Aline de Leandro

Growing up in Tobruk, Libya, the child of foreign expatriates, I had the privilege of being in the company of a most educated, erudite and spiritual man for the best part of a decade.   He was my surrogate grandfather (His Majesty King Idris Al Sanussi).  His Majesty spent hours plying me with stories of courage, heroism and altruism.   I remember well how he described his first-hand experiences of the generosity and kindness of the Turks, without whose help the Libyan population would have perished.  It was Turkey that had saved H.M.’s people from imminent starvation with their clandestine food drops during the brutal Italian occupation of his country in the early part of the twentieth century. 

Soon World War II came to North Africa.  Tobruk was a town of cemetries.  I never could believe that so many people had given their lives.  For a child it was impossible to comprehend that each headstone represented a person or each engraved name on granite was someone's child.  In His Majesty's kindly way, he told me more stories of the selfless sacrifice and courage of the Allies/ANZACS.   He said those were heroic young men who had come from far off lands to fight and give their life for freedom and to make the world a better place for all.

King Idris always talked about a debt one could never repay when strangers came to the rescue of other strangers.  He would say, "People who help people they don't know, and give their life so that strangers can live in freedom, are indeed high spirits."

At the end of WWII, it was only through the courage of the "high spirits" that  His Majesty pressed the newly-formed United Nations so that Libya became one of the first countries in Africa to gain independence.