101-Year Old Jewish D-Day Veteran Laments Britain’s Decline, Says the War He Fought Was ‘All for Nothing’ as the Nation Slips Away

By: Fern Sidman

When Mervyn Kersh stepped onto the blood-soaked beaches of Normandy in June 1944, he was barely into his twenties. The air was thick with cordite and terror, the horizon fractured by artillery fire, and the young Jewish soldier from London believed, with a fervor only youth can muster, that he was helping to redeem civilization itself.

More than eight decades later, Kersh is 101 years old—and he believes the civilization he fought to save has squandered its inheritance.

According to a report that appeared on Wednesday at Fox News Digital, Kersh’s reflections are not the ramblings of a nostalgic centenarian. They are the anguished testimony of a man who marched into the ashes of Bergen-Belsen in 1945 and now watches, in disbelief, as antisemitism and social fragmentation seep back into the heart of Europe.

“I think it was a waste of time,” Kersh told Britain’s Daily Mail in remarks that Fox News Digital highlighted in its Wednesday report. The war, he said, forged a unity that no longer exists. “Everybody mucked in. Whatever way they could help somebody else they did. That wasn’t just in the army. You don’t get that now, no.”

It is difficult to overstate the gravity of such words coming from a Jewish veteran who served in the shadow of the Holocaust. Kersh was not merely a participant in World War II; he was an eyewitness to its moral abyss. Stationed near Bergen-Belsen when British troops liberated the camp in April 1945, he encountered horrors that scarred him for life. And yet, as Fox News Digital reported, it is not those memories that haunt him most today—it is the sense that Britain has forgotten the very lessons purchased with so much blood.

In the interview cited by Fox News Digital, Kersh has lamented what he sees as a nation in cultural freefall. Britain, he says, has “gone right downhill.”

“I know the population is changing,” he explained. “Some are leaving, and then others are coming who have no understanding or knowledge of what this country was like, not only just its history, but its morals.”

He is careful to distinguish between refugees fleeing genuine peril and what he views as a broader erosion of shared civic values. “I have no objection to genuine refugees fleeing for their lives,” he insisted. Yet, he fears that the United Kingdom has lost confidence in itself, abandoning the cultural memory that once bound Britons together.

Kersh’s criticisms intensified after the October 7 massacre in Israel, when Hamas terrorists murdered more than 1,200 people in a single day. For a Jewish veteran who thought the defeat of Nazism had forever delegitimized genocidal hatred, the attack was not merely geopolitical—it was existential.

“It was a waste of time,” he said then. “We are going through the same thing again.”

Kersh’s most recent interview, headlined by the BBC as “Honoured veteran, 101, disappointed with UK,” was dissected at length by Fox News Digital. In it, the centenarian attempts to reconcile pride in his service with despair at what he sees around him.

“Yes, it was worth it,” he conceded of the war effort. “But it’s disappointing what’s turned out now.”

What disappoints him most, he explained, is the antisemitism that now permeates British life. “What’s disappointing is the antisemitism that I see everywhere, hear everywhere, or read.”

This is not an isolated grievance. As Fox News Digital has reported repeatedly, antisemitic incidents in the U.K. have surged since the Hamas attack, with Jewish communities reporting vandalism, intimidation, and assaults at levels unseen in decades.

For Kersh, these statistics are not abstract. They echo the warnings that were ignored in the 1930s, when antisemitism was dismissed as fringe agitation—until it was too late.

Kersh is not alone in his verdict. Fox News Digital has drawn attention to a haunting pattern among the dwindling cohort of World War II veterans: many no longer recognize the countries they once saved.

Alec Penstone, a 100-year-old British veteran, was asked in November what Britain means to him today. His response, quoted by Fox News Digital, was devastating.

“My message is, I can see in my mind’s eye, rows and rows of white stones, of all the hundreds of my friends and everybody else that gave their lives – for what?”

He paused before delivering the verdict: “The country of today… No, I’m sorry, the sacrifice wasn’t worth the result that it is now.”

Across the Atlantic, the sense of estrangement is no less acute. In 2024, during the 80th anniversary of D-Day, American veteran Ronald “Rondo” Scharfe told Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum that he often feels like a foreigner in his own land.

“The real truth? I feel like a foreigner in my own country lots of times,” he said, in remarks Fox News Digital broadcast nationwide. “It makes my heart real heavy.”

His lament was not partisan so much as spiritual. Washington, he said, was consumed by “too much Hollywood,” while neglecting “the important subjects.”

These testimonies converge into a single troubling question: What happens when the generation that fought fascism concludes that the victory was squandered?

Kersh’s story is especially poignant because of his Jewish identity. He did not merely fight for Britain; he fought for the survival of his people. He stood within miles of Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands of Jews perished, and believed that the world would never again tolerate such barbarism.

Yet today, as antisemitic rhetoric resurges on campuses, in parliaments, and online, he wonders whether the moral antibodies forged in 1945 have worn off.

This is not the bitterness of age. It is the terror of recognition.

Fox News Digital has contextualized Kersh’s remarks within a broader Western malaise: declining social cohesion, historical amnesia, and a growing discomfort with the very narratives that once defined democratic societies.

For Kersh, the war was not merely a military campaign; it was a moral revolution. Britons queued ration cards without complaint, volunteered en masse, and subordinated self to survival. That collective ethic, he says, has vanished.

“You don’t get that now,” he told the Daily Mail. “No.”

His words resonate because they are so starkly unadorned. He is not railing against change for its own sake; he is mourning the disappearance of a culture that once knew, instinctively, what it stood for.

Kersh belongs to a vanishing fraternity. Each year claims thousands of the men who stormed Normandy, liberated camps, and rebuilt Europe. With their passing goes not only memory but authority—the moral authority of those who can say, with unimpeachable credibility, “We were there.”

When Kersh declares that modern Britain is worse than the one he fought for, it is not a political slogan. It is an indictment from history itself.

And that, perhaps, is what makes his lament so unsettling. Not that a 101-year-old man is disappointed—but that he is disappointed with a clarity born of having seen the abyss and believed, once, that humanity had stepped back from its edge.

Now, as Fox News Digital continues to chronicle the anxieties of this fading generation, the question lingers in the air like the echo of distant artillery:

If men who survived Normandy and Bergen-Belsen no longer believe the struggle was worth it, what, exactly, has the modern West forgotten?