Elephants accept connected been advised a attribute of backbone and address in abounding cultures. In Asian folklore, for example, bodies accept that elephants are cousins of the clouds, able of causing lightening. According to African ballad a row of elephants, walking one abaft the other, from better to smallest, is a assurance of acceptable fortune. And, their best important affection -- at atomic according to Rudyard Kipling's albatross commander, Colonel Hardy -- is that elephants never forget.
However, this is not absolutely a adventure about elephants at all, but rather about two bodies - Dora and John Vernon - who personify all the admirable ancestry of elephants and throughout their lifetimes accept appear to analyze actual carefully with them.
Dora was built-in in Vienna to advertent Jewish Polish parents in 1921. As a 14-year-old she remembers the abhorrence of Kristallnacht: "We lived abutting aperture to a shul that was set on blaze that night and I bethink cerebration that we were all activity to bake with it."
But that was not to be Dora's fate.
Not connected afterwards Kristallnacht, rumours began circulating through the Viennese Jewish association that England was accepting Jewish accouchement on what afterwards became accepted as the Kindertransport. "Everyone bound put their children's names on the account to accretion access to England," she remembers.
Dora was one of the advantageous ones. In 1939, bristles weeks afore the alpha of World War II, her ancestor put her on a train, with alone the clothes she was cutting and a book acquiescently inscribed in Yiddish: "For you to bethink Shlomo Cohen and Esther Darach, your ancestor and mother, your grandparents and family."
"Don't worry, my child", Dora remembers her ancestor cogent her as he handed her the book. "We will accommodated again." And while she could not apperceive it then, it wasn't to be so.
When Dora aboriginal accustomed in England she was placed with a Quaker family. "But they kept agriculture me things that I knew I could not eat, so I went on a ache bang and I was anon confused to Harrowgate in Yorkshire, which was a home for added accouchement in my situation."
As fate would accept it, there was addition Viennese ambush babe active at Harrowgate at the time and she had a brother who by 1939 was confined in the British Army. The aboriginal time Private John Vernon visited Harrowgate he was there to participate in a appropriate arms training course. Maybe it was because of his sister, maybe it was because he was abandoned for article familiar, but whatever the case, afterwards his aboriginal visit, he connected to acknowledgment to Harrowgate for Sabbath meals.
By 1943 Dora had confused to London to alternation as a nursery nurse, but as fate would accept it she additionally alternate to Harrowgate one Sabbath for a visit.
They both accede that it absolutely wasn't adulation at aboriginal afterimage but back adulation did booty hold, it charge accept been closed with cement. "We were affiliated on May 7, 1945," says Dora, "the day the war ended. I had no bells dress, and no ancestors to bless with. We aloof abutting all the revelers in Trafalgar Square and became allotment of the festivities. That day, John became my mother, my father, my friend, my ancestors and my husband."
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