大象传媒

I was born in Poland and I joined the Forces in Palestine when it was under the British Mandate. In 1942 I went to Egypt and joined a hospital as a nurse. I stayed in Egypt for a few years. The second place I was in was Suez. It was quite a large hospital and there was a camp outside in the grounds especially for refugees who came from Europe, and one very large ward was for children. I find it very difficult even now to talk about the children because many of them were starved and many died. They had vermin, lice and nits, but the worst of it was to see their eyes. When you presented them with trays of bread, they didn鈥檛 want to take it - they were afraid. Later we discovered that the Germans used to taunt them by giving them something to eat and then used to snatch it back. But slowly, slowly, with lots of patience, compassion and understanding of what they had been through, they started picking up pieces of bread. They used to hide them under their mattresses and were obviously afraid they would get one slice of bread and weren鈥檛 going to get any more.

We had lots of patience and eventually they started smiling. We washed their faces and to shave their heads to get them clean from the nits. The nits would have spread into the mattresses and that would have been dangerous as well. I particularly remember one little girl whose name was Mara and who must have been about 7 or 8. She was completely delirious and was screaming and screaming. I eventually understood that the screaming was because she could see the farm where they had kept pigs, and they were running. She was running after the pigs and she didn鈥檛 know how she got to Egypt. I decided that I would give this little girl, with her lovely long hair and beautiful eyes, a lot of love and patience, and eventually she stopped screaming. I told the doctor who looked after the children, Dr. Gould who I think came from the Isle of Wight ,and another who was either German or Austrian

I also told them what I had heard the women whispering among themselves. Like the children, they had been running for their lives and many of the pregnant ones aborted because of this. The doctors spoke to them and then gave them injections to help clear out the abortions which had caused infections, before giving them medicine. After that we used to take them round the compound, singing songs and I shall never forget their faces as they sang Russian songs, Polish songs, marching songs. And we did the same with the children.

Going back to Mara, I got permission from the matron to take her into Suez and I bought her a white blouse, a red skirt, red socks, black patent shoes and a very large red ribbon. She has been in my mind ever since and I suppose I have put her in between my own 2 daughters 鈥� a third daughter We were so busy that we lost touch with most of them and eventually they were put in a camp on the other side of the Suez canal. After we came off duty, a group of us used to go over to the camp and teach the women to grow carrots and thing s in the sand round the camp. We used to teach them to spend a penny on the flowers to make them grow better! And we used to show them ourselves! I wish I had the photos of the results to prove it worked!

We also had wounded troops come into our hospital, some very badly wounded. I can鈥檛 describe how some of them looked. But we had to keep smiling - I was called 鈥楽miler鈥� and was given poems by some of the soldiers 鈥� as we were their mainstay while they were with us, and had to give them courage to face going back to the fighting or back to hospitals in Britain or Blighty as it was called.

A nice thing and a real coincidence that I remember is when they had evacuated troops back to England through South Africa, there were 2 patients left in the ward and I was on duty. One was an Englishman and one was from Mauritius. He had TB which a lot of them had and often was the reason for them going back to Blighty. While they were there, we had some excitement as the tent caught fire. We had buckets of sand and of water, and I ran to the office and the fire people came and put it out. Luckily nobody was hurt. I still have photos and also the address of the Mauritian. And many years later, in1951, after I was married and had my children, I had a burglary. I reported the theft of the electric hedge-cutter to the police and one of them who came to ask me where it was kept, etc., was telling me that sometimes when burglars can鈥檛 find anything worthwhile to steal, they set things alight. That jogged my memory of the fire in Egypt and I was telling him abut it. He looked me straight in the face and said, 鈥淭hat was me. I caused that fire. I was smoking in bed.鈥� They weren鈥檛 allowed to do that, especially in a tent, and when I came in, he threw this cigarette out and the tent caught fire.

Another time in England, 2 teacher friends invited my husband and myself for a meal, and while we were there a man called Mick came in. I jumped up because I knew him but not from in England. I asked him if he had been in the army in Suez and in hospital there, and he had. We realised he had been in my friend鈥檚 ward and used to come and have a cup of tea with us when we were having a break on night duty.

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