Steven Karras by The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military

Author:The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied Military [Military, The Enemy I Knew: German Jews in the Allied]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: World War II, Social Science, Jewish Studies, Jewish, World War; 1939-1945, Interviews, United States, Jewish Soldiers - United States, World War; 1939-1945 - Participation; Jewish, Biography & Autobiography, Military, Jews; German - United States, Jewish Soldiers, Jews; German, Biography, History
ISBN: 9780760335864
Publisher: Zenith Press
Published: 2009-10-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

BERNARD BAUM

GIESSEN, GERMANY

66th Infantry Division

Bernard Baum was born in Giessen, Germany, and spent the first eight years of his life there before his mother, an American citizen by birth, was able to arrange exit visas for the family to emigrate in 1933. He grew up on the North Side of Chicago and attended Senn High School. After graduating at seventeen, Bernard enlisted in the army and was sent to Lawrence, Kansas, for the Army Specialized Training Program until he was sent to combat in France as an infantry replacement. He is pictured above in France, 1945.

My father was reared in a small town, Hessen, Germany. His father was a cattle beater, which was a common occupation for Jews at the time. My father was the first university educated member of his family. I was born in 1926 in Giessen, Germany.

My family was German by nationality and Jewish by religion. My father’s military service in World War I left him very German. He fought for the Fatherland and carried shrapnel in his back for the rest of his life. At the same time, he was aware that Judaism made a difference to being a full-fledged integrated German.

I remember a couple of incidents of anti-Semitism in childhood, prior to September 1933 when we left. When I was on my scooter in a park across the street from our residence, I had been given a little swastika flag, which I tied to my scooter. One of the older women came up to me and said, “You can’t fly that flag! What are you crazy?” I think she probably was Jewish. She took it away from me. She said, “You don’t want this flag.”

When I was in second grade, the teacher wore a swastika button on his lapel. He became a Nazi very early on. My older brother was tossed into a garbage can by his classmates or some other children at his school. They all chanted, “Jude, Jude.” There was a parade of brown-shirted Nazis on the street right outside of our building. My father had an enameled sign that said, “Dr. Theodore Baum, Dentist” outside our door. Some ruffians came along, ripped it off, and threw it in the river. One night the police came to get my father and kept him all night. My mother was terrified. They released him, however, because it was sufficiently early in that regime so that they couldn’t do much other than scaring the hell out of him.

My father was a reader and liberal by orientation and politically. He read Mein Kampf in about 1929 or 1930. As the story goes, when he finished that book, he turned to my mother and said, “If this man Hitler comes to power, we’re leaving Germany.” That was about 1930. In January 1933, when Hitler became chancellor, my father got the papers.

He said, “We’ve got to leave because these Nazis are bad for us.” It wasn’t a very sophisticated statement, but clearly we three brothers wanted to understand why this was happening.

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