My Uncle’s War

In my childhood, I was surrounded by evidence that there was something very important going on.

Down half a block and around the corner a series of flags began to appear in front windows. Eventually there were four in one house.

Each signified that someone had died in military service.

I had never paid much attention to that house, or that block. I usually went there only on Sunday morning when the weekly stickball game took place.

One Sunday morning, police, all of them Irish, fancy uniformed leaders of the PBA (Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association) cut off automobile access to the street with the flags.

Two big black limousines were allowed through.

From the first descended men clad in frilly vests carrying musical instruments - bagpipes, drums, flutes. They formed a narrow lane up the short front stairs of the house with the starred flags,

Then came the occupants of the second limousine, led by a priest. The musicians played mournfully as people, dressed in black, climbed the stairs. First came women: grandmothers, friends of the family, some collapsing, sobbing, on the arms of men.

They would never again see those four “starred” boys. And those four boys would never see their home again.

After a while less funereal music was audible in the street from inside the house. Dance music!

But hanging out on the sidewalk while Irish people partied out of sight got old real fast.

Why hang around ? That morning the weekly stickball game on that block had been cancelled. Anyway, I was too small to play, not yet having a strong throwing arm.

And it was Brooklyn, I was Jewish. Irish kids ran the stickball leagues.

So I went home.

Around the corner and down the street was my house, where someone had died in the war, too. There was no flag with a star in our windows.

There never would be.

Technically my uncle had not died in battle. He died in a Veterans Administration hospital. But he had war related mental injuries that killed him.

My uncle had wanted to enlist. But he had failed his obligatory physical exam, for what now seems ironic reasons. “Flat feet,” although he came from a family that owned a shoe store.

Then the Selective Service System, which ran conscription during the war, was tasked with quickly producing men able to fill a special need.

German prisoners were being interrogated, and the US government wanted to find out who among them had been involved in the many ghastly activities of the Hitler regime. And what Hitler might be planning to do in his doomed military campaigns.

Translators were needed. My uncle spoke Dutch, German, Yiddish (in a Dutch inflected dialect that my Polish-Lithuanian-Romanian Jewish family couldn’t understand.)

And so my uncle became a Pfc. Never wore a uniform when he came home, as others in our neighborhood did. Never went to “basic training” in the usual way.

Instead he was probably sent to Camp Ritchie in Maryland, or was trained by those who had been trained there.

The ”Ritchie Boys” were all Jews. Faced with defeating those Germans the Allied forces wanted to defeat.

All were trained not to use combat weapons, but to fight by appearing to be what they weren’t: sympathizers with German prisoners.

“Look,” they might say to a prisoner, “I don’t like being in this war any more than you do. It’s Roosevelt’s war, not mine. I can’t wait for it to be over so I can go back and see my wife and kids.”

Research had been done on the prisoner. The American interrogator would know that he too had a wife and children.

Or a prisoner would be shown a phony, fluttery film of a blindfolded German being led to a post in a dark room where a firing squad knelt before him. Smoke was seen (there was no audio in that era) and the blindfolded prisoner slumped, his white shirt seemingly stained with blood.

Research had been done; this prisoner was a vegetarian pacifist who couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

What role did my young uncle play in these “Ritchie Boys” scenarios?

I never knew. And I don’t think my parents ever knew either.

But they all knew, and our extended family knew, that in his Ritchie Boys service he would have come across evidence that some of the captured Germans were killers, rapists, torturers, robbers of Jews in my uncle’s native Holland.

His wife, who lived upstairs from us with my uncle and their two little boys, certainly knew. She often told my mother, in tears, that my uncle was “a nervous wreck.”

He just sits in a chair, she said, his leg throbbing, whistling old Yiddish songs. He won’t eat. I can’t trust him with the kids. When Larry yells up he comes to the back yard to sit and drink beer while Larry throws a ball against the wall.

What I knew about my uncle was that he lived upstairs, was a shoe salesman for a company that grew out of his father’s store, and made my aunt miserable.

He also had regular visitors. Men who tromped up the front porch stairs, then two flights up to my uncle’s little apartment.

My mother would suddenly turn on our tiny, static-burbling kitchen radio, if we were home, my little sister and I would flee to our separate small bedrooms. She to feed her dolls, me to read.

The visitors were doctors, or some kind of medical people. They stayed for a long time.

They were administering something that caused static on the radio, the lights to flicker, the refrigerator to stop humming.

Shock treatments. The standard treatment then for mental illness, including insomnia, obsessive fatalism, violent acting out. All characteristic of my uncle’s condition. Electrodes were put on his shaved head (he wore a wig after the treatments began). Not very different in “treatment” from what the Nazis were doing to those deemed guilty by birth or through capture. Though totally different in intent. One was to cure, the other was to kill.

The shocks were what caused the static on her little kitchen radio, the dimming of our lights, the shut off refrigerator.

“Must be a thunderstorm” my mother would say. These came frequently in our neighborhood, just a few miles from the Atlantic Ocean.

One day there was a commotion when the shock therapists came. Two more pairs of legs thumped up the stairs. When they came down we saw from our front window that they had somehow maneuvered a stretcher with my uncle’s unconscious body on it, down the stairs and into an ambulance.

I never saw my uncle again.

(Larry Bensky can be reached at: Lbensky@igc.org)