Whenever I have the search opportunity in a paper that is not local I enter my last name for no reason other than because I can. So a couple of weeks ago I was searching in the archives of the Hartford Courant for something completely unrelated and uncovered the following January 4, 1968 and January 8, 1968 story written by Richard D. McNeill for the Hartford Courant.
My father died in 1983. His WWII stories centered about the trucks he drove, the pranks and trouble he and his buddies got in to. Every few years there would be a reunion and the stories would be retold. As time passed, there were fewer stories of the war and more about future plans, their families, their children and grandchildren. I still exchange holiday cards with some of the other “children.” We never discuss our fathers stories. The stories were theirs to tell, not ours.
Anyway, this newspaper article was a memory that I can only vaguely remember. My grateful thanks to Mr. McNeill and the Hartford Courant Corporation for this personal history lesson. I hope you won’t mind if I tell this story mostly from the newspaper article with a few additional memories added. I regret there are a lot of questions that will never be answered.
On December 27, 1967 the phone rang in a Norwich home and a womans voice asked to speak to, “Abe Fishbone.” When he was called to the phone the voice said, “You probably don’t remember me . . “
And Fishbone replied, “As long as any girl remembers me I’m happy.”
The story began twenty-three years earlier and involved a brave seventeen year-old who had out-foxed the Nazis and a three-day stopover. The liberation of World War II concentration camps shed light on some very ugly scenes to Private Abraham Fishbone.
But something beautiful happened in a Herzberg forced labor factory.
Fishbone was with the 38th 91 Quartermaster Truck Company transporting troops of the 1st Division to front line action during the liberation march. When they reached Herzberg in the Hartz mountains just over the Rhine River, he spoke with a member of the Polish underground because he spoke a little Polish, “just enough to get along.”
“I asked if there were any of my people around.” Fishbone said. Then he was told to wait.
Looking around there was a lot of dirt and starving people. The labor factory was made of rows of long, low, wooden quarters that looked like tumble-down chicken coops yet they housed hundreds of humans.
In one of the buildings was a young, pretty and very frightened Dina Klahr.
She and a friend had more to fear than most. They were Jews.
Their parents had been killed in the quiet town of Oleszyce, Poland, just before the girls had run away under falsified passports to escape the ghettos and imminent death there.
The underground agent walked into Dina’s room where she and her friend waited with about 12 other girls. Mrs. Kesten remembers: “He thought we were Jewish and there was a Jewish man outside. I thought you might like to meet him.” he said.
The girls were “excited and happy.” So excited, Fishbone wrote in a letter home, “they actually couldn’t believe it.” “You know how I hate to see women cry, well this lasted for half an hour.” He returned to his camp and the next day brought the girls food and talked with them for a while.
In November 1942 the Jews in Dina’s recently Nazi occupied town were all made to wear white arm bands with the Star of David.
Dina’s mother had obtained a false passport for her. For the next two and a half years everyone but her closest friend, Ruth Lewkowicz, knew her as Eugenia Mikado.
She and Ruth ran away to the big city of Lublin, Poland but there was no work and nowhere else to run. Always in danger of being discovered they still went to the German Labor Department to volunteer for work.
Mrs. Kesten remembered the story she told the officials was something about “my mother had died and my step-mother was no good.”
From Poland she was sent to work in the bomb and mine factory under Nazi rule but was still able to outsmart the enemy. The girls would fix some of the bombs so when they hit they would not explode.
Finally liberation and Pvt. Fishbone came but it was in the wake of bad news. President Roosevelt had died the day before, April 12.
On the third and last meeting of Dina, Ruth and Pvt. Fishbone, Dina recalled the address of an aunt who lived in New York. She asked Fishbone to write and “tell her I’m alive.”
The letter was mailed the next day from some 60 or 70 miles away. He never heard from Dina again until the phone call.
Dina, with “no place to go” and “no future,” left Germany and returned to Poland where she married Abraham Kesten.
On the day after Christmas, in 1958, she came to the United States and ten years later Dina had become Betty and she and her husband owned a poultry farm in Watertown, CT and had two children.
Fishbone’s company was awarded with presidential citations for heroism and bravery in combat.
To my knowlage there was no further communication. No cards. No reliving the memory. Now I am wondering how and why the story was in the newspaper in 1968 when stories of war were not fashionable. What happened to Ruth? Did she ever hear from the Aunt in New York? What was the trigger to make the call? So many questions with no answers.
Thank you all for your service and for working to make all the atrocities of evil, war and pain a memory and not a future.
Thank you for reading and sharing my history and Norwich Community blog freely with your family or friends or anyone you think might be interested or in a position to take on some of the suggested projects. Don’t hesitate to contact me for further information. I am happy to pass along anything I can. Together we can make a difference. Email comments on this blog to berylfishbone@yahoo.com View my past columns at http://www.norwichbulletin.com/section/blogs.