Feature

From the front line…

Those who go the extra mile ….. or two!

BY JACQUELINE CURZON

The news at the moment is really all about one event the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia. And one of the first things that you realise when one person starts a fight is that as sure as ‘eggs is eggs,’ lots of other people will start joining in or starting up elsewhere. So we are finding ourselves not only with Mr Putin trying to annexe a neighbouring democratic state but with the Chinese Premier starting trouble somewhere else, and of course you then have Iran flexing its muscles again, and we have North Korea getting stuck in with lots of drums and trumpets and launching new super missiles into the sea around Japan. In fact they are indicating that they have the means to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile called a Hwasong-17, with the range to hit America. Troubled times.

Kim Jong-Un, the supreme leader of North Korea, is very likely to try and negotiate more food and more benefits for his country, as each day his people die in their thousands due to starvation. The fact is that they have little or no imported food since every other country is not trading with them due to their nuclear desires. Yet he has found the money to do so much else, mainly around himself and his political elite. He has even made a “video” of himself in front of his new toy. It's not surprising that these distractions are appearing when everybody else is focused on a completely different part of the world.

Often when the media is distracted by the enormous goings on in the world, the little people are just getting on with things and doing amazing things. One such person is a Jewish Aid and Charity worker called Sally Becker (no relation to Boris Becker, the tennis star) known to many during the wars in the Balkans as the Angel of Mostar. During those dark times she delivered aid to anybody who needed it, evacuating wounded children and escorting orphans to safety. She has attended to children in all the major hotspots of recent times in her desire to make a difference. Like many of her ilk she operated under the radar of officialdom and just got on with it. Some did not return, like Alan Henning from Greater Manchester, who died taking aid to Syria. He unfortunately met Jihadi John. Alan was another person of enormous worth to the worldwide community.

Over the years Sally rescued children from many conflicts and delivered life saving aid to people in need. Now she is rescuing orphans from the Ukraine, what a hero. She is also connecting Ukranians through her Charity, Save a Child Global Paediatric Network with specialist medical doctors and consultants in the UK and elsewhere. In Mostar she drove a battered old Renault, today it’s a coach which she took from Poland to Lviv, to rescue the children. And in case you thought she had it easy, over the years she has been imprisoned by Serb paramilitaries and shot by Albanian thugs. You don’t get much braver than that.

And now to Pesach, which is growing ever closer. The pages of this newspaper are adorned with advertisements, whether for wine, 5* holidays, food or catered meals. And every year the prices rise and there are collective groans from the shoppers in the supermarkets. The war in Ukraine has generated some unusual changes to the stance of what is allowed, as there is a shortage of sunflower oil (80% of UK oil comes from the Ukraine) with a hechsher and as a consequence the KLBD has allowed other sunflower oil without supervision as long as there are no other additives. A tiny little win for your pocket. But if you thought this was limited to the kosher Pesach market you would be very wrong. The food standards agency will allow the substitution of sunflower oil by rapeseed oil (canola) without telling the customers on pre-prepared chips, breaded fish and frozen vegetables. Normally the FSA forbid switches like this due to the prevention of allergic reactions but in this special and rather unique situation they are bending the rules. So as Jews, watch out about other switches which we are not told about. The mind boggles. As it happens, McCain chips are no longer under supervision so one of the potential problems may have gone away. And now a musical story about the good and the bad. One day a 93 year old man went to a concert. He listened to the music in a church in Bath and at the interval decided to get up and go for a walk, he fell and broke his hip, luckily for him he was attended to by a senior A&E Doctor who happened to be the organist and the Reverend in the same church who was a retired surgeon, they made him comfortable and whilst this was happening some other members of the audience rang the ambulance service whilst he was lying on the floor in the auditorium. The patient said to the concert orchestra, “I don’t want to mess things up, do please carry on.” This was all the more impressive as the ambulance didn’t turn up for nearly 12 hours. Unfortunately for the ambulance service, a former ITV journalist from Bristol happened to be at the concert and saw the incident of the pensioner on the floor and therefore was able to share this with the media. In fact as he was so brave he was compared with people on the Titanic where the band played their music on the main deck as the ship went down. Everyone had nice things to say about the pensioner and everyone said how incredibly brave he was, as he was in a lot of pain, and to have been so incredibly stoic. As usual the ambulance service apologised and said sometimes there were longer than expected waiting lists, due to backed up A &E departments, so if you’re 93 and don’t want to spend 12 hours on a stone floor, avoid concerts.

Which links to one of my favourite bugbears, e-scooters. Dangerous, often illegal and always a talking point. Some Motor Mechanics of ill repute are now taking the scooters, which normally have a top speed of 15 miles per hour, and hacking the software in them, which allows them to manipulate the controls on the top speed and as a result one can see some scooters achieving up to 50 miles per hour. Absolutely hideous. The really scary bit is that most riders are not wearing helmets. My father in law who in his youth rode motorcycles used to say “if you wear a ten bob (50 pence) helmet you must have

a ten bob head”. So if your child has an e-scooter, I strongly suggest you make them cover up. If you remember Covid and all the restrictions you will remember fines (fixed penalty notices) that were issued to Joe Public for the many and varied Covid related offences. During the period nearly 125,000 notices were issued, and guess what - 51,000 remain unpaid. So what do you say, I mean does it really matter? Well yes, especially as there is a pressure for an amnesty, on those still outstanding, so once again the law abiding citizen has or will pay the price. And to extend the discussion further, what about an amnesty for parking or speeding fines? No chance. To top this our beloved Met has just issued 20 more fines to the party goers at Number 10, will they get an amnesty too? What a waste of time and effort. Two weeks ago a remarkable lady died aged 94, Vera Gissing. She was one of the children rescued by Sir Nicholas Winton MBE in 1939 as part of the Kindertransport. (he was known as Britain’s Schindler). The details of the rescue and of many things relating to this are the Jacqueline Curzon stuff of legend, but it was not until 1988 PHOTO: LARA MINSKY PHOTOGRAPHY when Nicholas Winton‘s wife discovered a scrapbook which contained all the photographs and names and letters and documents from the people that he rescued that his heroism became known to his wife and a wider audience. He was then invited - and this is the interesting bit - to sit in the audience of a BBC television show called ‘That’s Life,’ which was run by the famous Esther Rantzen (now known as a tireless campaigner for children and senior citizens, and the instigator of the Childline and Silverline charities). In fact Winten was the special guest and unbeknownst to him, he was sitting next to one of the children he had saved, Vera Gissing nee Diamante. On the programme Esther Rantzen started thumbing through the scrapbook and recounted the saving of 669 Czech Children's lives, in 1939, from Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia. She then revealed that he was in the audience and the story unfolded. Once Vera and Sir Nicholas had become acquainted, Esther asked other survivors to stand up and dozens did, a truly remarkable event and this proved a very heartwarming tale, and great TV. Later in life Vera wrote her memoirs and became a friend of Sir Nicholas. Then in 2001 she co-wrote his biography. He died in 2015 aged 106. It’s been a tough couple of weeks at Chez Curzon as I have been struggling a lot with a lack of energy but have been invigorated by all of the acts of chessed that I have received. Thank you.