John Brunswick

JOHN BRUNSWICK

BOCHOLT, GERMANY

XV Corps, Third Army

John Brunswick was born Hans Braunschweig in Bocholt, Germany. Having arrived in the United States in 1957, he was inducted into the army in 1943 and was trained as an interrogator of prisoners of war (IPW) at Camp Ritchie. He served much of the war in an IPW team attached to the Free French 2nd Armored Division. In the photograph above, Brunswick (center), serving as translator, sits between Lt. Gen. Von Foertsch (left), Commanding General, German First Army, and Gen. Jacob L. Devers, Commanding General, American Sixth Army Group, as Von Foertsch signs the unconditional surrender of German Army Group “G.”

When I received my draft notice, I had very mixed feelings. On one hand, I felt that I should have volunteered to fight Hitler and his Stormtroopers who had caused such unbelievable suffering to so many people and had ruined their lives. If not stopped soon, they would probably be unstoppable and cause more trouble throughout the world. On the other hand, I hated to leave my wife. At the age of thirty-two, having already been in the United States for six years, I was making a little more money and I was able to support my parents.

While I had no choice, deep down I knew that by serving my new adopted country, like everybody else, I was doing the right thing and would have felt guilty if I had not done so. I was inducted in March 1943 and, after about a week, landed in Camp Croft, an infantry training camp near Spartanburg, South Carolina. I slept in the barracks with about fifty other inductees, nearly all of them eighteen to twenty-one years old—I was the “old man.” We came from all over the country; I had trouble understanding some of the farm boys from Mississippi and Louisiana with their thick southern drawl.

The first part of basic training consisted of six weeks of physical hardening, drilling lessons in discipline and commands and, above all, instructions in shooting the MI rifle. The sergeants instructing and commanding us apparently did not expect the old man, who had an accent and was a New York Jew, would make a very good soldier. However, I surprised them all by qualifying as an “expert rifleman,” which was the highest grade a marksman could achieve.

After six weeks of basic training came another seven weeks of advanced infantry training. We had to hike up and down the South Carolina red clay hills with full, 50-pound packs on 20-mile marches in the 90-degree heat. During that part of training, my wife, Hilde, visited me in Spartanburg for the weekend. Her arrival and search for a furnished room was quite shocking to us, as well as revealing about the attitudes still existing in the old South at the time. Even though I was in uniform, one woman informed us, “We do not want you Jews,” and another one slammed the door in our faces.

I WAS SOON SUMMONED in such a hurry, but was not too surprised to find out that Class Number 16, consisting of about four hundred men, would not start for about six weeks. I became a “night-weeper.” As the classrooms were being used during the day, they had to be cleaned at night—the stoves had to be cleaned out and stoked for the fire to be lit for the morning classes, etc. We were busy and slept a good part of the day. I met my friend from Germany, Rolf Wartenberg, there; he had been accepted in Fort Benning, Georgia, which was the Infantry Officer Training School and hard to get into.

At the end of our training, May 1943, I tried the same. There was an opening for five vacancies, and there were about fifty applicants from our class. I was among the last eight or ten, after the others had been weeded out, showing off my skills drilling and commanding about forty people under the watchful eyes of superior officers. My infantry training from Camp Croft would have come in very handy, and I believe that I would have been selected. I was doing very well when suddenly, to my great disappointment, I was called off. The next day I found out why.

Out of our whole class of about four hundred, the top fifty graduates had been selected for an immediate promotion to second lieutenant, I among them. It seemed like a miracle. When I called home and said, “This is Lieutenant Brunswick speaking,” it sounded like a big joke, however, this is what happened. It not only made a tremendous difference in my status, but it also gave me a big boost to my morale, and it especially made a tremendous difference to my family’s economic situation. All of the sudden, instead of having the basic salary of $50 a month, it became $300 a month, and I was now able to really provide for my family and my parents.

