Dakers, R
Rex Dakers
Esther Mclenaghan provided the following:
Rex Dakers was one of the chaplains at Lamsdorf – an Australian. He ran the Lamsdorf Christian Fellowship.
From the Sydney Morning Herald
‘He never talked about the war’: the Padre who stared down Nazi horror’
The face in the photograph is weathered and friendly, its owner wears a cleric’s collar. Beneath the photo is the caption “Padre Rex Dakers” and, beneath that, written in Hebrew: “This is the Australian who saved my father’s life”. The Hebrew was written by the former prime minister and president of Israel, Shimon Peres.
Shimon Peres was 12 when his father, Yitzchak Persky, enlisted in the British Army during World War II. Persky was a Russian Jew who had emigrated to Palestine in the 1930s. His wartime exploits were to feature in a 1962 movie, The Codename is Courage, starring Dirk Bogarde. Persky escaped from the Nazis no fewer than four times, his chances of surviving having improved markedly after an English officer gave him the dog tags of a dead New Zealander, thereby enabling him to escape identification as a Jew.
Padre Rex Dakers enters the story when Persky and another man were caught trying to escape from a train. A German officer was marching them naked to be shot when Padre Dakers intervened, arguing the pair had not received a proper trial and that to execute them without one was a war crime. Padre Dakers told the German officer that if he shot the pair, he’d have to shoot him, too.
It seems the photograph of Padre Dakers was given to Shimon Peres during a visit to Australia in the late 1990s. It was filed in his archive, which is described as “mountainous”, at the Peres Centre for Peace and Innovation in Tel Aviv.
About five years ago, when the Israeli ambassador in New Zealand requested any material from the centre relevant to the Anzacs, the photo made its way to New Zealand from where it was forwarded to Australia. Dakers had been a Methodist pastor in the western suburbs of Melbourne when he enlisted – every Dakers in the Melbourne phonebook was rung until the family was found.
Padre Dakers met his five-year-old son John for the first time the day he got home from the war in July 1945. There was a story about him in the Melbourne Argus newspaper. He spoke about the strong leadership Australians had shown in the German prison camps. He pointed out that the leaders in the camps were elected – many of the positions had been held by Australians. They weren’t frightened to take on the authorities, turning a mine that was regarded as “a bad show” by the British prisoners in to “a good show”. Captured on Crete, Padre Dakers had been a prisoner of war for four years.
Last Sunday, in a room of Langham’s hotel in Southbank, the grandson of Yitzchak Persky, Shemi Peres, met the three surviving children of Padre Dakers and some of their descendants. Each of the descendants that I asked was “surprised” when they heard the Persky story. Each of them, one after another, said, “He never talked about the war”.
One daughter remembered a man in Bendigo who had a father who was in the prison camps with Padre Dakers saying he was “very brave”. There was also a story that he swam for five kilometres with a wounded man after the ship they were on was torpedoed. He died in 1970.
What his daughters remembered about Rex Dakers was that he loved growing vegetables, that he grew them wherever he could find spare ground, giving them away or selling them to raise money for causes such as a senior citizens’ hall in Leongatha. And that’s where a memorial to this man can be found. The Leongatha senior citizens’ centre bears his name.
Martin Flanagan is a senior writer at The Age.
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