Reunited…

Agoura Hills resident finally reconnects with man he knew as a child war evacuee 71 years ago



 

 

Barry Spencer was haunted by memories of World War II, but it wasn’t the nightly air raids that exploded over his family’s modest London flat during the war or the rationed food or even the overall horrific Nazi threat that kept his mind drifting back to that place and time in history.

Instead, Barry couldn’t shake thoughts of a boy named David Hurwich.

Barry, who was born Barry Isenblatt (he later changed his last name to Spencer) was among the tens of thousands of children who were evacuated from London to safer areas throughout England during the war.

Some children were sent to live with family members, while others, like Barry and his brother, Simon, moved in with strangers. Barry’s parents stayed in London where his father worked as a fire watcher, whose job was to put out fires started by incendiary bombs.

At first, Barry and Simon were sent to live with a family that turned out to be quite unfit.

“We weren’t given enough food. We’d get one lonely sausage floating in a pool of gravy,” Barry said from his Agoura Hills home in mid-May, where he was reunited with his long-lost pal David for the second time in two years.

After three weeks of neglect, Barry and Simon were removed from the home and sent to Leicester, a town that is known as the burial place of King Richard III.

Barry was 4 years old in 1943 when he went to live with the Hurwich family, a prominent Jewish family whose son, David, was 5. Simon, 12, lived with another family within walking distance of the Hurwich home.

“I settled in fairly quickly, but I resisted being separated from my brother,” Barry said. “I certainly didn’t understand what was happening. (But) I knew we were fighting Hitler, and I knew we would win.”

Life with the Hurwich family had its perks. David taught young Barry how to ride a bike and the meaning of the word “boo.” Barry was taught to cheer when David performed well at a football game at his prep school and to boo when the team missed a goal.

“He wore a lovely school uniform,” Barry said of David.

The wealthy Hurwich family had plenty of toys for Barry to play with, and he remembers that David’s father, a doctor, was quite dapper and wore a splendid lounge suit “to carve the joint,” or meat, that was served on a long, polished table in the formal dining room.  

“They were intriguing to me,” Barry said of the family he came to adore. “They were so different from my family. Money made all the difference. They were in a different social bracket.”

David said that his family also experienced food rationing, but women who ran a grocery had extra food and would give his family a little more meat now and again.

“It never occurred to me that somebody was getting shorted,” he said.  

Barry stayed with the Hurwich family for nine months before his family retrieved him from Leicester. Now 76, he said he’d always wondered what had happened to David. He wrote to his friend once shortly after he’d gone back home, but David never wrote back.  

David, 77, said he didn’t know how to spell Barry’s last name and always felt a twinge of guilt for not responding.  

In the mid-1970s Barry went back to Leicester to find the big brick house he’d lived in with Dr. Hurwich and his family. He found the home but it had been turned into apartments.  

Barry moved to America with his family in 1976, and thoughts of David nagged at him for another 30 years.  

By 2013, Barry figured he was  running out of time so he hired a woman from London to trace David. It turned out that he still lived in Leicester, not far from the home that he lived in during the war.

Barry received an email from the woman with David’s phone number and email address.

Sherry, Barry’s wife, said her husband was shaking when he got the news.

“I whooped for joy,” he said.

David, as it turned out, had also thought of Barry over the years and periodically tried to locate him when he was in London. But he still had problems with Barry’s surname. In addition to not knowing that Barry had changed his name to Spencer, he didn’t have the correct spelling of Barry’s original surname.

“I thought it was ‘Eisenblatt’ not ‘Isenblatt,’” he said

During the first phone call in 2013, the men talked for 45 minutes. Plans were made for a follow-up meeting in February 2014, when Barry visited his long lost friend in England.

Jewish connection

Although it was common to place Jewish children with Jewish families during the war, neither Barry nor David considered themselves very religious growing up. David recalls his family inviting Jewish American servicemen to lunch at their home, and though his mother shopped at a kosher butcher, the family also ate bacon.

“I didn’t know we were Jewish,” he said.

Barry said he didn’t remember seeing any Jewish artifacts in David’s home, but that could have been because during the war being Jewish was dangerous— so dangerous that David’s father stocked “poison pills” for the entire family if they were ever captured by the Germans.

David ended up discovering that his greatgreat uncle had founded the synagogue in Leicester in 1897 and his grandfather had served as its president for 20 years.

After 71 years apart, Barry and David plan on making up for lost time with frequent visits across the pond.


 

 

TOGETHER AGAIN—Above, after 71 years apart, Barry Spencer, right, reunites with David Hurwich. During World War II when London was being blitzed by the Germans, Spencer was sent to live at Hurwich’s home in Leicester, England. Top photos capture the men as boys— Spencer on the left and Hurwich, top right.

TOGETHER AGAIN—Above, after 71 years apart, Barry Spencer, right, reunites with David Hurwich. During World War II when London was being blitzed by the Germans, Spencer was sent to live at Hurwich’s home in Leicester, England. Top photos capture the men as boys— Spencer on the left and Hurwich, top right.

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