Heading back to the beach

Jewish veteran from London prepares to revisit Normandy

- DANICA KIRKA

D-Day veteran Mervyn Kersh with his cat Joey at his home in London. The 99-year-old says that being Jewish gave added urgency to the fight against the Germans. "We knew what was happening. (We) didn't know the extent of it, but we knew they had gas chambers," he says.

LONDON Even as he prepared to embark for the battlefields of Normandy, Pte. Mervyn Kersh was summoned by his commanding officer and threatened with arrest.

Why, the officer demanded, had Kersh refused to eat his army rations of canned beef and vegetables, subsisting only on canned peaches? Was he trying to make himself so weak that he would be unfit to fight in France?

Kersh, then 19, was indignant. “I said that was the last thing I wanted to do,” Kersh told The Associated Press. “I’m Jewish. I didn’t eat anything that wasn’t kosher as far as I could help it.”

The officer dropped the charge and Kersh was soon on board a landing ship approaching the Normandy coast with artillery shells from Allied ships and German shore batteries screaming overhead. The sense of adventure turned to fear, Kersh recalled, and he sought comfort from a pocket edition of “The Book of Psalms” before landing in France a few days after D-Day, which on June 6, 1944.

Kersh will return to France this week for ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings and the Battle of Normandy that followed. It’s expected to be one of the last big events commemorating the campaign to end the Nazis’ grip on Northern Europe, with the dwindling number of surviving veterans now approaching or past their 100th birthdays.

Growing up in a Jewish family in south London during the 1930s and ’40s, Kersh, now 99, was doubly motivated to defeat Adolf Hitler. In addition to the threat to Britain and the bombing that killed almost 30,000 people in the capital, there was the knowledge that the Nazis were slaughtering Jews across Europe.