IN JNNE 1944, I had my final leave, said goodbye to all my loved ones, and held my little boy for the last time. Then I and many others found ourselves on a troop transport leaving from Boston Harbor. The crossing, in a converted large freighter, was an experience in itself. We slept deep down in the hold in hammocks, with three or four on top of each other like canned sardines. There were thousands of troops onboard, and there were probably ten or fifteen troop ships that crossed the Atlantic in convoys shadowed by war ships, zigzagging and trying to elude the ever-present German submarines, which had sent so many ships to the bottom.

We finally made it to a port near Edinburgh, Scotland. From there, we took a train to Broadway, a quaint little town, into the Midlands of England, not far from Birmingham. Once there, I was selected for an additional period of advanced intelligence training in Swindon. When I returned to Broadway, intelligence teams were formed, each consisting of two officers and four enlisted men, as well as two jeeps and a small trailer for the equipment. Towards the end of August, we crossed the channel and landed in Normandy. We saw what unbelievable odds they had fought, climbing those steep cliffs while being subjected to enemy bombardment and constant machine gun fire from fortified bunkers. They had been so brave, facing almost certain death.

In Normandy we saw additional evidence of all the destruction the war had caused; it was a new experience for us. We landed that day at the headquarters of General Patton, commander of the Third Army. It was not far from Paris, which had just been liberated. We set up our little tents in a meadow where we could see the city in the distance. It was the usual army thing: Hurry up and wait.

The other officer on my team was Lt. Herbert Heldt. He had been an engineering officer before being sent into the intelligence camp, obviously because he knew some German (his parents had been born in Germany). He was short and, in civilian life, had been a jockey and a midget automobile racer. He wasn’t the smartest person, but what he lacked in brains, he made up in bravado. We complemented each other well because we were so different. Then there was Henry Block who had been promoted to master sergeant, the highest grade of noncommissioned officer. There were two lower grade sergeants and a corporal, used as drivers and clerks, to compete our little organization.

We had named our two jeeps Hilde and Hilde 2, which was stenciled on the side below the official number. After that, we had no particular duties except to wait to go into Paris for the first time. We saw the church steeples from a distance, but the city was “off limits” to unauthorized personnel like us. Then Heldt got the idea: “Why don’t we take one of our jeeps and look at what Paris is like?” So we did. It turned out to be what I might call the weirdest night of my life.

As army personnel we had no trouble clearing the various check points. Once in Paris, we parked our jeep in a garage that, we were assured, was under constant guard. This was very necessary, as the many French Forces of the Interior (FFI) were in need of equipment, so there were lots of looting and stealing going on. To be extra careful, we also took the rotor out of the motor without which the ignition would not work. We had our pistols in our belts and the four enlisted men carried their carbines.

Paris had no electricity or running water, however, there was no shortage of liquid refreshments; the Parisians cheered every Allied soldier they saw.

Then it got dark. There was still shooting going on by German stragglers, who were apparently trying to escape under cover of darkness. Suddenly, a shot rang out from behind me, grazing my left ear on the inside between ear and head, and some blood from my ear was visible. It was nothing serious, even though another inch farther to the right probably would have ended my story at the age of thirty-three.

For many years I claimed that the only reason I did not get the Purple Heart decoration for a wound received in action was because I could not report it, being AWOL at the time. In the interest of truthfulness, I have to report that the shot had been fired by my friend Henry Block, who had been walking behind me and, in the excitement and turmoil, squeezed off a shot in the wrong direction.

ABOUT A WEEK LATER, we were called to Third Army headquarters. One of the jeeps belonging to an IPW team with one of the divisions had hit a mine on the road. Three of the six team members had been killed, so we replaced this team. We got our instructions, received our orders, and were directed to the headquarters of the XV Corps to report to the colonel in charge of the Intelligence Division at Corps Headquarters. He assigned us to the HQ of the 2nd French Armored Division, which was one of the three divisions that belonged to the Corps. It turned out to be a good assignment.

