https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/files/original/3150/59400/AKoskyM[Date]-01.mp3 ece8b61437e1ed33abcc6b97f5c3fa1f Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Kosky, Mark Description An account of the resource Three items. The collection concerns Mark Kosky (b. 1923, 1806538 Royal Air Force) and contains three interviews. He flew operations as a navigator with 625 Squadron. The collection was loaned to the IBCC Digital Archive for digitisation by Susan Sperber-Kosky and catalogued by IBCC Digital Archive staff. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 2019-07-19 Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal. Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context Kosky, M Transcribed audio recording A resource consisting primarily of recorded human voice. Transcription Text transcribed from audio recording or document Interviewer: Ok. So sorry. Try again. MK: My name is Mark Kosky. I was born on the 5th of January 1923. Educated at Grammar School. Later at Cambridge. Early in my teenage years I joined the Air Training Corps because I was always interested and keen on flying. Took flying lessons. Entered the Royal Air Force Voluntary Reserve at the age of seventeen. At the outbreak of war immediately volunteered for flying duties and was a successful applicant for air crew. I had to wait many many months before they finally sent my papers through for me to report and I did my Elementary Flying Training School in England. As a result of the German planes coming over our Flying Schools the Empire Air Training Scheme was thought up by the then War Cabinet under Churchill and all aircrew trainees were sent for their training either to Canada or to what was then Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe. I particularly wanted to go to Canada. It was a country that had always attracted me as a possible place to go and live. I was very lucky. I was sent to Canada. I did thirteen months very intensive training in Canada as did all trainee air crews. It gave me a chance to see some of Canada. Not as much as I would have liked to have seen but extremely enjoyable. A land that attracted me greatly. I came back with my wings as a navigator which was actually not what I wanted. I had great ambitions to be a fighter pilot. It seemed a very glamorous way of fighting the war but more particularly a personal way in that it was giving me a chance of single combat against the enemy. Interviewer: So when you joined the, sorry the Air Force war hadn’t broken out. Was it, was it looming? MK: War was looming. I joined the Volunteer Reserve. War was looming. We had of course before I even joined, the Munich Crisis. The promise of peace in our time from Chamberlain which of course never materialised. But I was very keen for two things. One to fly and two particularly if there was to be a war to be able to participate in it in the defence of the country that gave me birth and particularly as of the Jewish faith knowing as I did and all Jews did that Mein Kampf had been written, the Hitler programme that was probably going to be put into effect and for these two reasons I was extremely eager to fly. Interviewer: Were there many Jewish people in the Air Force? MK: Yes, there were. A great number. But there were in all the forces of the Crown Army, Navy and Air Force. It is possible that the Air Force may have attracted more than the other two services for exactly the same reasons as I put forward. Interviewer: So where were you born? MK: I was born in London and — [pause] Interviewer: Yeah, that’s fine. So you joined and did you have family that were personally going to be affected by the Hitler — MK: Yes. Interviewer: Programme. MK: My mother was born in England, in London but my father was born in a very small, almost a village of Poland and it was a place called Kutno. I’ve since been back and visited it but only very recently and there in Kutno lived my grandmother and thirty two close relatives. Uncles, aunts and first cousins. Of course, at the outbreak of war the invasion of Poland came immediately and I knew as did I think every Jew that the Jews of Poland would be adversely affected immediately. Indeed they were. Interviewer: Yeah. So really you had more personal reason than most to prevent the Nazi occupation I suppose. MK: Yes. In fact, you’re actually echoing something that happened to me. At the end of my two or three days of examinations both physical and mental for aircrew. I think about one of twenty applicants were passed. Very intensive days of physical examination and mental aptitude. At the end of those few days one sits before a green baize covered table with three officers sitting behind it and the officer at the centre with one smile, and one waits with great fear and anticipation have we, have I actually been passed fit for aircrew. And the officer in the centre, looking through my file his first question to me was, ‘I see you’re Jewish by faith which I suppose gives you a strong incentive to fight, to fly but Kosky that does not seem to me to be an English name. Where does it come from?’ And I said, ‘My father was born in Poland.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Well, in that case I would say Pole you have a greater incentive to fly than anyone else.’ At the time I said, ‘Of course sir,’ but at the time I somewhat resented the fact that here I was English born, thought only myself as English in every fibre of my being and suddenly I had been pronounced a Pole. But in order to make sure that the answer was yes I said, ‘Yes sir,’ and was told that I had been selected. Interviewer: Great. Your experience serving in World War Two were there many people from other faiths there? MK: Yes, it was an absolute mixture of almost every faith that I met and all of them I found to be of exactly the same views and opinions as myself. I never found any that differed. Eventually, when I was crewed up because I was put into Bomber Command and a bomber crew of a Lancaster or Halifax comprises seven men and one crews up by meeting all the various members that are needed on a bomber crew and by spending a couple of weeks with them we choose each other. The pilot choosing the navigator, the navigator and pilot going on and choosing the others and we ended up as a crew of seven. In that seven there were two C of E members, the skipper was a Yorkshire Methodist, we had a Southern Irish wireless operator who was Catholic, we had a flight engineer from Wales who was he said a convinced atheist. We discussed faith and religion between raids and at times of dispersal a great deal and we all put our different points of view. Each of us having the same belief in the same God but coming at it perhaps from different angles. As far as I was concerned being the only Jewish member of the crew I was often questioned as to why I had not accepted the Christian faith either as a Protestant, Methodist, Catholic, Baptist or whatever and this led to very interesting discussions indeed. Just one story here. My skipper, a devout, very devout Christian said to me, ‘You know really you ought to attend one of the church services in Lincoln Cathedral.’ I was stationed at a place called Scampton which was just outside Lincoln, very famous for its Dambuster squadron. I thought well why not. Let’s go along and see how it is. I went with him and one or two other members of the crew to Lincoln Cathedral on a Sunday morning and it was a very beautiful service which I found moved me greatly and in the course of the service two or three hymns were sung and I joined in. Particularly in the 23rd Psalm, “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” and one other. My skipper turned to me as we left the service and said, ‘How did you find it?’ I said, ‘I found it extremely beautiful.’ And he said, ‘You know you are really three quarters of the way there. You know our Psalms.’ I smiled and said to him, ‘Who wrote the Psalms?’ And he said, ‘Well, I suppose it was King David.’ And I said, ‘Who was King David king of?’ Well, he started to laugh and he said, ‘Well, of course, King of Israel.’ I said, ‘Well, we share the Psalms so these are things that bring us and draw us together.’ It was amusing to me to find that without my prompting him he had not given any thought as to the origins of the Psalms. Judaism and Christianity have a common base. They share virtually almost everything together. There are points on which we divide but they are not particularly important points when one considers the basis of the Judeo-Christian faith.’ Interviewer: You mentioned to me earlier a particular Psalm that you used to say before, what was it before, before — MK: Battle. Interviewer: Before battle. Yeah. Can you tell that story please? MK: Yes. When my father was told by me that I had received my papers to go and get my flying training he was a devout Jew and he said to me, ‘It’s probably going to be impossible for you to keep all the various tenets. The dos and don’ts of our religion. I don’t want you to forget them even though it may be difficult for you to keep them,’ and he gave me a small little locket which is called a Mezuzah. It is something which most Jewish people put on the doorposts of their houses and in their rooms and it contains the prayer which starts, ‘Hear oh Israel the Lord our God. The Lord is one.’ And he said, ‘Wear that and maybe when you look at it it will remind you of who you are and where you’ve come from.’ Those were the days when men most definitely did not wear little lockets around their necks and I was reluctant to do so. However, I pinned it eventually under the lapel of my uniform jacket and then when we started to fly on operational missions would remove it and pin it under my flying jacket and on the first one or two occasions of operational flying would just pop my thumb under my lapel and would very softly recite to myself a Psalm which I had chosen after giving some thought to which Psalm. And I chose Psalm 16 because it starts with the words, ‘Guard me, oh Lord for I have put my faith in thee.’ It seemed a very appropriate way for anyone going into battle to start the mission and after we had made one or two or three missions one of the crew members said to me, ‘We hear you mumbling something before we go up the steps to the aircraft. What is it?’ I thought it best to explain to them what it was and why I was doing it. The result was that subsequently they all said to me that they would not go into the aircraft to start the mission itself until I had said what they called, ‘My thing.’ They became convinced and it was, it was perhaps rather comical but they became absolutely convinced that as long as I said my thing i.e. the Psalm 16 we would come back safely. Now, bearing in mind that on my squadron seventy eight percent of my comrades, my friends, my mates, my brothers never returned and were killed. We were therefore one of the twenty two percent that survived. Who knows. I believe most fervently that prayer is I think it was [pause] I think it was Oliver Lodge who said that, ‘Prayer is a mighty engine of achievement,’ and I believe prayer helps and I think perhaps it helped me and I think it helped the rest of the crew. Interviewer: I mean during the war you’ve already described you must have lost a lot of friends, family and it seems to me the biggest example of pure evil in this world, the Nazis. How do you keep a faith through so much suffering and so much sadness? MK: Yeah. Very good question. It is a very difficult thing indeed to keep faith when everything seems to be under the bitter [pause] I suppose one could call it the bitter oppression of an evil. Hard to do but absolutely essential and I think I can here speak as a Jew and say that to every Jew who has suffered over almost two thousand years oppression, persecution, crusade, pogrom, holocaust the one thing that has kept them strong has been faith. The hope that faith gives to them and therefore I think for so many Jewish people hope which was an essential part of faith helped greatly and I’m absolutely convinced that for those men I flew with and I can only speak for them they all had faith. Those that professed to be atheist and I had the experience of one I don’t believe they really were. Can I illustrate it with a story? Interviewer: Please do. Yeah. MK: We were coming back from a mission. We had — [background siren] Interviewer: Just wait for this siren. [pause] Interviewer: It’s very loud isn’t it. It seems loud in my headphones. MK: It is loud. Interviewer: Yeah. MK: We were coming back from a mission on which we had been badly shot up by a night fighter and had lost two engines and we were losing height and our skipper expressed a view that we would probably not be able to get back to our base in Lincolnshire. We would possibly be able to get across the coast towards the Channel and therefore suggested that we had the option of baling out or stay with the aircraft and hope that we would affect a good landing. Everybody in the crew said they did not wish to bale out. They would stay with the aircraft. During the course of the actual firing which took out our two port engines our — [pause - telephone ringing] MK: Ok. Interviewer: It was during the course — MK: During the course of the actual mission which took out our two port engines it was very hectic. Tremendous noise. The plane diving and climbing in evasive action in what was called a corkscrew action two hundred feet at a time. A very difficult and somewhat scary time and in the noise that was coming across the intercom I heard our flight engineer say, ‘Oh, please God we get out of this mess.’ We did. We landed safely, not at our station, we were miles off course. We had no navigational aids because the radar had gone. We landed in Llandrindod in Wales and when we were eventually debriefed I said to our flight engineer, ‘You know, Ben, I think you’re a hypocrite.’ And he said, ‘I’ve never been a hypocrite. I’ve always held to all my convictions very firmly. Why do you say that?’ I said, ‘Because when we were shot up I heard you say and everyone else did over the intercom, ‘Please God we get back.’ He said, ‘Did I really say that?’ I said, ‘Yes, you absolutely did.’ He thought for moment or two and then said with a great smile on his face, ‘Well, you must accept that I was praying to the God of the atheists.’ Hence I really believe he had faith. It was an attitude he took up. I would think he believed in God in his own particularly way just as much as those of us who were part and parcel of our beliefs of faith. Interviewer: That’s a lovely story. Just to conclude unless there’s anything else I have to say I think people of other faiths I mean not just Jews Sikhs and Muslims don’t seem to be really recognised in their contribution to fighting for the UK. Is that an experience you had? MK: Well, the only experience I have of being in battle was of course during the Second World War and I really only met various denominations of Christianity and of Jews or of people who didn’t believe in anything. I really did not personally meet any members of any other faiths. I’m not able to answer that. Interviewer: Ok. Sure. And your, you say your brothers, do you have more than one brother who was fighting as well? MK: No. I had no brothers. I’m an only son. What I would add is that at the end of the war I found that my grandmother and thirty two close members of my family, thirty three in total had all been put to death by the Nazis in one day. They had been rounded up from this town in Poland called Kutno and taken together with all the other Jews of the town to an extermination camp not far from a town called Chelmno where all of them were shot and buried in pits with lime on them. I did only a year ago go back with my son and my grandson to the town itself which I had never seen before. I found the actual house in which the family had lived for well over two hundred years. No longer made of wood but rather roughly of brick. Three Polish ladies there outside who wondered why we were taking photographs. A young girl who spoke a little English who came along and who invited us after she’d explained to the ladies to go into the house. I was very grateful. We did go in. I felt the atmosphere inside the house. We said our prayers and we came out of the house and went to the field which was the