The following are excerpts of an article by Jennifer Kavanaugh from the Metro Daily West News*

Life sometimes forces choices that are too awful to be considered real choices, and William Feinberg weighed his fate as a 19-year-old Army soldier in a World War II prison camp.

“It was dangerous, no matter which way you go,” Feinberg said. “If I said I was Jewish, the Germans were going to treat me badly. If I threw away my dog tags, possibly I could have been executed for being a spy. So I finally decided to step forward and admit my religion.”

Feinberg’s choice led to a three-month ordeal of starvation, slave labor and exposure to the German winter, as well as painful memories and a horrible front-row view of inhumanity. But it also may very well have saved his life.

Feinberg served in the 423rd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division, and he and thousands of his fellow soldiers became surrounded and captured by Germans a few days into the Battle of the Bulge.

The Germans marched the prisoners for days, refusing to give them gloves. Feinberg remembers going that entire winter without gloves.

“They wouldn’t let us put our hands in our pockets,” Feinberg said. “They were sadistic.”

Feinberg said the Germans packed the prisoners into freight cars, where they rode for days without bathroom facilities, and were fed cabbage soup and roughly sliced pieces of bread. They arrived in the German prison camp Bad Orb on Christmas Day 1944.

After Feinberg revealed his Jewish ancestry, his captors sent him to Berga Am Elster, an offshoot of one of the death camps. There, he and about 350 other people were forced into manual labor, digging tunnels into the side of a mountain for a munitions factory.

Read more...

The following are excerpts of an article by Andrew Lightman from the Newton Tab*

Sixty years after his assault on Omaha Beach in Normandy, France, Melvin Bloom remembers the noise and smell most vividly.

The dunes were steep and high, like a wall, said Bloom, an 81-year-old Navy veteran. The Germans had dug in and were blasting the beach with a cannon, machine gunners littering the water and sand with a slew of bullets.

The night before the invasion, as the ship crossed the English Channel towards Normandy, the water was so rough from the wind and the rain that nobody slept.

And as the coast, D-Day and H-Hour drew nearer, Bloom’s boat was at the front of the line and hit the waters at Omaha Beach more than an hour before the invasion was set to begin.

Aboard his ship was Wallace Maske, an enormous man of German descent, with hands twice the size of Bloom’s.

“I was Jewish and we were going to fight the Germans and another kid on the boat was German and were the closest friends, to this day,” he said. “It shows that a German and a Jew could be friends through the war.”

“Wherever I went, he went with me. He wanted to make sure I was taken care of.”

Read more...

Yesterday, more than 140,000 people attended the dedication of the National World War II Memorial in Washington D.C..  President Bush was one of many distinguished guests who spoke at the dedication ceremony.  For full coverage of the event, check out CNN.com’s story.  You can also learn more about the memorial itself at the National WWII Memorial official website.

As the number of living veterans of the war dwindles, I was tremendously happy to see so many of them out there to finally see a memorial worthy of their sacrifice.  It is unfortunate that so many others (like my grandfather) never got to see it.

Some interesting facts about Jews in World War II:

At a time when Jews made up only 3.33% of the population of the U.S., the approximately 550,000 Jews who served in the military made up 4.23% of the military.

About 60% of all Jewish physicians in the United States under 45 years of age were in the Service.

*source: Jewish War Veterans of the United States of America

photo by Rick Latoff

Read more...