time. "Send up more food." Not the ammunition and stuff - you've got look after people. Petrol, right? "Send up another division here or there." These are the messages that are so important and we were doing...and we were the tactical headquarters. Our main headquarters came across a week later, whenever, I don't know. And then we moved to some crossroad - oh....it was there that I had finished working - we did eight hours work, eight hours sleep, eight hours work and then you have twenty-four hours off. Three of us working. I'd finished one of these duties. Evening, night - I can't remember. If you had a car and you open a car door, the light comes on. During the war, in our wireless trucks, if you open the door the light goes off. Black-outs. But there is delay. If the door is open that much, the switch doesn't operate. So I'm opening the door and I suddendly think: "Oh, I want my cup. I must have a drink." So I pulled the door to and a bullet hit the door. What do I do? Now I panic. Fortunately, we had a telephone to be in touch with our place where we sent Morse messages - we didn't send them from the trucks, we had a central place. Because that's where you have to have your decipher units and all the high command messages come in. So I phoned. I said: "A bullet's just hit the truck." I was told not to be stupid. Anyway, I said: "It's true." "Wait." My phone rings about three minutes later. "Open the door." "Not so-and-so likely," I swore. And an officer said: "You'll do as you're told. Open it now." Well, I always knew that a rifle was good for something because I did it with my rifle. I won't be that close. I opened the door and another bullet hit the door and then some other guns went off. I was told it was safe to come out. They'd brought some more soldiers who had shot a French girl from a tree. She had a German soldier who was her lover and she was upset with the British for disturbing her relationship and she was trying get her revenge. So that was one of my war experiences. It wasn't very nice. But fifty years later I can laugh about though. So then we're just sending messages and that's basically what we did all the way through France. Have you ever heard of the Tracy Bokage, VA Bokage? It was awful. This is where the Germans put up a resistance. They got beaten and we pushed through. We came through probably two days later. Both sides of the war for one, two, three miles - there were dead soldiers, dead horses, flies, insects. The same was unbelievable. I've got that smell with me now. It was a similar smell I had when I was...later on. The bodies were blown up. Now this is where you suddenly grow up. I'd had a very sheltered life and all of a sudden I'm in a war and I can see somebody who was a soldier and is that high - his stomach's blown up from gas - it was a hot day. Horses the same. One of the soldiers put a bullet in something and it all exploded- it was horrible. That was when we moved through France into Belgium. We came to a town - Douai, I think - without a note of it I wouldn't know. We went over a bridge and all the French are out cheering us. One big man with a beard with guns all over him and knives and bullets like decorations all over him, he came up to me. I was on a wireless truck, hanging out of the back, and he kissed me and he said: "Merci, monsieur. Merci, merci," crying. Well, if anybody had won the war he had, I hadn't. That I found unbelievably moving. To think that these people were so grateful for what we had done. We stopped...when you're in a TacHQ it's your job to establish communications all the time. So if you're moving from one place to another, it's called "leap-frogging". A "leap-frog" is when you move on ahead. So our main unit was here so...and we had to be the forward unit, to go ahead. We went ahead and stopped in a farm and we established communications. The main unit comes up. Now when they move again - I can tell you when this was - I was twenty-one, it was my birthday - so it would be 1944, August. When our main unit moved on we had to keep communication till they reestablished and then we closed down. The farmer came up to me and he said: "You haven't got any paraffin." I said: "These are all petrol." We had huge...thirty, forty big cans of petrol and I said: "Look, they're petrol." Talk about a "ness", not a "neft". The first one I picked up was "neft". Four gallons, like...I don't know. And I said...He said: "What's that?" I said: "I don't know. We never use it. I don't know what it's doing here." He said: "Could I buy some?" I said: "I'll give it to you." It was to start his...they call it a "thresher". When they harvest the wheat, you put it through this machine and it only works on that and he put some in and it started. He hadn't used it the whole war. He said: "Come with me." And he took me down to the cellar. He said: "Somewhere here there's something." And he took a hammer and knocked out some bricks. Eventually he found what he wanted and brought out a bottle of cognac. He said: "This has been here since the First World War and we've never touched it. There's some more in there." He says: "Please take a bottle." So I have this bottle of brandy which...I'll tell you when I opened it. We then went on to...south of Brussels and again in communications. By this time main units are coming over from...because it's safe for them to come. So General Montgomery and General Eisenhower come over. General Eisenhower's now established in Paris. I don't know....General Montgomery's established in Brussels a bit later. So we were near Brussels. We then moved up to Louvain. In French it's Louvain, in Flemish it's Leuven. A university town which I discovered the Germans burned all their books. That I read the other day. Anyway, we hadn't been there many days and we had instructions to move. Two of our wireless