in Surrey

BY DAVID BENTATA

My beloved son, Lt. Daniel Mandel z”l, was shot in Nablus while arresting terrorists in 2003. This visit to England was one I had wanted to make for a few years, and in May 2019, Mizrachi UK invited me to be one of their guest speakers at a Yom Ha’atzmaut event in London.

Our story starts in Romania, where my father, Henry Males z”l, was born in 1899. He moved to Canada as an infant, grew up there and lost his first wife to illness and his son in World War II. He went on to marry my mother and I was the second of four daughters, born in 1948 in Toronto, where I lived until I made Aliyah with my husband and five children in 1987. My father died when I was a young married woman and I didn’t really get to know him. He was a quiet man.

A few years ago, I realized that my father had been a bereaved father from the Canadian Army, just as I was a bereaved mother from the Israeli Army. He never talked about his first wife or his son, and as a young person I was interested in many things but not my parents and their stories! So I started to investigate and found out that my half-brother Charles z”l was buried in England at Brookwood Military Cemetery in Surrey.

Charles, or Chucky as he was known, volunteered to serve in the Royal Canadian Air Force along with five other guys from his neighborhood, but only 2 returned. He was a gunner on a Lancaster Bomber and was killed by anti-aircraft flak over

Bochum, Germany, on October 9th 1944. His plane returned safely to England and he was buried at Brookwood. My father, already a widower, received a telegram informing him of his only child’s death. He was one of 35,000 Canadian parents that received that dreaded telegram. A short time later, he received a letter of condolence saying where his son had been buried, and that was that! For 75 years, no one from the family had ever been to visit his grave. I was determined to change this.

With a little help from friends, I was escorted to Brookwood Military Cemetery by Stanley Kaye, a wonderful, kind exserviceman and military history buff. Brookwood has around 1,000 military graves, mostly marked by crosses, but Chucky’s grave had a Magen David. I

W hen my son Daniel z”l was killed, it happened in a different country and a different era, and our experience was drastically different. Daniel received a hero’s burial, attended by family, friends and community, including his soldiers and many others. Our home was flooded with people who knew and loved Daniel and wanted to tell us their stories about him. We were supported by professionals in the army, by the Ministry of Defense, by our community. We felt loved and we were given the strength and support to go on with our lives. I have made it my life’s work to speak about heroism and resilience wherever I can.

Now, thinking back to World War II, when the scale of the tragedy was so enormous and overwhelming, I appreciate my own experience differently. There were so many beloved sons, so many graves, and not enough time to mourn them properly. Mine was the first stone to be placed on Chucky’s grave.

Cheryl and David Mandel have built a website in memory of their son Daniel: www.daniel-mandel.co.il