98. A True Love Story
In about 1964, I chatted up a girl called Felicity, working in a pharmacy in Sandton, a suburb of Johannesburg. We started dating but she lived on the far side of the city in Bedfordview, which involved a long drive to see her. Nevertheless, we continued to date for some months. By then, she had left the pharmacy and had gone to work as a receptionist for a doctor, Benny Hermer. I did not have a current doctor, so, in due course, when I developed some minor ailment, I booked in to see Felicity’s boss. He was a wonderfully cheerful man and a very good doctor. We chatted while he examined me. I mentioned that I worked in the movie industry. Benny laughed and said that he nearly became the subject of a major Hollywood movie starring Rita Hayworth and Tyrone Power. I was suitably intrigued, and we arranged to meet outside of his working hours so that he could tell me the whole story.
We had lunch a week later at a restaurant near his rooms, where Benny told me his story. After leaving school, he had attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg to study medicine. He was also a gifted pianist and gave occasional recitals. At that time, he met an attractive young lady who was taking a degree in music at the University. Their love of music soon became a romantic love. However, she was intent on taking her musical career to the next level. Benny reluctantly agreed that they would wait to get married after she returned from studying at the Berlin Conservatoire in Germany. She left in 1938 with the intention of having a career as a concert pianist. She had already given concerts in Johannesburg and was acclaimed as a rising young star in the world of classical music.
Her choice of the Berlin Conservatoire was unfortunate as World War II was looming on the horizon. There was general confidence in South Africa that war would not happen. Sadly, of course, in 1939, war did break out. Not only was she trapped in a country at war with her homeland, she also happened to be Jewish. She tried using her South African identity to get permission to leave Germany. South Africa, as part of the British Empire, was certainly at war with Germany but there were also elements of extreme right-wing Afrikaners who supported Hitler. I don’t have her story in any detail, unfortunately, but I do know that she made every effort to leave Germany as soon as war was declared.
Meanwhile, Benny, having qualified as a medical doctor, immediately enlisted in the South African armed forces and was soon posted to North Africa where the war in the desert was beginning. New Zealand, Australian and South African troops were mostly deployed to North Africa to fight against the Desert Fox, the name given to the German General Erwin Rommel.
The war in the desert seesawed back and forth, but in January 1942 Rommel succeeded in capturing Tobruk, a key port in Libya that Churchill regarded as vital to the success of the Allied forces. However, the main British forces had been deployed elsewhere and the garrison in Tobruk was occupied by largely inexperienced Indian troops and a couple of South African infantry divisions. The garrison was put under the command of South African Major General Hendrik Kloppers. Without going into details, the position was untenable. The Allied air forces had been moved too far away to be effective. The Luftwaffe was in range with a great number of bombers and fighter support. British troops were also too far away to come to the rescue. As the garrison was completely surrounded by German and Italian forces, Klopper signaled to the nearest British commander asking for his instructions. General Ritchie replied that Klopper should make his own decision. The South African, a hardened military man, was also a realist. He recognized that his troops were surrounded and vastly outnumbered. He could either go down “fighting to the last man” or surrender. He took the pragmatic approached and surrendered. It was the second largest surrender of Allied troops in WWII after Singapore. 33,000 men were imprisoned by the German army. Klopper was subsequently found blameless for the failure and the blame was attributed to the British High Command.
In the middle of all this, Benny Hermer was captured by the Germans while accompanying a convoy approaching Tobruk and imprisoned with the rest of the Allied troops. Included, by the way, were about 2,000 non-combatants, mostly Black South Africans who acted as drivers, laborers, medical orderlies and who were forbidden by the South African government to carry arms.
Benny immediately set about figuring out how to escape. He had come to help the Allied forces with his medical skills, and he had no intention of being helplessly incarcerated for the rest of the war. Besides, being Jewish would not exactly endear him to his captors. He was also becoming increasingly anxious about his fiancée, still stuck in Berlin, as far as he knew.