cemetery in which the Jews of that town had been buried since 1753. There were no gravestones left because the Germans destroyed them and the Poles had taken the bits and pieces that were left and made a little wall and erected a monument in memory of the Jews of the town. We said our prayers there and lit our candles. I found it extremely moving and very emotional and I’m very glad really that I made that particular pilgrimage. Interviewer: That’s lovely. Is there anything else — Other: Excuse me. MK: I know you’ve got to go. Other: Sorry. Nice to have met you. Interviewer: Nice to have met you too. Other: Sorry to run out on you. You’ll let us know when and where. MK: Yeah. Definitely. Other: Alright. You ought to show them the poem that you wrote. MK: I don’t think it’s actually to do with this. It’s about my love of flying. Other: Alright. MK: Nothing to do with faith. Other: Ok. Interviewer: I mean what you’ve described happened to your family in Poland is absolutely unthinkable so how [pause] did you find it hard to keep faith in God through that? MK: Yes, I suppose that for every Jew who thinks the [unclear] must do, the fact that six million perished and of those six million over one million were babies in arms. They were killed in a brutal manner. Many of them just having their brains dashed out against walls and men and women who had done nothing wrong at all except they were born of the Jewish faith very difficult indeed to try and understand how such a thing could happen. Those Jews who survived the camps and some did and I’ve spoken with them most of them I think came out with a strengthened faith. Some of them came out with a complete loss of faith. I think it’s a little bit like putting steel in the furnace. It’s steel in the furnace. Sometimes the fire refines the steel and makes it even stronger. Sometimes it does the opposite. I have great admiration for those Jews and Jewesses who after all those years of the most brutal oppression in the camps and survived maintained their faith. I have met many of them. There are two or three widows in this block, Polish Jewish survivors with their concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms and I speak with them and they still have faith. Interviewer: Final thing. Obviously, Remembrance Sunday is the reason for doing it. Why do you think it’s important to have Remembrance Sunday? MK: I think it’s terribly important that we have Remembrance Sunday so that this generation which has almost forgotten the war and why it was fought and what it was fought for and the young generation now at school whether it be Primary or Grammar or Secondary are told what happened and we explain to them this was not just a war between one country and another. It was a war against a monstrous tyranny that this country which I think of as England I know that we don’t use the term now, we talk about Great Britain or the United Kingdom but for me it has always been England. This country took up arms in a righteous struggle. I think it is terribly important that our children and our grandchildren and I have great-grandchildren are taught about it, remember it and pass that knowledge on to all future generations. Interviewer: That’s lovely. Perfect. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Interview with Mark Kosky Spatial Coverage Spatial characteristics of the resource. Canada Great Britain England--Lincolnshire England--Lincoln Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant Royal Air Force Royal Air Force. Bomber Command Language A language of the resource eng Type The nature or genre of the resource Sound Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource 00:27:46 audio recording Conforms To An established standard to which the described resource conforms. Pending revision of OH transcription Identifier An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context AKoskyM[Date]-01 Description An account of the resource Mark Kosky joined the ATC as a young man because he had a great interest in flying. He joined the RAFVR at the age of seventeen upon the outbreak of war. His mother was a Londoner and his father was Polish and Mark was raised in the city in the Jewish faith. When he began his aircrew training his father gave him a Mezuzah to wear on his uniform. Before each operation he quietly recited Psalm 16 before he entered the aircraft. The rest of the crew asked him about this and when he explained it was a Psalm they insisted they would not enter the aircraft until he had recited the Psalm in their presence. His extended family in Poland (thirty three people) were rounded up in one day and murdered in a concentration camp. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Julie Tompkins Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available IBCC Digital Archive Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This content is available under a CC BY-NC 4.0 International license (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0). It has been published ‘as is’ and may contain inaccuracies or culturally inappropriate references that do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the University of Lincoln or the International Bomber Command Centre. For more information, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ and https://ibccdigitalarchive.lincoln.ac.uk/omeka/legal. aircrew faith Holocaust memorial navigator perception of bombing war RAF Scampton round-up superstition training