Personal recollections of WWII era life in Boro Park, New York

4.2.12 WC: 191694 If I could help our war effort by turning myself into a superhero, at least I could look out for German spies on our beaches. When I was four years old, German spies landed on Long Island in a submarine. Although they were quickly captured, there were rumors of other planned landings. And so over the next few summers, which my family spent in a rented room near Rockaway Beach, a local police officer paid us kids a penny a day to be on the lookout for “Kraud Subs.” We took our job very seriously. I recall my grandmother Ringel (my mother’s mother), who was recovering from a heart attack, taking me to a rehabilitation home in Lakewood, New Jersey, where several wounded or shell- shocked soldiers were also being rehabilitated and listening to their scary combat stories. Then I remember, quite vividly, both VE (Victory in Europe) and VJ (Victory over Japan) days. There was dancing in the streets, block parties and prayerful celebrations. Our soldiers, including several of my uncles, were coming home. (My father received a medical deferment because he had an ulcer, which my mother said was caused by my bad behavior.) We weren’t told of any Holocaust or Shoah—those words were not even in our vocabulary—just that we had lost many relatives in Europe to the brutal Nazis and Hitler (“Yemach Sh’mo—may his name be erased from memory). We cheered Hitler’s death, which according to a Jewish joke of the time, we knew would occur on a Jewish holiday—because whatever day he died would be a Jewish holiday! A few weeks earlier, we cried over Roosevelt’s passing, which I heard of while listening to the radio and broke the news to my grandmother Ringel, who was taking care of me. She refused to believe it, until she herself heard it on the radio. Then she cried. Roosevelt (which she pronounced like “Rosenfeld”) was the hero of our neighborhood (and other Jewish neighborhoods). A magazine photo of him hung in our home. The “greenies” (recent immigrants, “greenhorns”) who moved to Boro Park from the displaced person camps never talked out what had happened “over there.” The tattooed numbers on their arms remained unexplained, though we knew they were the dark reminders of terrible events. Among my other early memories was Israel’s struggle for independence and statehood, just a few years after the war. My family members were religious Zionists (“Misrachi Zionists”). We had a blue and white Jewish National Fund “pushka” (charity box) in our homes, and every time we made a phone call, we were supposed to deposit a penny. We sang the “Jewish National Anthem” (Hatikvah) in school assemblies. I still remember its original words, before Israel became a state: “Lashuv L’Eretz Avosainv” (“to return to the land of our ancestors’). One particular incident remains a powerful and painful memory. My mother had a friend from the neighborhood named Mrs. Perlestein, whose son Moshe went off to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. There was a big party to celebrate his leaving. Several months later, I saw my mother crying hysterically. Moshe had been killed, along with 34 other Jewish soldiers and civilians, trying to bring supplies to a Jewish outpost near Jerusalem. My mother kept sobbing, “She was in the movies, when her son was killed. She was in the movies.” Israel’s war had come home to Boro Park. It had been brought into our own home. Everyone in the neighborhood knew Moshe and his parents. He had attended my elementary school, played stickball on my be) HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017102