by Elisa New
Then he adds an analysis of his own division that was hardly comforting: “We are going to hear more and more reports of casualties and replacements but—the division . . . is certainly not ready for combat. The men are rugged and trained, but to be frank, the majority of officers aren’t worth a damn, being too inexperienced.”
And worse, from his mother’s point of view:Maneuvers are drawing closer and plans are being completed. Where or when I couldn’t tell you for obvious reasons, or how we will travel. You know how I am about such things but can tell you that we will probably leave Camp Breckenridge for good around the first week of next month [March 1944]. After that, it is hard to tell what is in store for us. I hate to see this Division go over as it is certainly not prepared for Combat Duty. . . . The Officers are almost all green at their job and the enlisted men are disgusted with their assignments.
Nevertheless, in September Jack is still in the United States, “champing at the bit” and determined to join the “titanic struggle.” He tells his mother flatly that he is “only too glad to return to the Mortar Platoon even if it means remaining a lowly Private First Class.”
By October he is finally moving east, bound for Europe:The only thing I am permitted to tell you is that I am somewhere on the Eastern Coast . . . I know that your chin will slip a little at times but keep it up as you have done all these years. Fred’s and my past conduct attest to the result of your work. I shall never forget, where I may be and whatever I do, to be all you expect. . . . Take care of yourself, honey, it won’t be too long, and that grand day which we are all continually praying for will come very shortly.
Having arrived in Europe, Jack is overjoyed. His V-Mail quotes a popular ditty on censorship: I’m Mum, Hun/Can’t tell where we sail from.
Late in the early winter of 1944, Aunt Myrtle’s son Jack spends his last leave in London.
After getting settled at a Red Cross center, I began a two hour search for Carreras. The factory is rather prominent, which decreased the difficulty of finding it. I was invited to eat dinner with the Board of Directors later and so went back to the Red Cross—got a bit cleaned up which included a full hour session with the barber and went back to Carreras at about one o’clock. The dinner was very good, and then I was shown through the factory, which took about four full hours. It is truly a “wonder house of machinery” boasting a very complete Air Raid Shelter for all of some 3000 workers, cafeterias on each of the floors and then the most modern methods.
After Uncle Ted finished up, we went over to his “flat” which had been damaged slightly during the “blitz.” Had a few drinks and picked up Aunt Doris at sort of a Private Night Club. A delicious dinner followed at the Barclay, and proceeded to the train station about twelve midnight. A few hours journey brought us to a small town north of London where we picked up another car of Uncle Ted’s and drove out to his country home.
That home is the most beautifully furnished I have ever seen—complete with big oak rafters, large open fireplaces and just about the best in everything to make a home comfortable and tastefully furnished. . . . I didn’t get up till eleven thirty the following morning—fairly wallowed in a hot bath and had breakfast in bed at Aunt Doris’s insistence. After dressing, I walked around the house, put on a pair of Uncle Ted’s boots and took a stroll through the grounds until two o’clock.
With a “swell goodbye and the gift of a cigarette lighter and a couple of tins of pipe tobacco,” Jack returns to the front. “I was certainly the downcast soldier, going back to Camp after such a splendid leave.”
I think it was reading a poem from a newspaper, a yellowed cutting my Aunt Myrtle kept in her album along with photos of her father’s 1928 journey to Europe, which suggested to me that I would someday have to follow the trail of my family’s history.
As a child I’d been made to understand there were reasons why our whole clan comported themselves as though we were persons to whom nothing untoward ever happened. It was made clear—not in so many words, but clear—that we lived by a different standard from everybody else, and that the family’s caretakers, its wardens, were my aunts.
If I’d asked directly what made us so special I think they’d have said that, naturally, as we’d come from industrialists, or even may-jer man-ahfack-chrs from Balt-ee-mewer, our higher quality than, say, mere New York Jews went without saying. We left to them, New Yorkers, the pushcarts and the retail trade; to them the rutted shtetl, the dirty boots; to them the traces of accent and the consciousness of gentiles.