trucks to move. "Where?" "Go." Special instructions from the general, which meant all the troops were moving up on the road and we had priority to go ahead of them all. And we just used a map reference. We went to this field, established communication, back to our headquarters and we were told to wait for messages to come in. When they come in, we got two radio trucks, one to receive and one to send out. One to receive wherefrom. Wherefrom? From the..Arnhem. The airborne landing at Arnhem. They sent messages... Interviewer: Holland. Norman Cohen: They sent messages to us, the other truck would send them on. The only problem was, the Germans were shelling the advancing British troops. The British troops were shelling the Germans and we were in between. We had a couple of shells there, but...scared, I don't think so. We were just doing something, I don't know. Whether it's because your'e twenty-one and you're single or what, I don't know, but that sort of fear, real fear is not there. Not from any of us. Amazing thing. Then we - I don't know where we next met up with our unit or not, but we're having a rest in the north of Belgium near the Dutch border. And I don't know where it was that I got leave. I was one of the first to get leave for ten days to England and I went back to England thinking "I'm a hero. Everybody will be pleased to see me." I don't think anybody noticed. In ten days I don't think anybody even noticed I was there or not there. I was pleased to go back to tell you the truth. It didn't seem to make any difference. Anyway, I went back and I couldn't find my unit. They had been sent to the Arden and that was terrible. Not for the war, not for the fighting, not that there's bullets being fired at me. It was cold. It was muddy. It was black. I was crying with the cold and I couldn't find my own wireless truck and I was falling into holes with the mud up to here. I'd just come back from leave. I'd been enjoying some good things in life and to come back to this. You've seen films of the First World War, of these trenches with mud - well, that's how I was. Eventually, I found my truck about two o'clock in the morning. I'd been travelling for thirty-six hours. That's my record of the Arden. It was ...there was things going on and the Germans were pretty close, and there was a lot of banging, but we...when you're a wireless operator, you've got four walls around you and you've got earphones on - you don't know a lot that's going on. You're working the whole time. Then we crossed the Rhein. We get into Germany. I remember Osnabrueck. Osnabrueck was bombed completely and we carried on till we came to Lueneburger Heide. Lneberg Heath. That must have been April, 1945, I think. By this time we were...had no real job to do with the radios because they're using civilian lines. They're using the ordinary public telephone systems, if you like, to be in touch with, and we were really superfluous at that time. and we were just sitting in the sun and trying to enjoy ourselves a bit and then one day, we were told to keep a listening watch. Who? Between the German high command and the 21st army group, Montgomery's high command. And on comes this message which I took down. 21st army group wireless operators were comparatively young. We'd been fighting a long time, working hard. It was nothing for us to take this sort of thing. They couldn't get it, so we took it and we sent to them by telephone. My two friends had one as well, but I don't even know if they're alive or not. But I've kept it all this time. That's the message I took. Then the German high command... Interviewer: What it says? Norman Cohen: What's in it it's best to tell you - it's in German, but the translation that I've got is: "To Admiral Durnitz from Admiral von Friedeburg." Admiral von Friedeburg was the general in charge of the high command of Hamburg. "Have signed conditions including shipping in same zones. The ceasefire will take effect from eight o'clock on May the 5th." I don't know what other messages there are around to show the end of the war, but as far as the Americans and the British concerned and the Canadians - people always leave out the Canadians and they shouldn't. Wonderful soldiers. One interesting thing in this - it also says something about Dunkerque. What I didn't realize until somebody explained it to me that Dunkerque resisted the invasion of the Allies all the time and there was a German garrison there in Dunkerque the whole time, so they surrendered at the same time as all the German armies did. To take effect from the 5th of May. So that's basically my war service. Interviewer: Lueneburg and it's not far away from Bergen-Belsen. What happens when the war is finished and now you're becoming aware of what really happened there? Norman Cohen: I was fortunate enough in having two friends - one was a sub-editor of the Yorkshire Post. Another one was a reporter with Reuter's in London, so they were both journalists. When we heard something was happening in the camps...I'm sorry to say I was very naive, very unobservant. I don't know why at the time it meant so little to me, but it did. Whether it was just for survival, I don't know. But when we heard about Belsen, my two friends said: "Let's go." So we got a driver and our truck and we went to Belsen. We weren't allowed to enter and it's only recently I've discovered why - it was typhus. With all the goodwill in the world, with all our charm, against British soldiers, and the fact that on the side of our truck it said the second army headquarters, which normally would let us go anywhere - they wouldn't let us in. But we saw people and the smell and through the bars we could see mountains of glasses, of watches, of shoes. It still somehow seemed so unreal. The smell was terrible. We went back - what day it was, whether that day, next day, I don't know - but... Interviewer: It was after the 8th of May? Norman Cohen: Eighth of May? I really can't tell you, I really can't tell you. Interviewer: Because Bergen-Belsen was liberated on the 15th of April. Norman Cohen: But it was still...by the time they got anything organized, I don't know. Interviewer: Did you see the mountains of... Norman Cohen: Probably before the 8th of May. We could see it throught the bars - we weren't allowed in. Interviewer: But you see the mountains of bodies or it wasn't there already? Norman Cohen: No, no. Whatever there were...I assure you, I'd remember today if I had. But what I did see, and this was in Lneburg...I went to see the docs, the M.O. - the medical officer. The reason being - silly to say now - but.....