Where did troops stationed in North Africa during the Second World War go for rest and recuperation?
They went to a place praised as an ideal holiday destination, recommended for its ‘sunny Mediterranean atmosphere, its smart modern towns, its abundance of gay night haunts and restaurants’, a place where battle weary ‘men fresh from sandy months in Egypt’ found ‘fresh greenness a welcome change’.
The name of this idyllic spot?
Gaza.
Today the name has become famous worldwide as synonymous with unimaginable horror: tens of thousands dead, hospitals destroyed, nearly two million people homeless and helpless in their own land. Electricity and water cut off. Famine.
October 7 was a vicious massacre. What has happened since has been called out and out genocide.
In 1944, when Nancy lived there, the image Gaza conveyed to the world could not have been more different.
A recommended holiday destination
Nancy had gone to Jerusalem from Cairo when Rommel was poised to march in triumph into the city. She stayed when the danger was over because didn’t want to return to Larry. The marriage was over.
She found work in Gaza, in a refugee camp filled with Greeks who’d fled Nazi occupied Greece. After her years in Corfu, she spoke enough Greek to be useful.
Nancy in Gaza 1943
How she would weep to see the total destruction of the ancient buildings and the landscape she knew, and the misery of its inhabitants. We humans are so good at destruction – a few weeks to flatten a thousand years of history.