20 January 2024 , 20:57
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It was nearly 80 years ago but Joanna Millan remembers being terrified by the deafening noise of the engines as the RAF airlifted her to freedom aged three.
She and her five brothers and sisters, all aged three and four, were among over 300 Jewish orphans flown to the Lake District in converted Stirling bombers at the end of the Second World War.
The emaciated survivors of Nazi death camps in eastern Europe were given new lives and dubbed the Windermere Children – the title of a 2020 BBC film about their story.
Joanna, 81, says: “I only have flashes of memory but we weren’t told where we were going. Our understanding was that if you left the camp it was bad news – nobody ever came back.”
Joanna and Rob Rinder on Zoom (The Daily Mirror)After being adopted in England, and renamed from Bela to Joanna, she went on to marry and have three children and eight grandchildren. And she has formed a special bond with TV star Rob Rinder – whose grandad, Morris Malenicky, was also flown here on one of the bombers in August 1945.
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Rob told Morris’s harrowing story on Who Do You Think You Are? in 2018. Now, he will join forces with Joanna for Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27.
“Joanna is family. We are all family,” says Rob, speaking to her over Zoom from Malaysia, where he is filming his Amazing Hotels show.
“So many of them – very young children like Joanna and others, older, like my grandfather – had no family or little surviving family. So they forged, it seems, this bond of trauma, to be alongside one another.
“Those bonds began the work of healing. For me, it’s a spiritual complexion and connection between the survivors. Because they had experienced so much trauma and loss, they chose to live their life in hope.
Joanna aged three with siblings after they arrived in England“When that’s the foundation for families over the years, it’s like being among a family that’s even richer than your own.”
Both Joanna and Morris ended up in Theresienstadt concentration camp in Czechoslovakia before it was liberated by the Russians in April 1945.
During years of persecution, they had starved in ghettos and seen their parents and most of their relatives and friends murdered by the Nazis.
Polish-born Morris was a starving slave labourer making tank shells for the German army before ending up in Theresienstadt – and had to lie about his age to escape to the UK like Joanna.
He went on to marry and have children and grandchildren, and died aged 78 in 2001.
Joanna, living in a self-contained flat in a Jewish-run Hertfordshire care home, counts her blessings daily.
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Joanna Millan 81, speaking about her experience“In a way, it’s like we’ve been gifted these extra years,” she explains. “We shouldn’t have survived. Yet 70 years on, we’re living a full life. I think of each year as a gift, so we should enjoy it.”
Smiling in agreement, Rob says: “There’s a word in Yiddish, ‘davka’, which means ‘to be contrary’. You’ll never meet people who have grabbed back the pen in life from the narrative that others have written for them with more force or power. It makes you feel more profoundly hopeful than you’ll ever be among any other group.”
Morris once told Rob that to be in Windermere was “as if he’d come from hell and arrived in heaven”.
Since 2018, when he retraced Morris’ footsteps, the barrister and TV judge, 45, has immersed himself in documentary work about the Holocaust and his rich Jewish heritage.
In 2022, he and his mother, Angela Cohen, were awarded MBEs for their work in Holocaust education.
The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day – the fragility of freedom – feels especially relevant against the backdrop of atrocities in Israel, Gaza and Ukraine.
Rob says his grandad had a real love of Britain, adding: “This idea of democracy under the rule of law really mattered to him.”
Yet Joanna still worries her freedom might be, once again, snatched away. She admits: “I’ve had my bag packed all the time, mentally. I always carry my passport with me.”
Holocaust survivor Joanna Millan, aged 3 (Tameside Advertiser)Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1942, her father died in Auschwitz the following year and her mother in Theresienstadt in March 1944.
Of her life in the concentration camp, Joanna says: “We siblings were very close. If one of us got in trouble, we’d all stand at the wall with them.
“We didn’t know how to eat with a knife and fork. We’d never seen green vegetables. My limbs were weak. I had kidney disease.”
Their experiences of being starved by the Nazis left Joanna and Morris with a lifelong habit of hoarding food.
As Rob explains: “If you know what it is to experience hunger and you know what it is to be cold, that never leaves you. It sits and it imprints, like a dark handprint on your heart.”
Arriving in Windermere in August 1945, Joanna and her siblings were soon dispatched to separate families. Despite arriving with only two words of English – dog and soup – she later became a magistrate, serving for 33 years.
In 1964, she married engineer Harvey, a British Jew, and they had children Daniel, now 58, Mandy, 57, and Wendy, 56.
Joanna admits: “I was absolutely clueless when they were born. I’d never felt that maternal love myself, so that connection took time to grow.”
Harvey encouraged Joanna to investigate her past, which led to her discovering more family and cousins across the world.
“It’s hard to keep up with them all,” she smiles. “But I’m now part of a community of relatives who belong and they have all welcomed me with open arms.”
When she was 50 and with the help of writer Sarah Moskovitz, who wrote a book about Holocaust child survivors, she reconnected with four of her siblings. She said: “We met in California for a child survivor conference and it felt very natural being together.”
Sadly, this April marks 22 years since Harvey died of cancer, aged 66. “It’s a bit of a cliché but I always say don’t put off what you can do today,” says Joanna.
“I knew Harvey wasn’t going to live for a long time, so we did all the long-hauls and birthdays while we could.
“We took every opportunity and I think I’ve done pretty much everything I want to do in life. But I’ll still always stand up for what I believe in. We all have to.”
Joanna still takes pleasure in simple things, like the peaceful view of the countryside outside her living room window. “I’d never seen trees before England,” she says. And one of the first survivors to speak in schools about the Holocaust, Joanna is part of the Association of Jewish Refugees.
Chief executive Michael Newman says: “Rob and Joanna’s accounts capture in the rawest sense how quickly humanity can crumble.
“Their testimonies underscore the vital importance of commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day, both to honour those whose lives were ripped apart by anti-Semitism and to stand in solidarity, ensuring the experiences of the survivors and refugees, and their families, are never forgotten.”
- For information on the Association of Jewish Refugees, visit ajr.org.uk