(not clear). And my hearing wasn't very good - I'd got wax in my ears and they needed cleaning out. So I went to see the doctor. I went two or three times before I could see him and I came out not being able to see him and I saw somebody coming towards me. It was somebody wearing a black-and-white striped pyjamas. He walked towards me. I froze. I didn't breathe. I didn't speak. It made the worst Dracula film look like nothing. He walked towards me. I was seeing a living skeleton walking towards me, just bones. The eyes must have been there, but they were here somewhere. Just two sockets and he walked straight towards me and I realized he couldn't see me. I flattened myself against the wall and he just walked past me. If I'd have touched him he'd have fallen down. There was nothing there. Maybe he wasn't alive. Believe me, he wasn't alive. Then it came home what a concentration camp was. What had happened to the minds of people. It was his willpower only that moved - nothing else. There was nothing else there. That's something that haunts me and always will. On the other side - I don't know where it was, Osnabrueck, I think - when we came through and released the workers who had been brought to work in factories and there were four or five men, singing and dancing, and they were going back to Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia - I don't know. It was that sort of area and they were wearing uniforms that looked as if they had ought to be in theatre. Hats with plumes and they'd got gold things here and one had got a cigar and medals - unbelievable. So these were also - had been brought to work in Germany. How they were there, how they looked so well-fed, I don't know. But that's another side that's also stayed with me. But to see that skeleton move, which brings me to the next time I went to the doctor's or the third time - I don't remember - and I was just going to go in to the doctor's and all military police vehicles arrive. Many and military police with their red bands around their hats and on their arms and red sashes and they escort a man with a coat around his shoulders, German officer coat around his shoulders, and I said to one of the soldiers: "Who's that?" He said: "It's Himmler." "What?" He said: "It's Himmler." I said: "Heinrich Himmler?" He goes into the house. I go into the next house, which the doctor was using. This was a row of houses in a nice part of Lneburg which has the park on one side of the road and all these houses. I'd been in the doctor's about two minutes and somebody comes rushing in and says: "Come quickly! Now! Whatever!" And he just dropped everything and ran. I wait and he comes back a few minutes later and he said: "He's dead. He's taken a cyanide pill." It was in here and he just bit it and died. Why he was never examined before then....I was the...I certainly was the last Jew to see Heinrich Himmler - that I can tell you categorically. I'm one of the last people. For all the good it does me. But at least I can give you verification that Heinrich Himmler is dead. And the other one I saw was William Joyce and that name doesn't mean anything to you. Lord Horhall, you know? Lord Horhall was an Irishman with a very nice voice who used to broadcast to the British troops. He always used to say: "Germany calling, Germany calling. You British soldiers, do you realize what you are missing? How wonderful it is in Germany? You are on rations - you can have anything you like here and the women are absolutely marvelous. All you've got to do is just walk over and join us and you'll have no problem at all." He was a traitor - I think they hanged him. I saw him go in there. Interviewer: When did you realize that what happened in the camps happened mainly to Jews, not only, but they were the main victim there? Norman Cohen: A long time later. A long time later. Interviewer: So when you went to Bergen-Belsen it was out of curiousity? Norman Cohen: Yes. I told you, my Jewishness wasn't that great. My name was Cohen - I never changed it, I never wanted to change it. That was my name, but a great feeling of being a Jew - I was an Englishman. Interviewer: You were more English than Jew? Norman Cohen: Of course. Interviewer: But you said that in the army you felt kind of anti-semitism? Norman Cohen: I met anti-semitism. It didn't make me feel any more of a Jew when you meet anti-semitism. Interviewer: Or any less of an English. Norman Cohen: Right, right. It's a paradox, but an English Jew - don't let this go over to England - an English Jew is very much an Englishman. Less now, much less now - we identify more as being Jewish. We may not keep - we, I'm calling myself an Englishman. I would call myself a Yerushalmi. But speaking as an Englishman, the English today identify more with being Jewish. They may not necessarily keep and practise their Judaism, but they identify much more. This happened from the early 20th century when the Jews of the U.K., of England - your Montefiores, your Rothschilds and so on - who were very much in the English class. If I tell you that where I grew up, when