My maternal Grandfather ran a textile mill, and was exempted from the WWII draft (the phrase my Mom uses is something like “vital industrial commodity”).
My paternal Grandfather was a surgeon, but had heart problems even in his 30s. He was given a medical deferment - or whatever they called it in WWII. But he wanted to fight Hitler (we’re Jewish), so the story in my family is that he found a med student whose EKG was similar enough to his own to be believed, but would pass the Army’s requirements. Grandpa submitted this EKG as his own (don’t ask me how - but everyone wanted to sign up in those days), and Bingo! Grandpa’s an Army doctor. He enlisted in New Jersey and was assigned to … drum roll please … Georgia. (Or was it Alabama? I’ll have to ask my Dad.) Anyway, he was assigned to an Army hospital down there, but housing was so tight that the closest place my Grandmother could find to live was in Alabama (or Georgia - whichever state her husband was not in). She was trying to set up housekeeping with her two young kids while her husband was hundreds of miles away. After a while people in the town came to the conclusion that my Grandmother was the “other” wife, and her “hubby” had a first family elsewhere.
A few months after his enlistment, the Army caught up with Grandpa’s fake EKG, and discharged him. He went to the town where Grandma, Dad and my Uncle were staying to get ready to move back to NJ. According to my Grandmother, he got in on a Friday evening. “Boy I’m beat,” he says, “I just want to get out my uniform and go to sleep.” “Oh no you won’t!” she said. “You are putting that uniform back on and we are going to temple tonight!” They went to temple and my Grandmother introduced her HUSBAND to everyone.
My paternal Grandmother had five brothers and one sister. Her sister’s the only one of that generation still alive. She didn’t serve, and my Grandmother only served to the extent that she made Alageorgia less safe for German cockroaches. I believe all five of my Great Uncles served in WWII. I have my own story about two of her brothers’ service.
Most of my Grandmother’s family moved to California when the kids of my grandmother’s generation were young. I was in CA for a conference in 1989 and I had dinner with my Great-Aunt, my eldest Great Uncle and his wife, and my youngest Great Uncle. Oldest Great Uncle was an accountant in his 30s when WWII broke out, and he became an Army accountant. I thought that crap like the $600 toilet seat was new - nope. OGU helped audit an arms plant in Buffalo. There was only $1 million missing. One. Million. 1945. Dollars. Missing. It makes the baby Harry Truman cry. There were more such stories at dinner from OGU.
Then youngest Great Uncle spoke up. He was an aviator in Europe, and had been shot down and captured by the Germans. He told us a couple little stories about the war. He hated the humidity back East in basic training. He ran into a guy in the POW camp he knew from high school sports in California - but the other guy didn’t make it. He told about being force-marched from the POW camp to another camp when the Germans didn’t want the approaching Allied troops to re-capture them. It was in the winter of 1945, and it was very cold and he did not have a good coat. Just a couple of little stories. YGU went to the bathroom, and everyone else at the table was LOOKING at each other intently with odd expressions on their faces. I asked “What’s going on?” Well, it seems that these were the first words my Great Uncle had said to the family about his captivity. Ever. Forty-four years and he never said a peep about it. Amazing.
And YGU was not a taciturn guy. He picked me up at the convention center and we were talking and joking the whole long rush-hour drive from Anaheim to LA.
Mama Zappa’s Dad was in the Merchant Marine in WWII, in the North Atlantic. As I recall, he saw ships in his convoy sunk. She had other relatives serve also, but I’ll let her tell about that if she wants.
Then - as if this post wasn’t long enough - is the lady we named our daughter Moon Unit after. Not really a relative, but close enough. “Tante Lune” was born and raised in Paris, and became a doctor. She was also Jewish. She met and married close friend of my maternal Grandparents’ after the War and migrated to the US. Tante Lune hardly ever spoke about her war experiences. My Grandmother asked her what it was like in France during the War. “Oh it wasn’t so bad. On the weekends we’d bike out to the country for picnics.” My Dad knew some ex-OSS folks from work, who knew, or knew of, my “Tante Lune” and gave him the straight dope. She had been in the Resistance, and was reputed to be the best pistol shot in Paris. The French Resistance would grab downed Allied pilots and hide them during the week. Then on weekends a “bunch of young people” would bike out to the country “for a picnic”. Sometimes two or three to a bike - times were hard in those days. After dark, at a pre-arranged location, an Allied plane would pick up the pilots, and maybe drop supplies. Then the remaining Resistance people would bike back - fewer than the ones that left Paris.
Of course, if any Nazi soldier had suspected anything, they would all have been shot at once.
“Weekend picnic in the country” my ass!
When the Nazis took Paris she went underground - and I do mean underground. For a time she was hiding out in the sewers, never daring to sleep in the same place twice. All the while taking care of wounded Resistance fighters. Setting up operating rooms in the sewers of Paris. Amazing stuff. She never talked about it - we got it all third hand.
In 1987, she told me and Mama Zappa a couple of stories about her experiences. She said her dog had gone missing right after the Nazis occupied Paris. She and a friend drove all over Paris looking for it, and found it shot in a gutter. By the Nazis.
She told a better story of Liberation Day. As Paris was being liberated, she went to a hospital to help as an MD. In that hospital was her father! He had not been wounded during the war. He was putting up a banner to celebrate the liberation, and fell off the ladder! They hadn’t seen each other through the whole war, and they meet up because of a simple fall.
Tante Lune died at 106. She had dementia the last several years, that was sad. Prior to that she was sharp as a tack - always up on current events, always well read. She did not want people to make a fuss, so she had no funeral. She had outlived her peers, and most of the next generation as well. What I wanted to say at her funeral, and never got the chance to, was the stories above, all about the dear elderly lady who was my “Tante Lune”. Hitler turned Europe into a machine to kill her, and everyone like her - non-German, Jewish, free, or independent-minded - and she was all of those. She not only fought the war, and helped win it, and survived, but she really lived. She lived longer in quiet retirement after the War than she lived before the War. If living well is the best revenge, she had the finest revenge of all. And enjoyed every minute she could.