When two days a year aren’t enough
The veterans I’ve known deserve more than a twice-annual nod
The new year is barely underway, and Memorial Day and Veterans Day aren’t even on the horizon yet. But I’ve already begun thinking about them, in a swirl of recollection fueled by a recent death and several articles that reminded me of the constant backdrop that war and conflict have played during my life.
Perhaps Trotsky’s infamous statement best sums it up: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” This creepy dialectic, from the man who challenged Stalin and wound up assassinated in Mexico for his efforts, precisely describes the metastasizing effect of civilization’s oldest pursuit.
Although I served in the military as a reservist from 1964 to 1970, I (thankfully) never was called to active duty for Vietnam, but several of my contemporaries were. One paid the ultimate price, and four others were affected for the rest of their lives, to greater or lesser degrees, by their experiences in that nether land.
I’ve also been thinking a lot lately about an uncle who served more than two years overseas in World War II, and of a newspaper colleague who was a gunner on a B-24 shot down during the ill-fated raid on Romanian oilfields and spent more than a year as a POW in a German stalag.
The experiences of these two Greatest Generation vets assumed additional personal relevance after a recent article in the Jewish Standard/New Jersey Jewish News highlighted volunteers working to identify graves of World War II Jewish American soldiers erroneously (or expediently) buried in military cemeteries under crosses instead of Stars of David. This effort, known as Operation Benjamin, prompted three shuls in Teaneck to honor veterans past and present in a joint observance after Shabbat services.
The story, reported by Leah Adler, then was referenced in a column by Joseph Kaplan, writing about his uncle, a sailor who died at Normandy and whose body was never recovered. Kaplan’s grandparents kept their son’s Purple Heart for years, but eventually it went missing until Kaplan tracked it to a relative in Israel.
Both the article and the column rekindled my interest in veterans I have known and how they coped in the aftermath of service.
My uncle, Sam Geftic, was the youngest of nine children born to immigrant parents from Poland and raised in Newark. In 1941, he was inducted in the first class of conscripts as the buildup to World War II accelerated. Sam went through basic training at Camp Lee, Virginia, and then attended lab technician’s school at Walter Reed Army Hospital.
Before shipping out with the 45th General Hospital early in 1943, Technical Sgt. Sam Geftic married my aunt, Evalyn Adelman. A record of their V-mails and letters has been faithfully transcribed by his niece, Lora Geftic, and given to family members in a picture-filled volume. Sam writes movingly about the huge scale of destruction and the small instances of humanity he witnessed, with a touch rare for someone of such a scientific bent.
Of the many conversations Sam and I had about the war, one that made a lasting impression concerned Jewish soldiers meeting the chaplain and expressing concern about halacha and kosher observance. In response to their anxieties, the rabbi told them to remain flexible and eat regular Army chow to maintain their health and strength, essentially granting them a dispensation. And if they could not attend Shabbat services, to pray individually or in small groups, and earnestly at that.
For the more than 500,000 Jewish American men and women who served in the armed forces during World War II, far beyond their proportion to the total population and suffering 11,000 combat deaths in the process, this must have presented a challenge to the more observant among them. Sam, an Orthodox Jew and ardent Zionist all his life, chose to follow the chaplain’s advice and forgo stringencies for the duration, a decision he said he never regretted.
When the 45th arrived in Rabat, Morocco, in March 1943, it immediately set up a sprawling hospital to treat Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen waging the North African campaign. The unit continued its lifesaving work until the end of the year before pulling up stakes and briefly putting in at Oran, Algeria, and then embarking for Naples and the Italian offensive. The 45th ultimately would follow the road to Rome and be part of the Eternal City’s liberation.
Although Sam was fully involved in the struggle against Nazis and Fascists, he still found moments to take in the sights. His letters brim with descriptions of Arab bazaars, Greek and Roman ruins, and churches with magnificent statuary, tapestry, and artworks. He rode in an ox cart with peasants, posed by the Appian Way, and witnessed a Sunday mass in St. Peter’s Square. But he also observed ever-present hunger, poverty, and degrading circumstances forced upon children and families caught up in the conflict.
After more than two years overseas, during which the 45th’s doctors, surgeons, and nurses ministered to thousands of servicemen, the unit was demobilized in September 1945. While working in the lab that had processed more than 160,000 slides, Sam had accumulated double the number of points needed to rotate home early but chose to remain with his band of brothers.
