Shan Hackett by Roy Fullick

Author:Roy Fullick [Fullick, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, World War II, Biography & Autobiography, Historical, Modern, General
ISBN: 9781783036936
Google: FpHHDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2004-02-19T03:14:40+00:00

Chapter Eight

THE STRANGER

The story of Shan’s extended period of convalescence and rehabilitation while being sheltered for four months over the autumn and winter of 1944/45 by a courageous Dutch family and his eventual escape back into British lines, was movingly described in his own book, I Was a Stranger, published in 1977. The author has an enigmatic note in the preliminary pages in which he says that his book, based on a narrative of the events that he set down within a few months of arriving back in England, was being published because references to some of the events he described had recently been made in what Shan thought to be an incomplete manner. The account given by his surgeon, Lipmann Kessel, in his own account of the Arnhem battle and its aftermath of Shan being spirited away from the Saint Elizabeth Hospital, differs in some respects from Shan’s recollection, but his book had been published in 1958 and could not have been the recent publication to which Shan had apparently taken exception. In any case, the gratitude felt by Shan towards the remarkable South African surgeon made them, despite their marked differences in social and national background and in their political persuasions, firm friends for life and they continued to meet until Lipmann’s death in 1986. Subsequently, Shan was much concerned with helping to set up a travelling professorship in memory of the man who in the middle of a battle had performed a particularly brilliant surgical operation on a badly-wounded airborne brigadier and had undoubtedly saved his life.

Whatever the circumstances and whoever published, in Shan’s view, inaccuracies of unspecified events during or after the Battle of Arnhem, we must all be grateful if it provided the impetus for the publication of I Was a Stranger. The book is a tribute in the most heartfelt terms to the bravery of one Dutch family in particular and of many other recorded and unrecorded Dutchmen who gave him and other escaping Allied soldiers help and shelter when discovery by their German occupiers would have meant summary execution of the helpers themselves and severe punishment of their families. For those who, directly or indirectly, through these activities suffered incarceration in a concentration camp the end, almost invariably, was an extended and squalid death. What these courageous Dutch people did is a tribute to what a deeply held Christian faith can do to fortify the human spirit in times of great adversity and to what could be achieved by a steadfast application of Christian virtues in daily life, however dreadful the circumstances might be.

All battles tend to the chaotic and the one that raged in Arnhem and Oosterbeek in September 1944 was no exception. British and Germans were mixed up haphazardly with each other, the hospital to which the Allied casualties were taken was in German hands and both airborne medical staff and Dutch doctors and nurses attended to a flow of wounded that were not only military of both sides but also

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