There are many things I wish I knew more of about my father’s life before I was born. How was everyday life during his first 16 years in the shtetl of Ottynia, Galicia, in southeastern Poland, in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, now part of western Ukraine? How and why he summoned the courage at 16 to move to Danzig (now called Gdansk) on the Baltic Sea coast, 550 miles from Ottynia? How he spent the next 13 years in Danzig, making friends, dating, earning a living, living under what was a Nazi-influenced regime? How he again summoned the courage to uproot himself from all he knew to emigrate to America in January 1939? How he managed in a new world where he did not know the language and knew but a handful of relatives?
To be sure, my father told his children snippets of his history. Stories about trudging through snow to school and cheder (Jewish study classes). How he was a route salesman of stationery and dry goods in Danzig. How he worked for a cousin selling shirts on Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan where he first met our mother.
On this Memorial Day, however, I can recall no stories about his time in the U. S. Army. What did he think about conditions in the segregated South where he was mostly stationed? About his fellow soldiers, no doubt from communities vastly different from New York?
When he was two months shy of his 32nd birthday he was drafted and inducted into service three months after marrying Sylvia Gerson September 6, 1942.
He was stationed on several bases, including Camp Rucker in Alabama. It was there that he suffered from gall stones that enabled him to get an honorable discharge eight months, four days after his induction.
During his time in the army he was a machine gunner, but, it is my understanding, he was to be reassigned to an intelligence unit because of his ability to speak German and Polish.
I’d like to think he was chosen to be one of the The Ritchie Boys, a secret intelligence unit that interrogated German prisoners of war because of their language skills. Information on the Ritchie Boys did not become public until the 1990s, a few years before my father died, by which time he was suffering from dementia (for more on The Ritchie Boys google “60 Minutes Ritchie Boys” for a 40 minute segment or link to https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/ritchie-boys).
His gall stones ended his military career August 4, 1943. We will never know if he would have been a Ritchie Boy.
I never saw his uniform, though we have a picture of him in uniform with my mother.
He didn’t watch war movies. Westerns were more to his liking. His most endearing and enduring remnant of military life was the “army eggs” he would cook for many a Sunday breakfast for my brother, sister and me. Army eggs were fried eggs with thin round slices of fried salami.
I’m writing this blog in the middle of the night, on my iPhone. I know what I’m going to eat for breakfast this Memorial Day—army eggs.
I did.
