Steven Karras Read online

  AS THE LATTER PART OF DECEMBER NEARED, the Germans commenced an all-out attack in the Ardennes with the aim of cutting through to Antwerp, thereby separating the American forces from the British. This began to be preceded by their dropping German soldiers in captured American uniforms behind American lines and attempting to raise havoc in our supply distribution. Our MPs were alerted that any small group of soldiers or any army vehicle traveling alone would have to be stopped to ascertain that the men in American uniforms were actually Americans. Some of the Germans spoke English so well, some even without an accent, that trick questions were used to trip them up. For instance, some of the men stopped were asked to recite the words of the latest Frank Sinatra hit record, or to name the team who won the baseball championship, against whom they played, and by what score. This caused a problem with some of the men on my team, most of whom spoke with an accent. In one instance, one of our jeeps had attached to it a captured German trailer. When it was stopped by the MPs, one MP jokingly started a conversation as to “how many German soldiers are you hiding in the trailer.” The staff sergeant, who spoke with an accent that could be cut with a knife, responded, “If you donn’t belliff us, vy donn’t you look in de back.” It took some doing to convince the MPs whose side he was on.

  The German attack proceeded rather rapidly. Our troops, who until this time never had been forced to retreat, suddenly found themselves overwhelmed. The retreat, in many instances, had practically become a rout. Especially rear echelon units that suddenly found themselves confronted by enemy forces, rather than having combat troops protect them, left much equipment behind and retreated. Finally the Germans were halted in their tracks. The few days between Christmas and New Year’s in Brussels were comfortable. New Year’s morning in Brussels droned from the enumerable airplanes, bombers, and fighters flying over the city toward the Bastogne area to stop the German attack and relieve the encircled American troops. The B-17 and B-24 formations, flying high, escorted by swift-flying fighter planes, left a magnificent pattern of vapor trails streaking the clear blue sky. It didn’t take long for the back of the German attack to be broken and the ring around our encircled troops to be opened by our ground forces, helped by the aerial poundings.

  By this time, I had close to three years overseas with no furlough and certainly the longest time overseas of our SHAEF unit. Toward the middle of March, the orders were cut for me to report to Le Havre for shipment back to the United States. When I got there, the military encampments around Le Havre were filled with tired and exhausted combat troops ready to find some rest in the States. We boarded a merchant ship outfitted as a hospital ship carrying seriously wounded soldiers from the front. Those of us who were well were made to help take care of the injured and sick soldiers. Being a senior noncom, the other duties assigned me were very light: I was to take care of feeding those men who had wired jaws, mostly caused by bullets or shrapnel having broken or demolished parts of their faces.

  After several days on the Atlantic, an announcement came over the PA system that said, “Gentlemen, we just slipped inside the submarine net surrounding Boston Harbor!” Even remembering this particular moment still gives me the chills. It was at that moment that I felt as if a ton of weight was lifted off my chest. I didn’t realize that I had carried this “load” with me ever since I encountered enemy fire and didn’t leave me until, at that moment, I felt secure. After debarking we were taken to Camp Miles Standish to receive new uniforms. I called my girlfriend Ruth and my sister Betty in New York to tell them the news that I was back.

  The next few days were hectic, to say the least: friends had to be called and seen, and above all, I had enumerable lists of families of comrades who asked me to be in touch with them, make a personal call, and even a visit to assure them that they were okay. On April 13, hardly a week after my return, Ruth and I were married, and on June 7, 1945, I received my discharge from the army. The reason: “Convenience of the Government.”

  At the beginning of World War II, I was young. I was eager to fight, fight as a Jew against Nazi Germany. I could not have lived with myself had I not played an active part. Having now, on many trips to Europe, revisited so many of the places which then held my life in the palm of their hands, and having had a chance in retrospect of sixty-plus years to reflect on the events played out over my close to four years in the service, I am thankful to have had the opportunity to relive them. Although circumstances and daily happenings make me at times wonder if it was worth it, the answer always comes back, as clear as can be: I wouldn’t want to have missed it!

