My father, born in 1921 in Humenné, Slovakia, was lucky to avoid the worst possible fate during WW2: his father, my grandfather Jacob Grossman, was a well-established cobbler with a small hide tanning business. As such, he was declared “an essential Jew” and he and his family were spared deportation to Auschwitz (a fate that my mother was not able to evade) Nevertheless, since my father had just turned 18 in 1939 and was therefore eligible for military service, he was drafted into the Slovak Army. Slovakia was a fascist satellite state of the Reich and father, along with his fellow Jews were given special black uniforms and made to polish brooms instead of rifles. Demeaning, but in every way better than the fate that other Jewish citizens would meet a year or two later.
Along with a couple of buddies, my father deserted his Jewish unit sometime in 1940. If caught, he would have been deported to a concentration camp immediately. The three friends each went their separate ways and my father survived the next three years living on forged documents which bore some typically Slovak last name. With the help of a kind farmer and his wife (whom I met in Prague in 1965), hiding in corn fields and tobacco fields, as well as the farmer’s attic, father managed to survive until late 1944 when he joined a group of partisans who formed the kernel of what was later known the Slovak National Uprising. A few months later still, he fought along the first wave of the Red Army as it reached Slovakia.
When he finally made it home at war’s end, in April 1945, he learned that almost all his immediate family had been killed in an allied bombing raid in October 1944. The allies were bombing railway supply lines and a stray bomb smashed into the nearby train station of Liptovský Mikuláš, where my father’s parents and siblings were waiting for their train home. Sister Zuzana (known as Zsuzsi in Hungarian) and much older brother Martin were not on the family trip and thus were spared. Father came home to find the house empty and trashed – possibly by Red Army soldiers or perhaps by local looters only to happy to ransack Jewish homes in the almost certain knowledge that “their” Jews were never coming back.
[there is a story to be told about how my father located my grandparents’ bodies but I shall save it for another entry]
Only a few weeks later, my parents met at the Humenné railways station, as my maternal grandparents went to welcome their daughter who had made it through three years in Auschwitz and was coming home. She was skeletal and in poor health but with an intact, forward looking, fighting spirit. That was my mother, and she retained that same spirit until July 2020, when she passed away, aged 96. My father tagged along on the walk to the station, and as my mother alighted from the train, it was love at first sight, despite the horrendous physical shape mom was in at the beginning of May, 1945.
Both my parents realized there was no future in the now “Judenrein” (“cleansed of Jews”) town of Humenné and they moved 450 miles west to Prague, where I was born and raised.
Even though my father had seen limited action during the war – he liked to tell a story of how he and a few fellow partisans had captured a Wermacht colonel in the mountains – he never bragged about it. I remember being hungry for more “real war” stories but he didn’t like talking about his personal experiences much. He expressed all that sadness and anguish in his short stories and novels, and by the early 1960’s he was a well known writer in Czechoslovakia. In 1965 he wrote a script for a film based on one of his books, called “The Shop on Main Street”. The film won an Academy Award – the first Eastern Bloc movie to earn the honor.
There was one thing dad did talk about. “Look,” he said, “Things did not turn out great after the war and the way our country’s will was trampled and we were forced to become Communist...what can I say...not what we were praying for exactly. But know this: I fought along the Red Army, and it was the Red Army that saved my life and liberated my part of the world from the Nazi thugs who murdered your aunt Lea and almost managed to murder your mother. I drank vodka with a Red Army captain who thought I was a German spy because I remembered the names of all the stops on the Trans Siberian Express line, from Moscow to Vladivostok. “Ty shpion!” (“You’re a spy”) He put his gun to my temple, I almost shit my pants. Luckily all the other Slovak guys who were with us confirmed this was something we had studied at school. The captain shook his head in disbelief. “Kak eta vazmozhno?” (“How is this possible?”), but he put his gun back in the holster, poured another glass of vodka and we laughed as I shivered. No Soviet citizen was permitted to know such state secrets as the names of train stations on the Trans-Siberian - even though everyone in a Slovak school studied it. Anyway, my point is this. The Russians were crazy and dangerous. But they could fight like lions. And whatever else happened later, after their “liberation” turned out not be a liberation at all, but rather just another type of occupation, they DID bring freedom to me. And I can never forget that!”
Today is Veterans’ Day. I lived in Canada for 30 years, where it’s called Remembrance Day and is actually even a bigger deal than it is here in the United States. On the 11th Day of the 11th Month, at the 11th Hour, everything stops, the national anthem is played and many observe a minute of silence. People wear bright red poppies in their lapels (as they do in the UK), a custom that dates to the end of World War I. It is inspired by a poem Canadian Army doctor, written by Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrea after the Second Battle of Ypres. Let me quote the whole poem, since it’s such a profoundly emotional, perfect piece of writing. McCrea was himself killed in January 1918:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
“If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders Field”
In June 1944, the allied forces of the United States, Great Britain and Canada stormed the beaches of Normandy and began to write the final chapter of WW2. We say “allied forces” but we must remember these were boys of 18, 19, even 17, who ran into a barrage of machine-gun fire, knowing the casualty rates of the first wave were going to be enormous. But they overcame their fear and fought and were maimed and died, so the world would be freed of Nazi tyranny. And they pushed on for a further year, bloodied, battered, tired, hungry, homesick, exhausted – but they did the job and stormed Germany from the West, as the Red Army overpowered the last defenses in the east and crushed Berlin.
I believe that not to remember these heroic sacrifices, the blood shed so we can live free, is a sin. It is indeed our duty to remember ALL the time, not just on Veterans’ Day. We may wear that poppy for a few days but should have its image on our minds daily, as we think of the boys on Omaha Beach, Juno Beach, Utah Beach, Sword Beach and Gold Beach. And we must also remember the boys in Flanders’ Field, all the farm boys from Nebraska and Kansas, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, Devon and Sussex – because many of the fearless fighters were indeed farm boys who picked up arms and marched to face enemy fire to make sure we can continue living in peace. And even though it’s not a popular, or well-recognized fact, I think also of the boys from the Russian steppe and from the Ural and the Caucasian Mountains, whose country was raped by the Nazi war machine but who fought back inch by inch and weakened that machine so our boys could advance from the West and wring the Nazi neck.
Naturally, we remember all veterans, from all wars, including the one facing enemy fire right now. Because if we do not speak – we will be silenced. And if we forget – we will be forgotten.
WE ARE ONLY FREE IF WE REMEMBER
beautiful, george. i am so glad you’re sharing your stories with us- bc of that, the people in them live forever ❣️
Very moving. Thank you George. Blessings to you sir.