Our well-dressed children, our candy dishes nestling chocolates in brown frills, proved our membership in a gentler world. Proved we’d eradicated, or at least transcended, cold and want and struggle. My aunts’ environs proved it. Those delicate cups and cake servers, those crystal-hipped bottles on the silver trays—these objects which my aunts disposed around their rooms—were like emanations of the women themselves.
Still, long ago, in one of Aunt Myrtle’s albums, I had read that poem. It had the stylized quality I associated with her, but it introduced notes darker than one heard in her delicate precincts. “There’s a Gold Star in my window,” the poem began, “And an ache in my heart.” My mother whispered to me that Aunt Myrtle was a gold star mother, which meant she had lost a son in The War: my mother’s cousin Jack. Mothers whose sons had been killed switched the blue star in the front window, meaning they had a son in the service, for the gold star, revealing that the son had been lost. While the sentimentality of the poem was not out of place in Aunt Myrtle’s world, there was something almost unbelievably discordant about the facts the poem memorialized, facts one could not square with the deep carpeting, the candy in frills. Sharing a carefully protected page with a telegraph from the War Department, a booklet narrating certain events of February 1945, and various telegrams from England, the poem admitted into my aunt’s world, and mine, winter and the death of children.
When I finally began to follow Jack’s story, taking Yael to drive along the borders of eastern Belgium and Alsace, I was trying to bring the death of this American boy into focus. I was trying to visualize what Jack might have gone through as he faced Hitler’s Panzers in the last violent months of the war.
But the vibrant green of the countryside passing by the car windows made it hard to envision.
In summer, overlooks in the Ardennes provide sweet views down to dells where cows bend their large heads into the flowery grass. Every switchback props a tiny cobbled town—one church, five or six open doorways at the crooked X where the town’s two lanes meet, and then the two or three blocks of flats—voices from the window, bicycles leaning against the stucco—before the town gives way to another mountain view of uncropped grass and the cemetery. Most towns in this region of Belgium have these World War II cemeteries. The monuments are often larger than any of the town’s dignified edifices, for they have been quarried in far places, then brought and placed here by the British, French, and Americans. Despite the profound calm of these towns with their staid and settled names—Grandmenis, Vielselm—they are names on a bloody itinerary.
The roads past the cemeteries were the site of tanks turning over and over down the hillside, and of trios and quartets of men found encased dead in new snows, an accidental glimpse of a reddened garment all that had discovered them. The wooden posts that display clustered company insignias, each with its symbols, its numbers and code, break the peace of these towns. When one faces them, reading the fervent inscriptions on the posts, it is 1944, winter, but when one turns, all again is summer, trees rustling overhead, sun pooling in the squares, sound of children, clank of dishes, rich smell of lavender, crust, cheese.
Near Colmar to the south, where Jack and other survivors of the Battle of the Bulge were sent, it is the same. The villages have been rebuilt, their facades fresh but in the same Alsatian style, and looking as if nothing ever jarred their tranquil lookouts over the vineyards that coil in semicircles around the frontage of every hill. Stopping in these towns, I drink pal
e wines—heady, but so softly fresh they quench the thirst. The waiters pour them into small straight-sided glasses that might fit in a child’s hand. Certainly Yael is big enough now, and I say nothing when they fill her glass along with mine as she chooses from the heavy plate of paté and bread. Our guides are two Frenchmen in their seventies who interrupt each other, press paté on her, and the local onion tart. She nibbles at what they recommend, enjoying the courtly attention they pay her.
We are glad to have found these men, and I am grateful for Yael’s French, so much more recent than mine. Our guides remember the war. They were little boys then, and they tell us that during the winter of 1944-1945 their mothers were eager to billet American soldiers and perhaps receive their protection. But these Frenchmen use many words we do not understand, so we compose labored sentences to get them to help us picture those wartime days. We carry a booklet with the insignia of Jack’s division, the 75th, in which we keep his letters and other testimonies of that awful winter, the six weeks between December and February when Jack’s division was thrown into the worst of the battles.