The commander, General LeClerk, and his officer corps were professional soldiers who had served in North Africa and had all along been staunch supporters of General de Gaulle. From North Africa, they had been shipped to England to be re-equipped with American tanks and then had come from Normandy to Paris and beyond. The whole division consisted of volunteers of whom 20 percent were known to be Jewish. The French division was much less tightly controlled than the American ones; in fact, they were somewhat too independent for the American generals under whose command they fought. We were advised not only to furnish the division commander and Corps Headquarters with intelligence from interrogations, but also to provide the Corps with our own reports about the French division’s movements.

As AMERICAN OFFICERS, We ate in the mess with the general and his staff. Conversation was naturally in French only. Even with our knowledge of French, I understood only about 25 percent when they were talking among themselves rapidly and using a lot of North African patois. The French operated differently from American units. The American units would prepare each tank advance with a lot of artillery preparation to hold down casualties. The French were less cautious; they hated the Germans more than the Americans did, having been subjugated by them, and were most anxious to liberate all of France as fast as possible. They advanced faster than the cautious Americans, thus suffered a great many casualties.

Our first battle was at a town called Andelot. It was a small town in a valley, surrounded by woods and hills, and we took it by evening. We were told that there were about four hundred prisoners whom we could see in the morning. At night, there was a lot of shooting in the hills. In the morning when we wanted to interrogate the prisoners, none could be found. We drew our own conclusions as to what had happened to them. In the town itself, a civilian mob had taken justice into its own hands to punish some collaborators. There were a bunch of men with pants around their feet and bloody genitals, there were women who had their hair cut off, and it was not a pretty sight.

WE WERE KEPT Busy, as the troops advanced through France toward the Alsace, sometimes very fast, sometimes held up for a week or longer, either by German resistance, or supply problems, or other reasons that I did not know. I tried to write Hilde and my parents whenever possible. I knew they worried about me. I thought about Hilde and my son, Freddie, a lot. I missed them, feeling somewhat lonely and blue at times, and hoped that I would see them again, in good shape and soon. The other soldiers also felt the same way, especially the somewhat older ones who had families.

Due to heavy German resistance that slowed our advance, we stayed for about two weeks in a little town named Gerbevillers, but we were kept very busy at times with the German prisoners brought to our HQ for interrogation. Then one day something strange happened. I sat on one side of a table together with one of our men and a prisoner who was brought into the room. Before interrogating him, he had to empty his pockets and show his German army papers, which gave his name and serial number.

This man was Martin Look, who said he was born in Bocholt. I had gone to school with Martin Look for four years, from age six to ten, and had even been in his parents’ house.

Now I met him again, about twenty-five years later, and wouldn’t have recognized him without seeing his papers. I doubted that he recognized me, and he was certainly not in position to ask an American officer any questions, but for half a minute I was tempted to ask him if he still had the wood-burning stove in his family’s kitchen. Then I decided that not only did I not know whether or not he’d been a Nazi Party member, but that I also did not want any gossip among other POWs, so I sent him on his way, just like everyone else. I later found out from my old neighbors in Bocholt that Martin Look had told somebody that “Hans Braunschweig was the American officer that interrogated me.” I still regret not having revealed myself during the interrogation.

BEING WITH THE 2ND FRENCH ARMORED Division was very exciting. Between that division and the XV Corps, I believe we were some of the most independent American soldiers in the army. When the division expected to be in reserve and stationary, we asked for passes (Ordre De Mission) for the six of us, and permission was granted to go to Paris and return, “when mission was finished”—in other words, an indefinite time order. All we had to do was ask every day at headquarters in Paris when we would be needed back. We took off in our jeep, reported to French HQ and were assigned to first class hotels. It was a welcomed change and lasted for about a week. By this time, living conditions in Paris were a lot closer to normal than they had been during our first visit. There was electricity most of the time, running water, and no more snipers.

