“Only superheroes run into burning buildings and save people.”

On the hottest September Sunday since records began, descendants of the Karbatznick family gathered for the unveiling of a plaque in honour of Barney Lewis on the wall of a building which now occupies the site of his wartime family home in Stoke Newington. The plaque commemorates King George VI’s award of the George Medal to Lewis in 1941.

On 10 September 2023, senior Jewish chaplain to HM Armed Forces Rabbi Major Reuben Livingstone conducted a service in the presence of the Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Hackney, Stephen Howlett (representing King Charles III), the Speaker of Hackney Council, several Borough of Hackney councillors, and other dignitaries, before the plaque was unveiled by Lewis’ daughters Linda Levenson and Shelley Gilbert. In a short address, they told the attendees that their late father – who changed his surname from Karbatznick to Lewis in the mid-1930s in honour of his father – was their hero, and that they and their late brother John were so proud of the bravery which Lewis’ modesty meant he rarely spoke about.

The plaque was paid for by Jerry Klinger of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, and was arranged in conjunction with AJEX, whose archivist Martin Sugarman had read about Lewis’ bravery on the family’s website  www.karbatznick.com. He saved the life of a man trapped in a bombed-out building in war-torn East London on 23 September 1940. Pinned down by fallen masonry and in danger of drowning as the basement in which he was trapped filled up with water, the man faced almost certain death until Barney battled to beat the rising water level.

The collapsed building and burst water main would have caused a death toll higher than the eventual 32 dead if it wasn’t for Lewis’ bravery. He ran into the burning and flooded building several times to bring people out, but as well as the trapped man in danger of drowning, large pieces of timber and brickwork had pinned down four other men by their legs. Lewis jacked up the dangerous roof and by sheer strength forced the brickwork away, enabling the four to escape. But finding that the timber was still pinning down the fifth man, with water levels rising, Lewis crawled out of the underground chamber, obtained a saw, and returned at great personal risk to cut away the timber and free the man just as the water reached his head.

Alex Gordon, grandson of Lewis’ sister Dora, told the large crowd that his grandmother often told him about her brother’s heroism and the subsequent award of a medal. “I remember hearing that story as a small child and thinking that only superheroes ran into burning buildings and saved people, and thinking that meeting the monarch was surely reserved for extraordinary people who had performed superhuman feats? How right I was”.

Lewis was born in Stepney in 1912, and as his parents had died before the war, he took two of his sisters to Buckingham Palace for the 17 June 1941 investiture by King George VI. His daughters Linda Levenson and Shelley Gilbert told the gathering, “How amazing that just one generation on from Russian husband and wife Leah and Lewis Karbatznick who spoke no English when they arrived in the country, their son was decorated for bravery by the King of England”.