Apparently, this is a story about elephants.

Elephants have long been considered a symbol of strength and dignity in many cultures. In Asian folklore, for example, elephants are believed to be cousins ​​of clouds, capable of causing lightning. According to African folklore, a line of elephants, walking one after the other, from largest to smallest, is a sign of good fortune. And their most important trait, at least according to Rudyard Kipling’s elephant commander Colonel Hardy, is that elephants never forget.

However, this is not really a story about elephants, but rather about two people, Dora and John Vernon, who embody all the admirable traits of elephants and have come to identify closely with them throughout their lives.

Dora was born in Vienna to Polish-Jewish parents in 1921. When she was 14, she recalls the horror of Kristallnacht: “We lived next door to a shul that caught fire that night and I remember thinking we were all going to burn down with it.”

But that was not to be Dora’s fate.

Not long after Kristallnacht, rumors began to circulate among the Viennese Jewish community that England was accepting Jewish children on what became known as the Kindertransport. “Everyone quickly put their children’s names on the list to get a ticket to England,” she recalls.

Dora was one of the lucky ones. In 1939, five weeks before the start of World War II, her father put her on a train, wearing only the clothes on her back and a book lovingly written in Yiddish: “To Remember Shlomo Cohen and Esther Darach, your father and mother, your grandparents and family”.

“Don’t worry, my daughter,” Dora remembers her father telling her as he handed her the book. “We will meet again.” And though she couldn’t know it then, it wasn’t going to be.

When Dora first came to England, she was placed with a Quaker family. “But they kept feeding me things I knew I couldn’t eat, so I went on a hunger strike and was soon transferred to Harrowgate in Yorkshire, which was a home for other children in my situation.”

As fate would have it, there was another Viennese refugee girl living in Harrowgate at the time and she had a brother who in 1939 was serving in the British Army. The first time Private John Vernon visited Harrowgate, he was there to take part in a special gunnery training course. Perhaps it was because of his sister, perhaps because she was lonely because of something familiar, but in any case, after his first visit, he continued to return to Harrowgate for Saturday meals.

In 1943, Dora moved to London to train as a nursery nurse, but as fate would have it, she too returned to Harrowgate on a Saturday for a visit.

They both agree that it definitely wasn’t love at first sight, but when love took root, it must have been cemented together. “We got married on May 7, 1945,” says Dora, “the day the war ended. I had no wedding dress and no family to celebrate with. We just joined all the revelers in Trafalgar Square and became part of the festivities”. That day, John became my mother, my father, my friend, my family and my husband.”

In April 1945, as the war was drawing to a close, John, then a Staff Sergeant, was part of the first Allied unit to enter the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. And as the only Jewish member of his unit who spoke Yiddish, he was issued a loudspeaker and sent out to the bewildered crowd of prisoners to tell them the Germans had left and they were free. He says that he cried when he made the announcement and now, all these years later, he cries again as he retells the story, as does everyone else within earshot.

The years immediately after the war were very difficult for the Vernons. Dora describes the situation: “John had just gotten out of the army and our financial situation was dire. We lived in one room and had nothing.”

Little by little they built their lives together. They studied, earned degrees, had a baby, built careers, and achieved a degree of stability. John eventually became a university professor, teaching German and English (he was also a translator at the Nuremberg trials) and Dora became a nursery teacher.
And this is where the elephants enter the story by chance.

In the early 1960s, the Vernons finally stood up. Dora was teaching at a nursery in London. One of her young students became very fond of her and did not want to leave. The girl’s mother bought Dora her first carved elephant to remind Dora of her daughter because she, she explained, elephants never forget.

“I was so taken with this gift and what it represented,” says Dora, “that soon everyone knew I liked elephants and why. Before long, everyone was buying me elephants as gifts.”

Looking around Dora and John’s apartment in Israel today, it’s absolutely impossible to ignore the elephants. From the moment Dora meets you at her apartment door in her elephant-adorned necklace and bracelet, to the moment you innocently walk into the bathroom and see the elephant toothbrush holder and elephant ceramic plant pots, You are truly in elephant paradise. Some are big, some are small, some are plastic, some are carved out of stone, and some are made of wood. There are elephants embroidered on cushions and printed on sheets of paper. There are even elephant magnets decorating the fridge.

Dora knows where most of her nearly 1,000 elephants come from; many have little labels to remind you. She brought at least half of them with her when she and John moved to Israel 17 years ago to be closer to her only child, Susan.

“It’s only in retrospect that I realize how much elephant mythology has been woven into our lives,” says Dora. “Elephants represent everything important that we have come up with even though I didn’t know their meaning until I was an adult.” She pauses as if she’s searching for a few words to wrap her thoughts into a neat package. “We’ve lived such a full life,” she says, “and we have so much to be thankful for.”

As for the elephants, they represent everything that has happened to the Vernons in the last 60 years. All those years ago, they made the decision to move forward with strength and dignity despite the sadness of their past and the challenges they knew lay ahead. They have been blessed with good fortune, and most importantly, Dora has fulfilled the promise she made to her father, she has never forgotten it.