D-Day: A German Jew survives the Holocaust to fight the Nazis [View all]

[Behind the Aegis]

His is a different war story, one of survival long before he got into World War II.

Henry Hirschmann was born a Jew in Grossauheim, Germany, in 1920, shortly after the end of World War I. Germany’s economy was in shambles and Hitler used his country’s vulnerabilities to rise to power in 1933.

“For the first few years, I didn’t feel the impact of his dictatorship,” said Hirschmann, now 93. “Then on Nov. 9 in 1938, I experienced one of the worst events of my life.”

It was called Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass – the night of Nazi violence that signaled the beginning of the Holocaust. The Nazis torched 200 synagogues, ransacked 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses and murdered scores of German and Austrian Jews. They rounded up 70,000 more Jews – mostly men – for the concentration camps.

They sent Hirschmann to Buchenwald, one of Germany’s first and largest concentration camps. But with sponsorship from an aunt and uncle in New York, they released him after six months.

He arrived in the Bronx in May 1939, four months before Hitler’s army invaded Poland, starting World War II. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, drawing America into the war, he ached to join the U.S. Army so he could return to Europe and fight the Germans. He got his chance in 1943, and a month after D-Day landed at Normandy, France, with an Army field artillery battalion loaded down with howitzers.

more: http://www.lakewyliepilot.com/2014/06/03/2452912/d-day-a-german-jew-survives-the.html