THE THIRD ARMY, along with the XV Corps and our French division, continued its advance through France southeast via Metz, where our team “liberated” a Panhard car. The headlights did not work but, nevertheless, it permitted IPW Team Number 92 to travel in style with one car and two jeeps. We could do things like this only with the French division, which was in every sense a very unusual outfit. It also comprised a battalion of Ghoums, native North African troops clad in black burnooses that surrounded them like big tents. They were very good at creeping up to enemy lines at night with a long knife in hand and creating havoc.

Our French division eventually advanced to Saverne, a town in the hills overlooking the plains and the roads leading to Strasbourg. The hills were snowed in, which the Germans were defending rather vigorously, and the pass through Saverne was considered the only passable one during winter for heavy tanks. However, the French could not be held back; they knew of some back roads that were not as heavily defended by the Germans.

They surprised the defenders, enabling the French 2nd Armored Division to break through. Then, against all orders from the XV Corps and Third Army HQ, it proceeded to advance with lightning speed for about sixty miles to Strasbourg, much to the consternation, as we later found out, of the American command, which by no means were ready to advance that fast on the whole front. We were promptly cut off by Germans, whom we had left behind us on both sides of the Alsatian plain.

Germans were also shelling us from across the Rhine, especially at the Gestapo building where the division headquarters had been installed. We were given a room on the top floor from which there was an excellent view of the Rhine and of the German positions. We also had an excellent chance of being hit by one of the artillery shells. We therefore decided that it would be much more prudent to change rooms and move into the basement.

One of the journalists of the newspaper Yank had heard of this story, and subsequently it appeared as one of the news articles in the paper with our names. The Gestapo building, however, was listed as a hotel in the newspaper, for security reasons. The Germans must have left in a tremendous hurry, for the drawers in the desks were still full. In one of them, I found a beautiful Walther pistol, which I brought home and had for many years.

Our DIVISION Was CUT OFF in Strasbourg for several days, as the U.S. Army had expended more ammunition than anticipated and had to stop its advance until supplies could catch up while being transported over the terrible and devastated roads of the French countryside. Our division had to withdraw to protect its flanks. When we eventually advanced again into Strasbourg and the Alsace, it was for good.

We spent quite some time in the Alsatian plain. This was where the news of President Roosevelt’s death reached and surprised us. I remember that I was not the only one who cried at the time. Not only was I grateful to him that I and many others had been able to come to America during his presidency, but above all I believe that without his foresight, Hitler might have ruled the world. Roosevelt had to fight a tremendous amount of reactionary opposition in helping England and engineering the lend-lease destroyer deal, which made it possible for England to survive the unlimited U-boat war of the Germans. He had also supported the rearmament program of the United States before we actually entered the war, realizing that our help would be needed eventually.

There had been, at the time, the very influential German American Bund, as well as the pro-German and anti-Semitic propaganda of the radio priest Father Charles Coughlin and antiwar involvement speeches of Republican senators like Senators William Edgar Borah and Gerald Nye of Idaho and North Dakota, respectively. Roosevelt was not perfect. Turning away the seven hundred Jewish refugees from the S.S. St. Louis when it came into New York Harbor (many of whom perished after returning to Europe) and not bombing the rail lines to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp will forever be blots on his record, but on balance he had been a great leader. Without him, the world would have been a much worse place today than it is already.

IN THE ALSACE, we found heavy resistance but being with the French troops, our living conditions were generally much better than if we had been with an outfit under direct American control. We usually found an abandoned house from which the Germans living there had fled and made ourselves as comfortable as possible. Of course, there was no electricity, and there was no heat in the midst of a severe snowy winter, but there were usually beds and nice down comforters.

I was always amazed at the courage displayed by, and the seemingly nervelessness of, the French officers. I remember particularly one time when the command post was in a little village, and the German artillery was constantly shooting at the nearby church steeple from which their positions could be observed. There could have been someone hit at any minute and the noise was deafening, but everybody went about their business as if nothing else mattered and everything was peaceful. I don’t know whether inside they were scared—I'll admit, I was.

