Saul Schiff: A Jewish American Soldier (A Book By Me)

I was born in the Bronx [New York City] in 1923, the youngest of a family of four boys and one girl. My parents were both European Jews, leaving their families and coming to America, "Die Goldene Medina" [a Yiddish expression of admiration for America], to escape the pogroms [a violent riot or massacre aimed at Jewish people] and other forms of anti-Semitism of the Old Country. I was raised during the Great Depression. Everyone who could worked to bring home money to support our family. My father started a business called "Schiff Beverages," and we made flavored soda pop. I turned 20 when I was drafted in the U.S. Army and joined my two brothers already enlisted. Because I had gone to radio and television school, I was soon promoted to the rank of Corporal Technician and sent to Sound Ranging School. Sound ranging was a technique used in WWII to locate and plot the position of enemy guns which were firing on our troops and installations. Our efforts were not always 100% successful, but the threat of our truly awesome American artillery power kept the Germans uneasy and on the run. In August 1944, it was time for my outfit to leave the USA for combat in Europe. We boarded the one-time luxury ship Queen Elizabeth in NY harbor. We crossed the Atlantic and landed in Scotland to make our way to England across the English Channel from France. We stayed there for a few days until we were taken across the channel into France, landing at Omaha Beach. Throughout the French countryside, we saw the high price paid by our troops at Normandy in pushing through the strongly entrenched Nazi forces. The SS contingents of the German army murdered, tortured and starved populations across Europe, using every foul and inhuman tactic in the book. In one instance, the soldiers of B Battery 285th FOB were captured, disarmed and marched to a snowy field where they were mercilessly cut down by machine gun fire. I don't know what happened to the SS officer in charge afterward, but he should have been hanged. The fighting against Japan was still raging when Germany finally surrendered. Hitler was dead, and their armies were shattered. It was May 8, 1945, and we were quartered in Oberneukirchen, Austria. The very next day we were driven west toward Munich, Germany, where we turned north for an extended stay at a one-time military installation. Near Munich, we passed an area where we saw stripe-clothed bodies lying dead on the hills bordering the road. It was Dachau concentration camp. Our convoy, not recognizing the significance of what we had just witnessed, did not stop. Dachau, while not primarily an extermination camp, was used by the Nazis to contain, brutalize and poison the "Untermensch," that "subhuman" class of undesirables like Jews, Gypsies, and the mentally ill. I met surviving Polish Jews. Wanting to help, I was able to get our cook to provide jobs for two young Jewish boys. When the Allies won, I spent time taking a U.S. Army-sponsored course in Physics at the in Freising, Germany. It was there I met Esther Stiller, a Holocaust survivor who had lost her family to the Nazis in Poland. She had survived the war working as a slave laborer on German farms. Later in America, she became my wife. Years later, my wife and I visited Dachau. The place was nearly deserted! Had the world forgotten already? I slipped away to be by myself and to reflect on the enormity of my surroundings. I recited Kaddish, a Jewish prayer written in ancient Aramaic which Jews chant after certain liturgical passages in memory of the dead. With the final "Amen," I felt thoroughly fulfilled and at peace. In 1988, I retired from my job as an Engineer at the Rock Island Arsenal. I've had a richly satisfying life and can take pleasure in many memorable experiences. God Bless America.

• | Author: A Book by Me|Joe McGovern, Anthony Speer
• | Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
• | Publication Date: Mar 02, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 24 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1543059333
• | ISBN-13: 9781543059335