102-Year-Old Bingham Holds Multiple Guinness Records

At the ripe young age of 102 1/2, Walter Bingham personifies Jewish heroism and resilience. Recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s oldest-working journalist and the world’s most senior radio show host, the Holocaust survivor, World War II hero and Israeli immigrant has a list of accomplishments so long it can’t be adequately detailed in an 800-word article.

He continues to produce the “Walter Bingham Radio Show” broadcast on Arutz Sheva from his home in downtown Jerusalem, attends press conferences, and writes article after illuminating article for The Jerusalem Report.

Interviewed on the occasion of VE-Day (May 8, 1945), Bingham reflects on his never-boring life. Born Wolfgang Billig in Karlsruhe, Germany, on Jan. 5, 1924, the sprightly pensioner recalls his youth growing up in Nazi Germany. Asked if he has any happy childhood memories, a long silence follows. Finally, Bingham spurts out he enjoyed learning to ice skate with his father – who was murdered in the Nazi genocide.

Expelled from public school, Billig and his Jewish classmates took the streetcar to the provisional school set up by the Jewish community. As the tram passed the town market square now renamed for the German dictator, the conductor would announce “Adolf Hitler Platz” – which in Yiddish can be construed to mean “Adolf Hitler drops dead.” Billig would pronounce sotto voce “Amen.”

Similarly, he remembers a Wehrmacht officer sneezing on the trolley. Instead of wishing him Gesundheit (health), Billig mispronounced the word in the local dialect as Zum Teut (to death) – to which the soldier politely replied, “Danke” (thanks).

Those memories reflect a lifetime of chutzpah and resilience – and trauma.
Billig fled his native land on July 25, 1939, in one of the Kindertransport rescue operations that brought nearly 10,000 Jewish children and teenagers to Britain from Nazi Germany, Austria, the Free City of Danzig, and occupied Czechoslovakia. In Wales, Billig learned English and bided his time until he was old enough to enlist in the British Army and return to Europe. Before being shipped out, an officer ordered him to take the afternoon off and return with an anglicized name. A German moniker, he pointed out, might get him shot if he were to be captured.

Landing in Normandy shortly after D-Day (June 6, 1944), the ambulance driver now renamed Walter Bingham – a name he arbitrarily picked out of a phone book while quaffing a pint at a pub – made his way to Berlin. After the Battle of Arnheim of “a bridge too far” fame, Bingham was sent for training to become an intelligence officer.

“I get my strength from there,” he says with a smile, pointing at the ceiling of his Jerusalem condominium, crediting G-d for blessing him with good health. He and his daughter, Sonja, also credit Yad Sarah for allowing him to continue to live independently. Though in the last two years, Walter has been using an electric scooter, he is thankful he has never had to use any of the charity’s medical equipment or the emergency call device hanging in his shower.

Sonja, who has two grown sons, Oliver and Alistyre, and spends many hours each week volunteering with Chabad and other worthy causes in Jerusalem, also oversees her father’s busy schedule and helps him with shopping and appointments. She says she is very grateful for Yad Sarah’s Yad Latomech service, which offers counseling and support to family caregivers.

“It’s very helpful to have someone to talk to, to know someone is there,” she says. “Yad Sarah is incredibly important for helping families.”

The family’s connection to Yad Sarah goes back to Walter’s childhood. His mother and grandmother, a leader in the Jewish women’s organization there, were friends with Sarah Lupolianski, the grandmother of Yad Sarah’s founder, Uri (who served as mayor of Jerusalem from 2003 to 2008), and the namesake of the organization. Taking a book from his shelf about his hometown during the Nazi years and the Holocaust, he points to the entry about Sarah Lupolianski: “Deported to Gurs, (in the south of France), in 1940. Disappeared.”

Assumed murdered in the Holocaust, likely at Auschwitz, she is among the millions he thinks about every day, especially now, with Israel at war with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas after the massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.

“We are again living like it is 1938,” he says. But in contrast to that period, when it was very difficult to get out of Nazi-occupied areas and when the British limited entrance to Palestine, he says the state of Israel will allow the Jewish people to survive and thrive.

“My message to Am Israel is to consider coming to Israel while you can, with all your possessions, in a planned manner, so that you do not have to run away with just a little suitcase like I did,” he emphasizes.

“At the age of 15, I understood why I was being sent away, unlike a lot of the children around me who were 3 or 4 years old and felt abandoned by their parents,” he says. His father had already been arrested by the Nazis. “But I still started to cry when the train actually pulled away. It was really traumatic for everyone.”

It is also an experience he recently re-lived. Just a day after the Oct. 7, 2023, killing spree, he and Sonja flew to Berlin along with two others who were saved by the Kindertransport to embark on a long-planned re-enactment of the journey for an educational documentary. The film took them from Germany to the Hook of Holland where a ferry crossed the English Channel to Harwich. They finally arrived at London’s Liverpool Street Train Station. A statue there today by Frank Meisler commemorates the arrival of the traumatized children.

“It was extremely important that we undertook this strenuous journey at this time,” he says, describing six days of a packed schedule of flights, trains, and ferries that traced the original route from Germany to London’s Liverpool station, where he had arrived alone in 1939.

After several years living in a countryside estate in Wales with other Zionist youth, Walter joined the British Army, becoming an ambulance driver. He subsequently became an intelligence officer, stationed in post-war Germany, responsible for interrogating high-ranking captured Nazis.

Following demobilization, Bingham became a journalist and advertising executive in London.

Marrying, the couple had Sonja in 1951. He also obtained a pilot’s license and acted in numerous movies and TV shows. He sports a jacket he received on the set when he was a wizard in the original “Harry Potter” film but is prouder of playing Charles Darwin in a BBC production.

Bingham never forgot about his lifetime dream of making Aliyah. He received his Israeli ID card in 2004, at the age of 80, following in the footsteps of his daughter, who had immigrated a few years earlier. In characteristic style, Bingham flew the plane on which he arrived. He has since skydived twice to celebrate his 95th and 100th birthdays, jumping from a plane that took off from the Bar Yehuda Airfield by Masada. “I saw my country from the river to the sea,” he quips. Media savvy, he arranged for German TV to film his most recent jump.

Looking back on his adventurous life, he immediately says his most meaningful memory is reuniting with his mother seven years after she put him on the train to freedom in Britain.

“We each did not know if the other was alive for all those years,” Bingham said. But through a network of relatives, he learned in 1946 that she was alive in Sweden. She had been sent to several Nazi work camps after he left on the Kindertransport, but Swedish officials, allowed to rescue some Scandinavian Jews from the Terezin concentration camp near Prague, for reasons that are still not clear, stopped and picked up his mother and some other Germans along the way, ultimately saving their lives.

This writer would be remiss for not mentioning the walls of photographs, plaques, and letters displayed in Bingham’s office. One notes that France dispatched an aircraft carrier to Haifa Bay in 2017 to bestow upon Bingham the rank of chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur. A letter from Briain’s King George VI attests that Bingham was awarded the Military Medal for Bravery for his selfless work during the Battle of Hill 112 in Normandy from July 10-14, 1944.

“I never killed anybody. But I saved lots of lives,” Bingham says mater-of-factly.

But this writer’s favorite Walter Bingham story involves a less well-known event. One Shabbat dinner at a home in Jerusalem, a drunken man was assaulting a woman in the courtyard. All the guests sat by sheepishly while the noise and screaming mounted. Puffing out his chest and pulling back his jacket to reveal his pistol, Walter brazenly approached the violent man and plainly told him to leave the woman alone and get lost.

His courage made an indelible impression.