  Siegmund Spiegel is a retired architect and the recipient of many awards for housing, planning, commercial, and institutional projects in New York State. He cofounded the Black-Jewish Coalition of Long Island and the Nassau County Holocaust Commission, and was the designer of the Holocaust Memorial and Education Center. Spiegel maintains an active schedule, even in his retirement in Miami, and continues to write articles for architecture magazines and lectures frequently about the Holocaust and human rights violations.

  Chapter 2

  JERRY BECHHOFER

  FÜRTH, GERMANY

  938 Field Artillery Battalion, U.S. Army North Africa and European Theater of Operations

  Jerry Bechhofer came from Fürth in northern Bavaria. He was seventeen when he came to the United States in November 1939, just two months after the outbreak of war in Europe. His last home in Germany before emigrating was Frankfurt am Main. He received the Bronze Star in Germany, 1945 (above photograph, Bechhofer at right).

  We have my father’s family documented back to the sixteenth century. At that time, the family came from Herrieden to Bechhofen in middle Franconia, Germany. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Jewish families in southern Germany did not have family names. A decree of Napoleon declared that every family must choose a last name. In 1813 our family took the name Bechhoefer—translation: someone who lives in Bechhofen.

  My father was born in 1888, one of thirteen children, my mother in Langenselbold in 1898, one of five daughters. Around 1902, my father became a baker in the town of Kitzingen. He was drafted into the German Army in 1914, served until the end of World War I in various countries in the East, and became a prisoner. Trying unsuccessfully to escape, he had to stay an extra year and came back to Germany in 1920. He met my mother—the boss’s daughter—while working in her father’s establishment, and they married in July 1921.

  I was born in 1922, the same year my father started a hides and skins trading business in Fürth, Bavaria.

  My first school attendance was in the Jewish community school in Fürth, a town which is famous because my classmate, Henry Kissinger, comes from there. We went to school together in Fürth. He was in the second grade and I was in the third, but we were in one classroom. My brother was a playmate of his; we were buddies and played together quite often. In 1931, due to adverse economic conditions, my parents moved from Fürth to Bechhofen. When I came to the school in Bechhofen there were only three other Jewish children, so naturally all my friends were not Jews, and relations with them were normal. Most of the people my father did business with were non-Jews. We had no problems with any of them. From 1935 to 1936, I attended the Jewish Preparatory School in Burgpreppach (near Bamberg).

  After Hitler came in 1933, we watched with ever-increasing apprehension how people emigrated. Emigration became more difficult, especially to America, because of the infamous quota system. Strangely enough—or maybe not so strange—my father’s business was doing relatively well after the Nazis came to power, which made immigration not such a great necessity. My parents, like many Jews, thought and hoped that the ever-increasing Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda would subside. How wrong not only we were, but the whole world!

  At the time of Kristallnacht, my brother Fred and I boarded with a woman in Fürth. We heard window panes of a store near us shatter during the night, but knew nothing until three Brownshirts came to our door and commanded us to get ready to
go with them. They marched us to a central place in the middle of town, where all the Jews—old men, young men, women, and children—were assembled. No announcements of any kind were made. Around 10:30 a.m. the men were told to march to an assembly hall, which had been donated to the city of Fürth by the Jewish Berolzheimer family as a library and intellectual retreat. Then women and young men under the age of eighteen were told to go home. All men over eighteen were escorted into the main hall, where some were taken to the stage and beaten. Most of them were brought to the train station and shipped to the infamous concentration camp in Dachau.

  I was courageous enough to make my way to our synagogue, which was burning. I imagined that I saw my own tallis (prayer shawl) go up in flames. In Frankfurt, my father escaped being arrested probably by bribing a Nazi functionary.