Transition to civilian life moved rapidly. My uncle used the GI bill to attend Rutgers and received his B.S. degree in 1948. His professional career spanned decades at Ciba Pharmaceutical, where he pursued research in drugs to fight tropical disease. He and my aunt, Evalyn, a teacher, and my cousin, Yale, moved from Newark to Berkeley Heights, where they lived for many years. Sam died in 1998; he was 80.
If ever there were a poster boy for a perfect uncle, Sam would fill the bill. When our families lived together in Newark, he introduced me to stamp collecting, the workings of a microscope, building an electric motor, and, much later, the joys of custom-blended pipe tobacco. When Dad wasn’t available, we boated in Weequahic Park and went hiking (and got lost) in South Mountain Reservation. And “Unk,” as I fondly called him (and later the Silver Fox), made ample time for all his nieces and nephews.
Yet I suspect that Sam Geftic, like so many children of the Great Depression who then marched off to war, kept a lot bottled up. PTSD hadn’t been diagnosed, and counseling as we know it wasn’t available to vets. When Sam told us stories as youngsters, they were filled with highly imaginative characters (Magic McGillicuddy comes to mind) inhabiting fantasy settings. It was only when we reached our mid-teens that he began to relate the real horrors of war.
To Sam’s credit, he remained lifelong friends with his Army lab partner, Mario Celano, and visited him weekly at the veterans home. And he continued to attend reunions of the 45th General Hospital, although Aunt Evalyn stopped going because she considered them too raucous.
That’s not surprising, considering what members of the unit had witnessed and processed. Rest easy, Unk. May your memory be a blessing.
My other close World War II connection, Bill Hering, came from an entirely different background. Raised in Paterson, non-Jewish, and barely out of high school,. Bill enlisted in the Army when he was 18 and trained as an aerial gunner. He was assigned to the crew of a B-24 bomber that would participate in one of the war’s most storied actions.
Bill’s craft and 177 others, detached from the 8th and 9th Air Forces, were to fly from bases in Libya and attack the German oilfields at Ploesti, Romania. The long-distance, low-level mission would expose each plane to maximum fire, with little margin for error. But the air armada absorbed a fatal setback on approach when the lead navigator erroneously took his element off course and overcorrected, sending the planes directly into the face of oncoming waves as the raid commenced.
Antiaircraft fire destroyed Bill’s B-24, but not before the crew bailed out. He and the others were captured by the Germans, and from August 1943 until liberation, they remained POWs under harsh, life-threatening conditions.
The experience left Bill with what I can only describe as a coiled persona. He could never seem to relax fully, was guarded and suspicious, or might take offense at the slightest remark. Once when I asked him if his captors permitted Red Cross packages at Christmas, he angrily replied: “You’ve got to be [expletive] kidding.” A generation older than me, we became friends, although it took years before I could chip away at his self-imposed protective veneer.
But I knew the deal was sealed one day when he showed me a card from his wallet. It proclaimed his membership in the Caterpillar Club. I thought it was a gag even though Bill insisted it was legit. Only later, after I checked it out, did I realize it was an exclusive group whose members were forced to bail out of their planes.
Bill was a talented copy and wire editor, a prodigious reader, a devoted dad to his two sons, and he retained a sense of humor through it all. He once showed me a letter he had written to the editor of the San Juan Star. Bill loved to vacation on the island and obviously was responding to a previous reader. As I recall, it said in effect:
“Someone recently asked what the critical moment of World War II was. It was the day in 1943 when this writer left home in Paterson and joined the Army Air Force. From then on, it was all downhill for Hitler.”
Sam Geftic and Bill Hering. Such different lives and yet, lives bound together and shaped by the most dramatic event of the last century. Unlike Sam and Bill, my friends who served in Vietnam felt neither the satisfaction of a righteous cause, nor the appreciation of the public. Their postwar years, in some instances challenged by substance abuse, traumatic disorders, or cancers caused by exposure to Agent Orange, reflected a society relatively agnostic about their plight.
I’m not waiting for Memorial Day or Veterans Day to keep all of them in my thoughts. Sam, Bill. Arnie, Walt, John, Greg, Ladley, your sacrifice and service burn brightly.
Jonathan E. Lazarus of West Orange is a retired editor for The Star-Ledger and a copy editor for the Jewish Standard/New Jersey Jewish News.
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