a rabbi used to wear the same clerical collar as the Church of England ministers. Unbelievable as it is - let me find you a picture. I can show a picture of a rabbi, a famous rabbi in England, at a wedding without his head covered. That's the way the English Jews were. They were...they would talk about the Passover and the Sabbath and the Day of Atonement. Very few talked about Yom Kippur, Pesach. The Feast of Weeks, never Shavuot. That's the way English Jews were. Interviewer: But still what was the expression of anti-semitism that you met in the army? Norman Cohen: I...the war had finished and I was in Hanover and our unit had a Christmas party and one of the crowd in our unit drank too much and fell asleep and I was dancing with his girlfriend. He woke up, he was a good boxer, he then punched me and hurt me and called me a "dirty Jew". I think he'd have called me a dirty anything because I'd taken his...I was dancing with his girlfriend. But he called me "dirty Jew" and it took me quite awhile and then slowly but surely everybody apologized to me because I'd helped fight and win the war as much as them, but it took quite awhile and I realized I was different, I was different. Interviewer: Did you meet the Jewish Brigade during your service? Norman Cohen: In Brussels. I was a very shy young man. I went on leave to Brussels and I asked if there was a Jewish club. I found the Jewish club. Well I don't have to tell you the Israeli attitude. You go into this place and unless you make yourself known you don't exist. So I walked in there, a shy young man. I'd have liked a cup of tea or something. Everybody's busying themselves and in come some of these very tough Jewish Brigade boys. And they walked past me as if I didn't exist and they were talking Ivrit and I didn't see where I could get a cup of tea or anything, so I walked out and that's the end of the story. But I was very proud to see they'd got a Magen David on their shoulders. No, I didn't meet any. I was very...terribly shy. Interviewer: So after the work is finished, you finish your service army. You go back to England and only later on in England you hear about the camps and what happened to the Jews under the Nazi regime? Norman Cohen: Yes, but it's a very slow process. It's a very slow process. You've got to get out of your system the fact that you have a Jewish religion, but you don't relate to these foreign Jews. You're an Englishman. You happen to have a Jewish faith, right? Could you tell me that a Catholic could relate to the poor peasants in South America as being equal-term Catholics? Can you imagine? A Catholic, a Catholic in Paris, whose got a nice house, a nice garden, this and the other, going over to Buenos Aires, going to a slum area where there's a church and now they are practising their Christianity and they're practising it in another language. They may be saying their prayers in Latin, but they talk in Spanish as opposed to French or English - they haven't got a lot in common. Interviewer: It was the same for you? Norman Cohen: Yes. We were English, English. It's hard to explain. It's taken me a long time, a long time. My drawback here is I speak English quite well, but I am no different from a Jew from Valkevishke, Prague, Rotterdam, Berlin. It doesn't make any difference, but it's taken me a long time. Interviewer: And now you're in Israel, living in Israel. Norman Cohen: And I don't ever....my wife likes to go abroad, but I don't particularly. I don't even want to leave Yerushalayim. I'm here. And that's it. Interviewer: Okay. Thank you very much. Norman Cohen: Before...Can I tell you one quick one? The war had finished. You may wonder, the prosperity of Germany. They were "kaput", they were flat, they were done, they'd got nothing. The Marshall Plan comes in to put them back on their feet. Now at the end of the war we were sent up north to a place called Eutin - this is...(not clear) Holstein, where a lot of German prisoners-of-war were. A lot. So firstly, they established a scheme called "coal scuttle". A coal scuttle is something you put your coal in and keep it in the house. And that was to get anybody who had worked in a coal mine or anybody who was willing to work in a coal mine to get out of the army quickly. They get extra pay, they get this, they get more food for their families, and so they got coal miners plus volunteers. The next one was Operation Barleycorn. Barley and corn come from ground - farmers grow it. So anybody who had worked on a farm or was willing to could come out of the army and do that. They had to leave their uniform which is how I got hold of my lovely new German badge, on which it says "Gott mit uns" (G-d is with us). Then there was one or two other schemes which I can't remember. So then these people come and work to get the country back on their feet. Those who worked in factories of whatever, in banks and so forth, had got nowhere to live. They lived in sheds on bits of ground. I knew a very rich banking family that lived in one of these sheds. But when they finished work they rebuilt their homes. A lot of people never worked in factories from four in the morning till two in the afternoon worked in factories. They'd go home, have a wash, something to eat and work to rebuild their homes till nine o'clock at night. And then sleep for a few hours. Now, once you have the momentum of this, they didn't stop. The British came out of the army - we'd won a war. And we said: "What are you going to do for us? We've won a war." We hadn't got this mentality, this thinking to work to rebuild our country as Germany did theirs. This...once this momentum started in Germany, they were able to rebuild and keep on building which is an interesting thing of how the prosperity of Germany has been so great. Interviewer: Okay, thank you very much. Norman Cohen: My pleasure.