  The full extent of the crime of Kristallnacht settled on people’s awareness only months and years later, and what followed still remains incomprehensible for many. The Nazis put out the story that this whole Kristallnacht episode was a spontaneous reaction of the German people because a minor official in the German Embassy in Paris had been shot. How untrue that was. I became aware of this when we (the U.S. Army) captured the documents that told each Nazi party official how to conduct the actions on the night of November 9 and the day of November 10. It was all planned with typical German precision.

  Soon after November, there was no more work for me in Fürth, so I went to join my parents in Frankfurt. I spent a good part of the ten months there earning money to prepare the kind of lists that the Nazi authorities required from each prospective emigrant, detailing every piece of household goods they intended to take with them abroad. Religious life went on in makeshift synagogues, since all the actual synagogues had been destroyed.

  At the time of our emigration, the easiest way to make passage to America was via Italy. We boarded the Italian liner, Saturnia, in Trieste and landed in New York on November 17, 1939. When someone lands in New York, they don’t have much time for thinking, you just savor the experience. We went to midtown Manhattan to see everything. That’s exhilarating. But there was always homesickness for my mother and family. It’s a miracle that the rest of the family came in May 1940, literally on the last boat out of Germany.

  Settling in New York was not very difficult, thanks to having relatives and compatriots close by, physically and spiritually. Jobs were very hard to come by in the winter of 1939–1940, and I spent most of my days actively trying to get jobs. My father, thanks to his training as a baker, secured one relatively soon, but it was a night job. I eventually became a messenger for Arrow Press on Eleventh Avenue.

  In retrospect, we think of how fortunate it was that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in many parts of Germany, only one son in each family could inherit his father’s business or trade. That left many sons only the choice to emigrate, and many came to North America. My father’s father did not want his children to leave. He told them “water has no boards to cling to.”

  In night school at George Washington High, my fellow classmates were to a great extent refugees like me. Few had much opportunity to get to know people who were born in America, except through work.

  There is a difference in describing one’s impression of a new country. A casual visitor certainly would describe his impressions and absorption of living and ideas differently from one who had to leave his old country behind and now this is all the country he has. Age also makes a difference. I was between seventeen and eighteen living in the Bronx, working in Manhattan, and reading the papers, and I got far more of an impression of what the new country was like when I started to meet “real” Americans in the army, for which I volunteered at the end of 1942.

  Those of us who think about it are aware of the enormous gratitude we owe the country that saved us from inevitable destruction of which we, however, became aware only after the war. That sense of gratitude probably motivated me to volunteer for service. Like all other young men, I registered for the draft, as did my brother Fred. He was called; I wasn’t. Trying to find out why I did not get called, I was told there were no papers. I had my draft card, but nothing happened. I said to myself: “The draft board has to fill a quota. If I don’t go, someone else will have to. He may be a married man; he may get killed in my place.” After an examination on Governors Island, I was pronounced healthy enough to serve and, in January 1943, became a member of the armed forces of the United States. One of my first “official” acts was to apply for U.S. citizenship, as did all refugee soldiers.

  On the train ride that took us from Camp Upton, New York, to Camp Robinson, Arkansas, I saw a fellow engaged in heavy-duty learning of a Hebrew book. I asked him his name and where he came from. His name was George Aumann and was from Frankfurt where most of my mother’s family had roots, and his familial relationship to me was that one of his aunts had married one of my grand-uncles! He and I and two other observant boys garnered a six-man bunk for ourselves, which was very pleasant. After basic training we were separated.

  As for training, it is hard to say if it is ever really sufficient, but that is due mainly to the fact that most instructors have never experienced firsthand what they are expected to teach. But under the circumstances and because of time and personnel restrictions, it seemed adequate.

