Obituary: Leslie Hardman dies at 95

The Jewish chaplain at the liberation of Belsen took on the arduous task of officiating in the burial of the camp's masses of Jewish victims.

By JONNY PAUL, JPOST CORRESPONDENT IN LONDON
leslie hardman 88 (photo credit: )
leslie hardman 88
(photo credit: )
The Jewish army chaplain who witnessed the horrors of the Belsen concentration camp immediately after the British army liberated it in April 1945 died last week aged 95. Reverend Leslie Hardman featured in the radio report on the liberation and took on the arduous task of officiating in the burial of the masses of Jewish victims murdered by the Nazis at the camp. The experience caused him to briefly question his own faith, which he later amended through strong Zionist beliefs in which his Judaism and Zionism became intertwined. The harrowing scenes Hardman witnessed were described in his moving book The Survivors: The Story of the Belsen Remnant, written in 1958: "Towards me came what seemed to be the remnants of a holocaust - a staggering mass of blackened skin and bones, held together somehow with filthy rags. 'My God, the dead walk,' I cried aloud, but I did not recognize my voice." The book became a sourcebook for a 2007 BBC documentary, The Relief of Belsen. In the days that followed liberation, Hardman provided much needed care and support to survivors. One survivor later described him as "our Messiah" and told how Hardman would speak to them in Yiddish and give them hope. "I sat there for hours," Hardman recalled. "Smoking, talking, listening. I spoke to them of Jewish religion and Jewish life." He described an incident when a survivor had tried to sing a song in Hebrew: "The pathos of this attempt was so poignant that I put my head on the table and wept; and then they comforted me." Hardman was born in Glynneath, South Wales on February 18, 1918. His father had emigrated from Poland and his mother from Russia. At the age of two, his family moved to Liverpool after a series of attacks against Jews in the Welsh valleys, perpetrated mainly by mineworkers. He combined a yeshiva education in Liverpool and Manchester with university study, gaining a Bachelor and Masters degree in Hebrew and Semitics at Leeds University. He married his wife Josi in 1936. She passed away in 2007. In 1942 Hardman enlisted as an army chaplain and in 1944 was sent to Holland, where he learned of the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis. From there he was sent to Germany, where he remained until the end of the war. In April 1945, he accompanied the British 11th Armored Division and liberated Belsen, then under SS control. After the war, Hardman became minister of Hendon Synagogue in northwest London, transforming it into a thriving modern Orthodox community. He remained there until he retired in 1982, after which he worked in Holocaust education. He was invited to conduct the service to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Belsen at Ravensbruck camp. In 1998 he was awarded an MBE and in 1995 was honored by the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance. Hardman was an ardent Zionist, who visited Israel regularly and had children and grandchildren in Israel. He was a former vice president of Herut in the UK. In 1974, he urged Jews in Hendon to support the Conservative Party MP John Gorst, who had voted against the government's embargo of arms shipments to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The decision had affected Israel in obtaining parts for Centurion tanks. In July 1980, he issued a thinly veiled warning to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, with whom he had a good relationship, after her Foreign Minister, Lord Carrington, had declared that the Palestine Liberation Organization was "an important ingredient in the Middle East" and not a terrorist entity.