Remembering so many...

BERTIE Littman is keen to explain: "AJEX is a brother to the Royal British Legion. It does exactly the same work - in fact, we work together.

"We care for all those who need assistance and keep a watching brief over members who might need some help and we also raise money for medical help.

"It's a charity and the only difference is that it's mainly for Jewish people."

AJEX started in 1928 following a series of meetings held in London to protest about the Arab anti-Jewish riots in Palestine and its Honorary Secretary, Louis Sarna, held the post until 1952.

Membership spread and now the Bournemouth branch boasts around 100 members.

Loyalty and allegiance to your country have always been a strong part of Judaism and for Bertie, born 85 years ago within the sound of Bow Bells, it played a continuing part in his family life.

"As a family we loved our country and we always put our money where our mouth was.

"In the First World War, my father and his four brothers joined up and two of them were killed on the Western Front, aged 17 and 19," he says.

When World War II broke out Bertie was 17 and too young to fight so he joined the Home Guard and then the Army, where he served for six years, fighting in North Africa, Italy and the Balkans.

After the war he served again, in Northern Ireland.

"I was living there and when the troubles broke out I didn't like the idea of terrorism so I joined the Ulster Defence Regiment."

He saw his actions as entirely in keeping with the Jewish community's efforts to fight for their country.

Did he fight with particular gusto during WWII because of what was happening to Jews in Nazi Germany?

Not especially, he says, because much of the appalling detail of the Holocaust was only made public after the liberation.

"But we knew before the war, what was going on," he says.

"From 1932 onwards almost every Jewish person in Britain would have known about the anti-Semitism, although a lot of people turned a blind eye to it."

One who didn't was Winston Churchill and, to a man, the AJEX members are happy to put right the myth that Jews blame him for not liberating the concentration camps sooner.

"He couldn't," says Bertie.

"The only way to save them was to defeat Hitler."

Fellow Eastender Alf Breyer, also 85, experienced anti-Semitism but he joined up in 1936 at the age of 14, as a band boy.

"I played the oboe and the sax - if there hadn't been a war I'd have finished up at the school of music at Kneller Hall and become a bandmaster."

Instead he was sent to serve with the Royal Ulster Rifles and then joined an Airbourne unit and was captured following the Ardennes offensive in 1944.

"When I was captured I had a jumping jacket on and I had the Star of David hanging round my neck.

"A German officer saw it and came up and said very quietly: If I was you I'd take that off. The SS are behind us.'"

Alf didn't remove the symbol, however.

"I just tucked it in and did up the jacket; just young and foolish I guess!"

Adrian Bazar, 85, also took part in the Ardennes action - but as a part of Phantom, the ultra-secret unit attached to the SAS and the 82nd Army Airbourne Corps.

"Our job was to see and not be seen, hear and not be heard.

"I was picked to be in it as a cypher clerk because I was a musician and was able to pick up Morse Code quickly," he says.

All these men went to war as Englishmen and Jews.

But service for Ivan Cybula, 87, Polish but living in France, began in the legendary French Foreign Legion, which he joined to avoid being sent back to Poland.

He fought from north Africa to the Arctic and, following an injury, ended up in hospital in Ormskirk near Liverpool.

"In the meantime France surrendered to the Germans and we were all assembled in London.

"We had two choices. One was to return to France which, being Jewish, wasn't a good idea so I joined the Free French for the duration of the war plus six months," he says.

"When Paris was liberated, I began to search for my family."

He discovered his parents and sisters were deported in 1942 by the French Police and that his brother had ended up in Auschwitz.

"Fortunately he was young and strong and he survived."

Ivan was delighted to learn of a sister, born in 1939 after he'd joined up, and started making inquiries.

"When I traced her she turned round to me and said: You're not my brother because we didn't know each other.'"

This memory is still raw enough to make him weep.

Of all the AJEX members gathered for this interview, it is perhaps Walter Kammerling, 84, whose story is the most chilling.

Patiently, eloquently, he recalls how, as a child in Vienna, he witnessed the increasing victimisation of Jews.

"In 1938 a young Jewish man shot a German official in Paris.

"Following this, on November 10, there was a terrible pogrom (violent action against Jews) across Germany and Austria.

"This pogrom euphemistically is called Kristallnacht because of all the smashed glass from the synagogues.

"I don't like to call it that because it sounds too romantic."

He recalls the mass hysteria when Hitler visited the Austrian city and his fear when: "Going home from school you'd hear screaming behind you and you didn't dare to stop because someone was being beaten up."

Walter escaped on the Kindertransport, the flight of 10,000 Jewish children who were brought to the UK by train.

"You had to pay £50 and in those days that was the whole wages of an English man for a year," he says. He was 14.

Walter went to live in Northern Ireland on a farm owned by the Jewish Community.

He was anxious to join up but because of his age was only offered work as a non-combatant.

"In 1943 I was able to bear arms so I volunteered then."

He didn't see action but changed his name for the duration of his military service, like many other Jews.

"The Germans had death lists and would kill you if you were captured with a Jewish name," he says.

After the war, Walter set about finding his family but to no avail.

Eventually he discovered that his sister and parents had been sent to Theresienstadt and then onwards to Auschwitz.

They did not survive.

The persecution of Jews was his reason for signing up to fight and his reason for fighting.

"I wanted it," he says, quietly.

Now, as a father, grandfather and great-grandfather he continues to give talks about his Holocaust experiences as AJEX continues to represent Jewish people who have served their country.

As Bertie Littman puts it: "I think the ex-servicemen's associations keep alive the fact that if people want to live in a decent country they have to take their share, not just say we're not going to do anything at all.

"That's why I think there should be more support for all ex-servicemen; what they stood for and what they laid on the line.

"They were prepared to give everything yet sometimes the reaction is OK, let's forget it'."

l AJEX will be joining the civic service of Remembrance at Bournemouth Cenotaph on Sunday. For details of how to join AJEX contact a.breyer@ntlworld.com