  After basic, we were told that we would be shipped overseas, which could mean Europe or the Pacific. The staging area was Fort Dix in New Jersey. While there, preparing mentally for battle, I told my superior officer that I had a choice not to go abroad because I had not yet been made a citizen. In typical army fashion, my citizenship application, just like my draft board papers, was not to be found. My superior officer was Capt. John W. Frazier; in civilian life he had been a Philadelphian lawyer—high society. He made a telephone call to a friend, a federal judge in Philadelphia and told him, “I have this young man in my outfit who needs to become a citizen in a hurry.”

  The judge said, “Bring him in.” Captain Frazier packed me in his jeep, drove to the courthouse in Philadelphia, and half an hour later I was a proud U.S. citizen. That night, my army comrades made a party to celebrate my citizenship. I must admit, I did not encounter any anti-Semitism in the army. I’m not saying that it didn’t exist; I just didn’t encounter any, and not among the officers either.

  Two days later I joined fifteen thousand other soldiers on a crowded ship eastward. This was August 1943, the time when German U-boats prowled the Atlantic Ocean and sank a number of ships, killing many soldiers and sailors. A few days out, there was an explosion on our ship that killed an engineer and made the boat inoperable. So instead of sailing alone in a convoy of thirty or forty vessels, protected by a phalanx of naval vessels, our ship was left behind in the middle of the ocean, guarded only by one single little destroyer until the needed repair, which took close to half a day, was completed, and we could rejoin the convoy.

  We were not told where we would land. When we passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, we guessed it would be somewhere on the northern coast of Africa. It turned out to be Oran in Algeria. Rommel had been defeated a few months earlier, and North Africa was clear of Germans. We were in tents, prowled only by natives who stole whatever they could. It is a Muslim’s dearest wish to be buried in white, so our white bed sheets were easy prey. Another way the indigent population enriched itself was by performing laundry service for the soldiers. The army did not deliver laundry service, we needed it, and the natives needed the money.

  After several weeks of training in the desert, we were informed that we would start our drive to Tunis on the day of Yom Kippur. I asked for permission not to have to travel on that day and join my unit the next day, but to no avail. I spent the entire day in the back of a truck. Late at night, I managed to get something to eat.

  From Tunis we sailed across the Mediterranean to Naples, Italy. Bombing had heavily damaged Naples, and the “pier” where we landed was an overturned ship. We were quartered in a school in the north of the city, but
we did not stay there long. Our next stop was the real front, a valley opposite the Abbey of Monte Cassino. A few months later, Cassino became a fierce battle, and the abbey was greatly damaged. On that first day in combat, we had our baptism of fire by being bombed at close range—by our own bombers. One of my comrades was wounded seriously enough not to be able to return to combat. I jumped into a foxhole providentially left by the Germans who had been there before us and was not hurt. I can still remember the sound of a large bomb hitting the ground about forty yards from me.

  When our high command realized that Cassino was a difficult location to overcome, they decided to get closer to Rome at Anzio. We were taken off the front, brought to Naples, and boarded boats for the short voyage north to Nettuno and Anzio, about twenty-five miles south of Rome.

  After a successful and relatively bloodless landing, we settled near the town of Anzio and dug in instead of pushing farther toward Rome. Every night, a single German bomber came over to bomb us. Nothing happened to us, but other people were killed constantly. That “folly” threatened to push us into the sea in the middle of February 1944, but thanks to favorable weather, our Air Corps were able to saturate the German lines with bombs, and we survived. We had to sleep in foxholes for three months, and more than twenty thousand soldiers lost their lives in the Anzio beachhead, until we broke out at the end of May and drove into Rome. The Germans had left, and the Roman population greeted us enthusiastically. That was on June 5. The next day, June 6, was the invasion of the coast of France.

  Among the Jewish families who survived the war in Rome and Italy—thanks in part to the Vatican—was a family named Rothschild. The wife’s maiden name was Lehmann, whose sister had been my classmate. They asked my advice as to whether they should take advantage of the special offer the U.S. government had made, to let a number of refugees come to America without any particular papers. I advised them positively, and they settled in Washington Heights.