Somehow, however, their attitude must have rubbed off on me to a certain extent. I recall interrogating a German major who had just been taken captive. We were in a building, the front of which had already collapsed, and we were on the second floor. There was constant artillery bombardment, apparently from two or three different gun positions. It was extremely important for us to know where these positions were, but he did not want to say anything other than his name, rank, and serial number. I finally said to him, “You won't get out of here until you give the information. You know that you Germans have lost the war, and it’s just a period of time before it’s finished. If you want to get yourself killed at this late date, go ahead. I have all the time in the world.” He must have seen my point, because he finally told me what I needed to know and that ended this episode, not a minute too early for me.

Another interrogation that I remember vividly had taken place under more quiet conditions sometime earlier in the fall of 1944. The man I interrogated seemed intelligent and reliable. He was with what might be best translated as a punishment company. After he gave me all the information I wanted, like armaments, officers, and opposing regiments, I asked him why he was in a punishment outfit. He said, “I was on the eastern front near Riga, Latvia, where the SS rounded up thousands of Jewish men women and children. They made the Jews dig ditches, undress, and stand so that, when they were shot, they would fall into the ditches. This went on every day. There were so many that the SS needed help and requested regular army troops to help kill the Jews. I refused and that is why I’m in the punishment battalion.”

While I had heard rumors of concentration camps, being cut off from all current news, mass murders surpassed anything I had imagined. I forwarded my interrogation report immediately to the division and also directly to Corps Headquarters, where I hoped it would be going up to higher headquarters. I have a copy of this interrogation still in my files because I was so shocked, even though this was against all army orders.

IN DECEMBER 1944, I was promoted to first lieutenant, but then all good things have to come to an end. One day we were advised that our XV Corps had been transferred from the Third to the Seventh Army, but the 2nd French Armored Division was to remain with the Third Army. When we were called back to HQ, we received a very nice letter of recommendation from General LeClerk. I personally was told that I would receive the Croix de Guerre for the valuable information I had provided the division. The 2nd French Armored Division received a Distinguished Unit Citation from the American High Command for its heroic campaign, entitling the participants in the campaign, naturally including us, to wear a fourragere, a corded ribbon, on the left breast of our dress uniform thereafter.

All of the above may sound as if being in the war was a lot of fun. I can assure you that it was not. We were very busy on most days, driving, looking for a place to sleep, setting up equipment, worrying about mines on the road, or roads under enemy fire. In the evenings, we were typing our reports, mostly in a cold room by the light of a gas lantern. I, like most everybody else, was waiting for letters from home; the mail reached us very irregularly. I wrote to Hilde whenever I had a chance, and to my parents and sister about once a week. My wife was doing her part for the war by accepting a job with the Office of Censorship. Since she could read German script, this enabled her to read the mail coming to German prisoners who had been brought to the United States. Quite a bit of valuable information could be gleaned from these letters had our planes hit a bridge or missed it, was food scarce as a railway line was out of commission, was morale good, and so on.

I also worried about the future. I was thirty-three years old with lots of obligations and no means to speak of or any specialized knowledge of any kind to put to use after my return.

AFTER A WHILE, we were assigned to the 106th Cavalry, which was a reconnaissance outfit with light tanks and armored cars. We arrived there shortly before Hitler’s last offensive in the area of the Vosges Mountains in the winter of 1944. At the time, we were in some village not too far from the Saar River, south of the Vosges Mountains. Of course, we didn’t know about the offensive. We had quartered ourselves in some abandoned house when at about 2 a.m. we were awakened: “Get out of here within fifteen minutes, the Germans have broken through.” We had never packed up as fast in our lives and were gone in ten minutes or less.

After Hitler’s surprise offensive had finally been beaten back, the Allied advance took us up to the Siegfried Line, a continuous line of fortified bunkers, antitank ditches, and clear fields of fire for the German artillery. In our sector, once again luck was with me. I interrogated a very young captured SS officer who had been in the frontlines of fortifications. It was extremely important for us to know where some of the main gun positions were situated, but he would not talk.

