The Holocaust wasn’t the only Jewish World War II experience
As the world commemorates the 81st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Tuesday on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the focus will be squarely set upon the Holocaust.
How could it not? The Nazis and their collaborators killed six million Jews during World War II, a genocide that wiped out a third of world Jewry. There is no doubt that this systematic slaughter should remain the prevailing Jewish narrative of the war, particularly on this solemn day.
But lost along this storyline is another side to the Jewish experience in World War II that has largely remained untold, that of the 1.5 million Jewish soldiers who fought for the allies and the 250,000 who died in battle.
After spending a large portion of my lengthy journalism career developing a specialized beat that focused on the Holocaust – and prioritized interviewing its survivors – I have devoted the last few years to exploring the story of those Jews for whom the war was more a tale of victory than victimhood.
One of them was my grandfather, Mickey Heller, who served four years in the Royal Canadian Air Force, including two years in Europe as a navigator in Bomber Command.
Like so many other veterans, he kept quiet for decades, stubbornly refusing to share his wartime experiences. Throughout all those years in which I was earning the trust of Holocaust survivors and producing stories that made them proud, I came to the frustrating realization that I knew next to nothing about my own grandfather.
By 2011, I had finally had enough. With my grandfather closing in on his 90th birthday, I vowed to give it one last try. I felt he deserved an opportunity to leave something behind and I, as his devoted, World War II–obsessed journalist grandson, was just the one to nudge him to do so.
That’s how our more than decade-long journey began. Thankfully, he slowly began to open up, and since my grandfather was always more comfortable speaking about others than about himself, I was able to learn much about a large group of his wartime friends. This quest evolved into four magazine articles that I published in that time period.
That journey culminated this past November, when the University of Toronto Press published my book: Zaidy’s Band, The Untold Stories of a Jewish Band of Brothers in World War II.
While I initially merely set out to solve the mystery of my grandfather’s murky military past, the pursuit ultimately evolved into a broader narrative about the Jewish men and women like him who served in World War II, and whose legacy has remained jarringly absent in our collective consciousness.
Like their respective countrymen, these fighters were motivated by patriotism and allegiance to their home nations. But they had an extra driving force that contributed to their outsized mobilization: to save their defenseless Jewish brethren in Europe from a Nazi regime bent on their destruction.
In some cases, these soldiers were among the first to liberate the Nazi death camps, offering an encouraging word of Yiddish to the dazed, emaciated prisoners.
“We didn’t know anything about it until we actually came across it and saw it with our own eyes,” Dan Nadel, a then-95-year-old American veteran, told me in 2015. “You can’t imagine what it was like. The stench, people walking around just like skeletons, just bones and skin, that’s all. They went into our garbage bags and killed themselves ravaging our garbage.”
Nadel told me that of the 55 men who hit the beaches of Normandy under his command, only 12 survived. He credited his own miraculous survival to a Jewish amulet he proudly attached to his dog tags.
But those who became prisoners of war, like my grandfather’s good friend Wilf Canter, had to conceal their Jewish identity since it could have proven fatal if discovered by their Gestapo interrogators.
And it wasn’t just the Nazis whom they had to beware. There was also plenty of antisemitism among the Allied soldiers that could range from racist talk to fistfights.
In Canada, it was especially acute in the navy. One of my grandfather’s acquaintances, Gerald Rosenberg, said that he endured constant harassment that only ended after he confronted a certain agitator and “hit him as hard as I could and threw him across the room.” They eventually became friends.
To avoid the risks, many Jews kept their faith a secret and were eventually buried in European cemeteries under crosses rather than Stars of David.
Indeed, about a quarter of a million of these Jewish soldiers died, not in concentration camps but rather on the battlefield. There were Jewish soldiers on every front and in every battle in World War II. For those who survived, it was a life-altering experience that spurred many to channel their military skills toward the fight for Israeli independence, to guarantee a Jewish homeland as a bulwark against another Holocaust.
My grandfather didn’t say much, but he did mention that Canada “didn’t like to take people of our ilk because they didn’t think that we were good citizens.” Even more so, he said his primary motivation for joining the war was to get even with Hitler.
As I quickly discovered, my grandfather’s individual story was not the only one that had remained untold. There was also that of the Jews in Bomber Command, which had the highest Allied World War II casualty rate. There was that of the Canadian Jewish role in World War II, which was often overlooked in favor of a more American and British-centric angle. There was that of the disproportionate Jewish contribution to the war effort overall and ultimately their crucial contributions as foreign volunteers to Israel’s establishment.
Exploring these various themes, and accompanying the turbulent efforts to establish a museum in their honor, highlighted a broader perspective to the Jewish World War II experience.
Throughout my years of Holocaust reporting, the backdrop to all my stories was the same: Time was running out and a post-survivor world was fast approaching. I felt a great sense of urgency to seize on this final window to log individual sagas into the archive of human history in hopes of it preventing their plight from ever being denied or ignored.
Today, most remaining Holocaust survivors are either too old and frail to access their memories or were too young during World War II to have had any significant memories of their own. There are very few with actual life-lived stories to convey, and this is even truer for the World War II veterans who, by definition, must now already be at least 100 years old.
While their stories may merely seem like an ode to history, I have come to see them as remarkably relevant. They speak to us today as we endure perhaps the most dangerous wave of antisemitism worldwide since then and the most perilous period for Israel as well.
Their choices influenced the paths their lives would take, and these same dilemmas of faith, values, belonging, courage and sacrifice still define the Jewish experience today. This is not an exercise in nostalgia. There is much we can learn from them.
As I have navigated through the modern-day challenges of what it means to be an Israeli and a Jew, I’ve often looked back at these stories in search of guidance and inspiration.
They are among the last remaining voices from that historic era, and hearing them enriches our understanding of their time and ours. Perhaps now, by recognizing this added perspective, we can finally tell the full World War II story of the Jewish people.
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Zaidy’s Band: The Untold Stories of a Jewish Band of Brothers in World War II is available for purchase at utpublishing.com and major book retailers. Learn more about Aron Heller at www.aronheller.com