Combat-hardened veterans named Jack’s outfit the “Diaper Division,” brought to these regions to break the German line in December 1944. Overtrained yet inexperienced, some of the raw soldiers landed on the steep frozen hills of Belgium too fast for their minds to adjust. Jack’s letters show a mother’s son transformed into a soldier, a man for whom home and family, worry and comfort have become provincial in the cold light of what he sees. The letters he sends he actually writes to himself, to keep his bearings. The tone shows me how Jack increasingly claims an adulthood he never had achieved as his mother’s son. He prays to God that all the misery of war will end soon: “I want to forget the roar of artillery, the men huddled in mud-holes and wretched civilians wondering which side is going to trample through their houses next.” And yet there is a stark worldliness, as well as an enormity, in what he writes that is his alone and that his mother, helpless at home, must simply receive and absorb.
It was the coldest winter Belgium had seen in decades, and the new recruits were in as much danger during lulls and at night as in battle. It must have been fearsome to these boys fresh out of camp in Kentucky, Jack only a week past his leave in London, to find themselves dug into a hole on a hillside where darkness fell purple across the snow in the late afternoon and the temperatures steadily dropped for the next twelve hours. Exhausted boys who’d spent the day crawling through snowfields sometimes fell asleep in foxholes not deep enough to protect them from the wind, and they woke to find their fingers unusable, frostbitten. They could not make fires and so they ate their C rations—meat and beans, meat and vegetable hash, meat and vegetable stew—cold out of the cans.
Back in the states Jack’s mother and her sister Fanny had shopped together and made up parcels to ship overseas. Aunt Fanny’s diary records one day’s purchase of Marshmallow Fluff, Uneeda Crackers, Clark Bars, Velveeta cheese, sandwich cookies, Good and Plenty, strawberry jam, peanuts, licorice, Jordan almonds, pistachios, turkey spread, and pretzels, but on roads slicked with ice the packages from home rarely got through. Jack’s letters are sporadic, interrupted for days when fighting is fierce and then coming every day, sometimes two a day.
“I was up at the front on Christmas and New Year’s and can’t boast a very good time.” Sometimes he remembers to share news of comfort to his mother: “One woman in a house we stayed at made me a pair of mittens out of a blanket and a small hood that covers my whole head.” Good son that he is, sometimes he remembers how his mother must be feeling: “Glad you are staying at Aunt Jean’s now and hope it rids you a bit of your loneliness.” But as the days go by his letters reveal details that must make his mother wild:Life is certainly a change now—dull and monotonous with only the sounds of our own artillery and the debris of War lying around to tell us war is not too far away. It leaves us taut with tension waiting for reports to roll in.
And in a letter to his brother:It is almost too cold to write. . . . the men run wild in the evacuated towns. . . . All one sees here is half torn buildings with gaping holes from artillery, bloated dead corpses in the ditches, isolated civilians walking down the road not knowing exactly where they are going . . . Occasionally a few POWS pass by, hands on their heads, looking less like soldiers than bedraggled civilians. We all wonder why they aren’t just shot instead of being sent home for an easy life of chopping wood and cleaning PX’s.
Moved south to Colmar, in Alsace, late in January, Jack receives a package. The terrain is more accessible and the Allies have traction. A parcel including Log Cabin syrup, salted nuts, liverwurst, cheese, taffy, chicken paste, and other treats gets through on January 21, but Jack betrays agitation at not receiving items from a list of basic needs. His tone is not sharp but impatient: “I managed to get a flashlight. Could you send me batteries, please.” And then he adds, “After looking around a bit, I am thoroughly convinced that the individuality of our men is what is winning this war. When the chips are down they do the best work, and although they complain about the army that is as normal as civilians grumbling about rationing. I guess that is what is called the American spirit—something the jerries don’t have. Keep your chin up. Devotedly, j.”
Jack’s last letter, dated February 2, 1945, arrived days after the War Department’s telegram informing Aunt Myrtle of his death.