For some days he wandered around the camp, giving any medical help or advice he could, without any medical supplies whatsoever. He noticed that new prisoners almost always arrived in the evenings, piled into trucks that drove through the main gate of the prison. He also noticed the huge plumes of dust kicked up by the trucks as they drove along the dirt road into the camp.
The following evening, he wandered casually up to the fence next to the gate and as the trucks entered, he simply walked through the thick dust and out of the gates. He admitted to me that it was a foolhardy move. The nearest British headquarters was Cairo, 839 kilometers away. The camp was on the outskirts of the town on the edge of the desert. He set off into the desert without food and water, hoping that by the following morning he would encounter some settlement or some means of acquiring sustenance. He realized that it was a vain hope, but he felt he would rather die attempting to escape, than remain in the camp. In the event, he staggered around the desert for a couple of days with the sun remorselessly bearing down on him. He finally collapsed, suffering weird hallucinations mixed with mental images of his fiancée, whom he feared would be dead by now.
The next thing he knew was that a white-robed figure was lifting his head and pressing some water to his lips. As he gradually regained consciousness, he realized that a desert Bedouin tribesman had found him and undoubtedly saved his life. The Bedouin took him on his camel back to his encampment some miles away. It was situated in a small oasis with a tiny pool of artesian water and a couple of scraggly date palms growing around the edge of the water. There were five other tribesmen in the camp. Not one of them could speak English. Nevertheless, they nursed him back to health and in the process, with sign language and repeating words, he managed to indicate that he was not German. The Bedouins were clearly no friends of the Axis forces, and this information was greeted with broad smiles.
Benny then indicated that he needed to get to Cairo. There was much shaking of heads and muttering but Benny, who was a charming and persuasive young man, finally had his new friends agree to take him somewhere close to Cairo. They indicated by sign language that they would not enter Cairo but leave him within walking distance of the great city.
He told me that the journey was really rough and was not made easier by the fact that the man who had saved him seemed to have some amorous intentions towards him. Fortunately, this did not become a major issue and he finally arrived on the outskirts of Cairo with his virtue intact. The Bedouins indicated a road on the far horizon and wished him goodbye with smiles and waves. Benny set off towards the road in the distance, which had not so far produced a single sign of life. Reaching it half an hour later, he sat on the side of the road and decided it was infinitely better to be where he was, than in the prison camp or in the merciless wastes of the Sahara.
Hours later, he saw a speck in the distance. After an interminable wait, a British army truck pulled up after Benny’s frantic waving and gesturing. The doctor was dressed like an Arab and the cheerful young sergeant was astounded to hear well-spoken English, albeit with a South African twang. He asked where Benny was heading. Benny replied that any British army base or garrison would be just fine. He then hopped aboard in the front of the truck next to the driver and told the amazed and amused young driver of his travels across the desert from Tobruk.
As they entered the vast sprawling city of Cairo, the traffic slowed to a crawl. Benny looked around fascinated and slightly overawed by the noise emanating from the crowded streets. He glanced at an open market to his left and did a double take. He grabbed the driver’s arm and asked if he would mind if they stopped for a minute. He said that he was being foolish but a woman, shopping in the market, looked so much like his fiancée he just had to speak to her. Benny got out of the truck and approached the woman, who looked up, gave a scream and dropped her groceries. It was indeed his fiancée! On the scale of 1 to 10 of coincidences this must rate at about a 100.
The fiancée had finally been allowed to leave Germany, but the authorities insisted that she leave to the east, not the west. She travelled through Poland and much of eastern Europe, heading towards the Mediterranean, travelling through Turkey and the Middle Eastern states, finally arriving in Cairo a few days before Benny.
I met with them both a number of times in about 1964 and it was wonderful to see how they clearly still loved each other and had settled down into a comfortable life in Johannesburg. Someday, I hope to find the fiancée’s story. I believe a book has been written about her. The determination of both of those young people to survive and find each other again is definitely worthy of the Hollywood movie that, sadly, did not get made in the 1950s.
The determination of the ExoBrain team to launch and establish ExoTech as the senior computing technology on the planet may be less dramatic but it is no less certain that we will soon succeed as well!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.