On April 15th, 2021, Boston celebrated the 73rd anniversary of the Israeli Independence Day by lighting up a bridge in Boston with blue and white lights, the national colors of Israel.  Hundreds turn out every year for the celebration.

After this generation dies, who will remember the atrocities of the period in history that led up to the Independence?  Or will the impact of these atrocities remain forever?   Have we learned anything about avoiding such horrors?  Who knows? 

Here, I share some of what I remember about the 1940s when America was at war.

America was at war. Terrible things were happening in the 1940’s.  Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese. Young men were drafted and many died.  Jews were being killed by the thousands, really millions, in Europe.  Gays and lesbians were also incarcerated. The Japanese were storming the South Pacific.  There was rationing of some foods, I don’t remember which ones.  Gas was also rationed.  In schools, children were practicing what to do in case of an air-raid.  Nazis from Germany invaded Russia, then called the Soviet Union, and many were killed in combat.  They did not anticipate what a Russian winter was like. 

I was fourteen when the war started, but it went on for several years.  At that time, I belonged to a group of young men and women, we called ourselves The Debites, after Eugene Debs, a famous socialist. All the boys were drafted into a branch of the American military.  I still remember our anguish when we found out that Robert had been killed.  He was our leader and so handsome.  How could a young man who had a life of such promise be killed in his twenties.

There was all the news about Jews in Europe being sent to concentration camps.  In my family, it was a constant topic of conversation.  We are Jewish, and lived in a Jewish neighborhood in the Bronx.

I remember my father signing some document so a particular family could come to America.  He signed many of them.  Someone asked him, “Can you really take care of all these people?”

 “They can take care of themselves, they just need to get out of Germany,” he said.  “But, if they need help, I will find a way.”

This was another side of my father that I never knew before.  He was in the sausage casings business and together, he and I, sent fourteen small salamis to men we knew overseas.  We did not know if they would get them.  And my father assured me they would be edible even though they travelled so many miles, by ship, overseas.  All the years of the war, we did the same thing, wrapping and sending a salami to every address we could find.  

When a friend of our family, Gene Schneider, came home, he thanked us for the salamis, and said “everyone loved them, we were so tired of military food, and they were always eaten in fifteen minutes.  We were so far away from home, but the salami, more than just food, reminded us that there was still such a place as the United States with good things to eat.”  Gene was eighteen when he went to New Guinea, he was stationed there for four years. We never heard of New Guinea until the war.     

Many of the Jewish people I knew came to the U.S. in the early years of the 19^th century.  I don’t know why all my grandparents came, but my mother’s father came because he was going to be conscripted into the Russian army where Jews never knew how long they would be forced to serve.  For my grandfather, it meant forever.  He left Russia with a different name to avoid arrest.   

All these Jewish people, some I knew, and some I didn’t, were in anguish about what was happening to the Jewish people in Europe.  They came from different countries and for different reasons, but they understood anti-Semitism no matter the country or the form it took. 

Franklin Roosevelt was almost a God in the Jewish community in which we lived. The question of why Roosevelt did not accept the Jews and the ship, the St. Louis, has always been an open question and much has been written about it.  They were not accepted in any country, returned to Europe, where they were all killed. 

We lived in a two-family house.  One day, a few years later, there was this loud wail on the stairs coming from the second floor.  Mrs. Alexander was coming down the stairs to tell my mother “Roosevelt just died.”  Our community was in mourning.  There are no answers to some things that happen in life.  

(To be continued…)