Harry’s war and his revenge on Hitler
Survivor tells his story in new memoir under auspices of Manchester's The Fed
Jenni Frazer is a freelance journalist
On one wall of Harry Olmer’s north-west London home there are dozens of framed photographs, all clearly family pictures – some old, some more recent.
The pictures represent more than the kind of mementoes to be found in most Jewish homes. For, as Harry himself states clearly on the cover of his remarkable memoir: “My revenge on Hitler is my family”.
In other words, rebuilding his family — he and his late wife Margaret, herself an immigrant who came from Austria on the Kindertransport, had four children — was the driving force behind Harry’s life.
A barely believable 97 years old, compact of build and charmingly polite, Harry Olmer arrived in Britain as one of the group called ‘The Boys’ – the young men and women who flew from Prague in August 1945, initially to stay in Windermere, in the Lake District.
Many of The Boys had been through several concentration and labour camps. Harry’s war, which began for him as a 12-year-old named Chaim Olmer, was slightly different. His is a story of last-minute impulse escapes, of slave labour in Polish-based ammunitions centres, of backbreaking work in the Plaszow camp near Krakow, of time in Buchenwald and Theresienstadt, and of near-miraculously finding that two of his siblings, from their family of six brothers and sisters, had survived the war.
Throughout it all, Harry says two things: “I never thought I wouldn’t survive” — and “I never lost my Jewish faith”. He might add a third thing — thanks to being born in Poland near the German border, the young Chaim spoke Polish, German, and of course Yiddish. It is probable that his ability to slide in and out of languages saved his life on many occasions.
In his memoir, Harry tells us that he was a good student at school — something which stood him in good stead when he arrived in Britain and was eventually able to resume his long-suspended education.
But first he had to go through six years of terror and fear. Just one of the chapters in his memoir is called “A lucky escape”, but that seems to have permeated his life during the Holocaust.
Astonishingly, the Olmers were able to give young Chaim a barmitzvah. At the time he and his siblings were working for the Germans. His father told them all “not to tell them our real dates of birth because, if you were under 14, you didn’t get any rations”. So — not for the last time — Chaim concealed his true age and claimed he was two years older than he really was. The downside of this, however, was that if you got rations, you had to work.
Nevertheless, he records: “I had my barmitzvah during this time. The rabbi started the service very early in the morning so as not to jeopardise the situation with the Germans. I didn’t say the Haftorah. I just did the bracha (blessing) and we had a lunch afterwards at my grandmother’s place”. How brave of the family to try to make things ‘normal’, even for such a short time.
He tells terrible stories of selections and random shootings, all carried out in the most matter-of-fact way. In 1942, he says, hundreds of Jews were rounded up and put on trucks bound for an unspecified location. In one incident a Jewish leader’s father was confronted by a German officer about a man in his home who was an amputee.
“That’s my father”, the Jewish leader said, and the officer immediately killed the amputee. “I saw the Poles digging graves behind the house,” Harry reports, “and when they saw the man had an amputated leg, they tried to break his other leg just to make the grave smaller”.
In 1943 there was a new horror, which if the taciturn Olmer describes as “the most terrible place you could possibly imagine,” must have been like another hell. This was a munitions factory in central Poland, spread over three sites, camps A, B and C. Camp A made steel shells, camp B made small arms, and Camp C, where Chaim was sent, was where the explosives were made.
The largely Jewish workers in Camp C used picric acid, making land and sea mines. It turned everything around it yellow, and it became well known that people lasted only two months before dying of the toxic acid.
One night Chaim ran off and joined a transport company which carried the empty shells from trains into the factories. That certainly saved his life.
And the next stop was Buchenwald, where Chaim arrived in August 1944. This was followed by a stint at an explosives factory and then a new destination — Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, eventually to be liberated by the Russians.
Just before liberation Chaim was so ill that he says now “if the war had lasted another day, I wouldn’t have survived”. His body went into spasm and he couldn’t talk. The war was over and Chaim Olmer was 17, nearly 18, but in a highly weakened state.
The big question was what to do next. He wanted to go to Palestine — but he was aware that the British were turning people away. He got news from a friendly nurse in a makeshift hospital that one of his sisters had survived, which helped a little in his recovery.
The nurse told him about British agreement to allow 1,000 young people into the UK. She told Chaim that he should go, but his name was not on the list. “She [the nurse] told me that one of the boys who was on the list for England had found out his father was alive in Poland, so he decided to go back there.”
This boy was Ephraim Mintzberg, and it was with papers bearing his name that Chaim Olmer arrived in Windermere, telling everyone in earshot that his name was Chaim, and not Ephraim. He never found out what became of his unwitting rescuer.
It wasn’t till 1953 that Chaim transmogrified into Harry — doing National Service for the British Army, whose officers could not get their tongues round the name Chaim. But that was a long way off.
After Windermere, Chaim was still not fully recovered so he and some other ‘Boys’ were sent to recuperate in Cardross, in Dumbartonshire. He learned English, made friends, and after taking Scottish school qualifications equivalent to A levels, began first to work as a dental mechanic and then ultimately became a dentist.
Following five years’ study at Glasgow University’s dental school, he achieved his orthodontics certificate of merit. He went on to become a highly-regarded and well-loved dentist in London and Hertfordshire — continuing to practise until he was 86.
Harry Olmer’s memoir was written under the auspices of the My Voice oral history project, run by Manchester-based social services charity The Fed. Its volunteer Gary Boorman spent the last year with Harry, learning about his extraordinary life.
Harry returned to Poland for the first time in 1990, taking members of his family and trying to learn of the fate of his relatives who did not survive. He has spent many years since talking about his Holocaust experiences to schools, and was awarded first the BEM and then the MBE for his services to Holocaust education.
Princess Anne gave Harry his MBE medal in 2023. “She asked me about the work I do, and I told her that I still go into schools… it’s more important now than ever before because of rising antisemitism and Holocaust deniers.Rge f” The princess touched Harry gently on the shoulder. “She gets it,” Harry says.
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