Eventually, I got him involved in a conversation about Hitler, the master race, and ethnic purity. We also talked about the fact that Germany could not win this war anymore, to which he reluctantly agreed halfheartedly. I convinced him eventually that, in the interest of the Fatherland, it would be the best thing for Germany if the war would finish quickly and that he could save precious German blood and lives if he would cooperate. With tears in his eyes, he showed me on a detailed map the location of two of the gun positions with which he was familiar.

Our UNIT FINALLY CROSSED THE RHINE near Mannheim on a pontoon bridge. The regular bridges over the Rhine had all been destroyed by either the retreating Germans or our aerial bombardments. From there, we gradually advanced to the Danube River, then to Wuerzburg, and on to Nuremberg. Most of Nuremberg was in ruins, with many of buildings still smoking. From Nuremberg, we advanced to a little town named Dachau. A few miles away was a camp, though we did not know what kind, whether POW or labor, which at this time was being penetrated by the first of our troops.

A strange odor hung over the town. When I inquired about it, several people pretended not to know where it came from. We soon found out. We drove to the camp the next morning, but were totally unprepared for the sights that awaited us. Right outside the camp stood about fifty open freight cars. Lying in them were dead starved people, severed limbs, which had fallen off bodies when some of the starving survivors had tried to throw out the dead people. They apparently had been able to climb out, but had been too weak to go any farther.

We found out later that this train had come from a camp in Poland, probably Auschwitz, which the SS had evacuated before the advancing Russians would overrun it. The unprotected human cargo had apparently been on the way for several weeks with no food and delayed by bombed out tracks. They finally ended up at Dachau, where guards apparently had had no more time to unload them and to destroy the evidence. The stench which permeated the whole area was unbelievable. It was so horrible that for months afterwards, whenever I thought of Dachau, the stench till seemed to fill my nostrils.

Inside the camp, more horrible sights awaited us. The SS guards had all fled but for a few who had been killed by our troops. Inside the barbed wire were thousands of emaciated inmates, their black and white striped uniforms hanging loosely on their bones. The ovens where the corpses were being burned were still warm. Outside the building were heaps of clothing and inside bodies, just skin and bones with a numbered tag on the big toe, were lying in heaps, maybe five or six feet high. If I live to be a hundred years old, I will never forget this unbelievable sight. Our American soldiers, mostly unsophisticated young boys from all over the United States, were completely unprepared for the sights they encountered. Until now, they had not really known what Nazism meant.

Two WEEKS LATER, we captured Julius Streicher. He had been a particularly sadistic anti-Semite. His newspaper Der Stuermer showed the most vicious caricatures of Jews, said the most outrageous lies about Jews, and incited the people to violence against them. The paper was read all over Germany and Austria. The man himself used to strut around with a horse whip in his hand. At any rate, he was jailed and I interrogated him in his cell before he was shipped back for more detailed questioning over many days.

It was amazing to see how ordinary a balding, middle-aged man looked when seeing him without his glamorous uniform and how his arrogant bearing changes when seeing him in a jail cell. He had posed as a bombed out artist hiding in the mountains and painting pictures. I was amazed to hear that he was actually a friend of the Jews and, like the Zionists, just wanted them to go to Palestine. I questioned, listened to his answers in amazement, and took notes. He sounded so ridiculous and pathetic that I could not even hate him. He was sentenced to death as a war criminal during the Nuremberg Trials and eventually hanged.

I RECEIVED ORDERS TO REPORT EARLY On May 5 to headquarters of the XV Corps, right outside Munich. Subsequently, I found out that I had been selected to be the official interpreter at the surrender of all the southern German armies. The German Gen. Von Foertsch was the chief of staff of Gen. Albert Kesselring, who was the commander of all German armies that had been in Italy, Austria, and southern Germany. There were six American generals, including Gen. Jake Devers, who was the commander of the two American armies in the southern part of France and Germany. Then there was also one lowly First Lieutenant Brunswick.