Tomorrow my life of ease ends as I have been called up to the Company and assigned to the Mortars, my old position. I doubt I will go as a gunner, probably assistant gunner—due to my long absence from the weapon. The boys have done a splendid job with the cost not being too high, but there are many faces I will never see again. Many of the fellows are changed—they are quiet. All very high strung and nervous to a certain degree. I hope I shall not change too much but already I have seen enough sorrow and brutality, destruction and waste to sober my youth earlier than normal. All of us are just plain sick and tired of battle, but there is a job at hand to complete. Please send small packages of soap, cigarettes, candy, V-Mail, batteries. I don’t carry much with me but my rifle and my bedroll so they must be small.
It is the end of a long day of driving, but Yael and I travel through the town of Wolfgantzen, where Jack died a few days before his unit crossed the Rhine at Neuf-Brisach. It could never have been a large town and isn’t now, and so we go slowly, especially through the patch of woods throwing shadows on the low houses, as I read the letter Aunt Fanny received from Jack’s friend in late February. By this time Fred, furloughed briefly for his brother’s death, had left Aunt Myrtle in her sisters’ care. A “wreck,” as Fanny’s diaries confessed, Myrtle was too distraught to write for details, and so the letter came to Fanny. Jack’s friend described the situation to Fanny and Myrtle:It was Feb 4th, and though the temperatures were considerably warmer than those he’d seen in the Ardennes, and the terrain itself easier to traverse, fighting here was brutal. [A record 3,000 rounds, Yael and I read in the pamphlet issued by the 75th, were fired by the unit into the town of Wolfgantzen.] The Germans resisted fanatically, because only by defending Wolfgantzen could they hope to keep open the escape route to the Rhine. Crouched in concrete dugouts around the town, they put up a defense that was equal to their savage reputation.
Our car passes through a vertical stand of trees as Yael and I continue reading from the letter: They attacked from the woods Northwest of Wolfgantzen but the battalion received heavy mortar and artillery fire. . . . The 291st infantry, advancing through the woods encountered strong enemy position . . . The advance of the 3rd Battalion toward Wolfgantzen was halted by intense artillery, mortar and small arms fire. . . . Jack died quickly. . . . Please tell his mother that he didn’t suffer.
After we passed through Wolfgantzen, proceeding to Neuf-Brisach, where the American, English, and French finally broke through, I stood looking at the straight choppy band of the Rhine and thought about crossing over.
I felt just as I had at Riga when there was nothing more to pursue,
no promising lead to follow, and like the other time when I had turned into a café for lunch, declining to follow the trail out to Rumbula where they shot the Jews. What should I do now, having found the spot, more or less, where Jack died? Cross the bridge and press across the Black Forest to Dachau? In a few hours we could be there and next morning could tour the place where the family’s one male survivor, Solomon, along with other tenants of the Shavli ghetto, had clung to life.
Or perhaps we could proceed east along Germany’s southern border, find the source of the Danube and ride it east through Jacob’s falsified birthplace, Austria, and thence back to Rostov-on-Don and the Crimea, where the young Bernhard Baron had, or so I thought, seen the boy conscripts of the Crimea piled in the ditches and, as I’d imagined, observed begrimed survivors pinching handmade cigarettes.
Or we could even follow the straight chop of the Rhine to its outlet in the North Sea, there to hail a steamer. It vexed me that I had never gone to Bremen to see the town from whence so many emigrants (perhaps including my ancestors) sailed for America, though I had twice planned to do so. How could I square this, or the fact that while I made my way across the Baltic, I’d omitted the North Sea leg of the journey that perhaps Jacob had made.
I thought of other skeins of the story that I had not unraveled to the end. I never managed to get to Eddie’s Fulmer Chase, the estate with its lawns and dogs he’d swapped for a knighthood, or even to the “humble” house in Hove where Uncle Baron lived modestly while his adopted sons climbed London’s social ladder.
I did find and pace the lawn of the house on Bond Avenue in Glyndon, Maryland, where the young boy Theo, longing for England, would spin fantastic plans with his younger brother, Emil. I went in summer, and so it was not hard to see the small boys in my mind’s eye, sweating, glowering at their foolish father and more foolish uncle speaking their German twaddle on the porch. But I never did make it to Paul’s grave, nor to the Hanover Street house in Baltimore where Jacob and Paul went courting, one to marry Baron’s sister, another his niece.
