Tag: D-Day

Zayde never liked talking about the war.

He never really had much reason to now that I think about it. He made a great life for himself and his family after coming home from Europe. My Zayde (grandfather in Yiddish – “bubby” for grandmother) was the son of a Ukrainian tailor who ran his own dry cleaners and laundromat. Because of financial woes, Zayde willingly dropped out of high school to support the family during the Depression. Despite the rise of Mussolini and Hitler across the Atlantic, he couldn’t enlist until after Pearl Harbor. America stayed out of the war until they had no other choice. I wouldn’t be shocked if he’d have enlisted sooner had the U.S. entered in say 1939. As it was, he joined in 1943, finished basic training, and then left for England. There he and his regiment waited until they were called upon to join the fight.

That was 76 years ago today.

Zayde didn’t storm the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, but he came in as part of D-Day plus two. He never gave us specifics, so we don’t know if the bodies were still strewn across the beaches, but I imagine that it was gruesome. I didn’t know much about his role with the Army until I stumbled upon the official copy of his discharge papers buried under mountains of old photos and documents, papers collected over the course of many moves and home office reorganizations. Until recently, I didn’t know the name of his unit or that he worked as a radar operator. Before this significant find, I only knew that he detected land mines, built and destroyed bridges across France and Germany.

He and his regiment spent 10 months trekking through war-torn French towns and villages where, according to him, some locals greeted the Yankees with boiling hot water dumped from the windows of their tattered homes. They pressed on, survived winter in the wilderness, may or may not have fought the Battle of the Bulge, and made it to the New Year. In April 1945, they liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp along with British and Canadian forces. Being the only one in his unit who could speak Yiddish, Zayde interviewed the survivors as well as some of the captured Nazi officers.

Years later when Bubby cooked lamb chops for dinner, Zayde protested and left the room. This little quirk of his continued well into their parenting days with my dad and two aunts. They didn’t really know why their father hated lamb chops. Bubby said he ate them before the war.

We later learned that the smell reminded him too much of the stench from the ovens at Belsen.

He came home with his M1, a Gewehr German rifle and Luger, and a National Labor Day pin presumably lifted from a dead Nazi’s uniform. Bubby forced him to get rid of the M1 and Luger as well as the Gewehr’s bayonet. Zayde pulled the firing pin out of the Gewehr rendering it a now-broken antique tethered by a small rope to keep the wooden frame and steel mechanical parts together.

He did keep the pendant, creepy face and all, with the infamous little Nazi eagle lurking menacingly beneath.

Zayde told my father that he took home these grim mementos to ensure that no-one could say that it never happened – undeniable physical proof of a genocidal regime that unleashed terror upon the world.

I finally understand why he felt the need to keep those souvenirs.

Let’s be clear about one thing: the original anti-fascists were the Allied Forces. They were young Americans in Illinois, Great War veterans from Colchester, Maquis rebels scheming in the safety of the French Alps, Canadians from across the Plains, and Australians of the Outback.

Present-day Antifa is a loose collection of like-minded fascist-hating men and women who protect peaceful protestors from alt-right scum, the violent bastards who want to beat and intimidate society into tolerating the intolerable. They have no intention of engaging in the civil discourse required for a free society to exist. The Proud Boys, Boogaloos, Richard Spencer’s new Hitler Youth. The “All Lives Matter” crowd.

Antifa prevents these shits from menacing peaceful, non-indoctrinated demonstrators. And because of this, Antifa is vilified by self-proclaimed deplorables.

And, naturally, they’re being scapegoated by the men in power who’ve benefitted from the support of such white nationalist neo-Nazis, a scapegoating unnervingly reminiscent of the Third Reich’s old strategy. Why else do you think Jews, communists, Catholics, homosexuals, and other “non-Aryans” ended up in camps?

Then, it was the stab-in-the-back theory. Now, it’s just daily tweets flowing from out of the Oval Office bathroom. Hence why Trump is now calling peaceful protestors “terrorists”, demanding that police “dominate the streets” to re-instill his idea of law and order. He’s even mused on camera about George Floyd’s happiness from the grave over America’s sparkling new jobs report released yesterday.

We’ve been heading this way for awhile now. Hell, as has been documented by no doubt millions of articles, the man began dehumanizing Mexicans on DAY ONE. He has repetitively derogatorily identified his perceived enemies before, during, and after his election, and he’s continuing to slander the opposition probably as we speak. This draft-dodging coward literally represents the antithesis of what it means to be an American, a President, a leader, or even a decent man.

Like all fascists, Donald J. Trump is the true enemy of the people.

My Zayde didn’t go through the trauma of witnessing piles of flesh-covered skeletal corpses as a young Jewish man to secure an authoritarian’s ghastly desire to callously quell peaceful demonstrators he deemed to be “fake protestors” just to take a stone-faced picture with a bible in front of a church to convey some weird strongman tough guy image for his masturbatory death cult. We’re perilously close to becoming the very thing we helped to destroy.

On the anniversary of Operation Overlord, the mission seen as the beginning of the end of fascism in Europe, who would’ve thought we’d be fighting a fascist in the White House? 76 years after D-Day and we’ve arrived to this disgusting moment in history. The battlefield may be here now, but the aim remains the same. Crush the fascists, save the world.

Zayde, I won’t let you down.