The picture in the New York Times, as well as those in the other metropolitan newspapers throughout the United States, had the caption, “Surrender at Munich,” and listed all the generals by name plus “an unidentified American officer.” People at home who knew me recognized me in the picture—for once Hilde knew where her husband was. In any case, it was a moment in my life that I will relish as long as I live. There were long negotiations with the Germans—the officers wanted to stay in charge of the troops, they wanted to keep their side arms, and so on—all to no avail. Finally, this Jewish refugee who, eight years earlier had to leave his homeland, asked this high-ranking German general: “Do you understand that this means, ‘unconditional surrender?’” To this, with utmost reluctance, the general eventually spat out, “Yes, I understand.”

HAVING BEEN IN THE ARMY during World War II and proven my worth, this had greatly increased my self confidence and done away with the feeling of being inferior to native-born Americans. All through my youth, even before Hitler, Jews supposedly were equal citizens, but they were still perceived by many Germans as unequal. There had always been a lot of anti-Semitism. When I played with other children in Bocholt, I believed subconsciously that I was always wilder than they. I remember climbing on the outside of our house into the second story window, or climbing a tree high enough so that I could get on a factory roof, always trying to impress my friends.

In my army years, at times the same motives must have been at work; when in basic training I tried to excel, or when I interrogated the German major under artillery fire, I continued until he gave up. In any case I had often been a “reluctant” Jew, asking myself whether it was worthwhile to belong to a small minority and being exposed to discrimination by so many unenlightened people. Being in Israel changed my outlook. I greatly admired what Jews had accomplished there in such a short amount of time and I admired their spirit. While I had not contributed to their achievements and therefore had nothing of which to be proud personally, I came to feel that I was fortunate to have been born a member of this small group of people. In five thousand years of recorded history, Jews have suffered so much, yet still have given the world so much to advance it, in religion, philosophy, science, medicine, and many other fields of endeavor.

In short, over a period of time, this reluctant Jew became a rather proud Jew. Throughout the years, when someone questions me about my German accent, I’m always pleased to say, “No I’m not German; I escaped Hitler and I am Jewish.”

IN 1992, WHEN HILDE AND I WENT TO AMSTERDAM, I rented a car for one day to show her Bocholt, where I had spent the first fifteen years of my life. It  gave me a chance to spend some nostalgic moments thinking of the little boy and his sister who had roamed around here some sixty-five years earlier and of their parents. The house looked no longer as nice as it did then, nor did its visitor. From there we drove to the Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town. It was well maintained; monuments of my grandparents and other family were all still standing and in reasonably good shape. However, the memorial tablet at the entrance to the cemetery annoyed us. It said, in translation: “In memory of our Jewish citizens who had to lose their lives during the Hitler time. They died for their people and their religion.” What nonsense! An upright statement as to what had happened would have read: “In memory of our Jewish citizens who were murdered during the Hitler years.” It showed me that even well-meaning Germans, who had re-established the cemetery and were keeping it in good shape, still had a hard time, fifty years later, coming to grips with the awful truth.

In balance, I think that I have been extremely fortunate overall. My family, parents, sister, and I could have perished in the ovens of Auschwitz, like so many unfortunate others. We all escaped. I could have been killed or maimed during World War II, and again I escaped unharmed. I arrived in the U.S. penniless, with only a good education but no particular skills at the age of twenty-six. I was able to acquire the means to make a decent living for my family and myself and to give my kids a good education. I have been able to see my three sons marry and enjoy my seven grandchildren.

John Brunswick became a manufacturer of plastic shower curtains, tablecloths, and mattress covers.

The above content is from "The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military in World War II" by Steven Karras. Steven has given us permission to reproduce the chapters in their entirety. All content is copyright Steven Karrass and ‎ Zenith Press. No reproduction without permission.