Heroic Jews and Gentiles in World War II
Yom Kippur was this week. Yom Kippur, as most of you know, is the Jewish day of atonement, a fast day, the holiest day in the Jewish year, when Jews ask God’s forgiveness for their sins and shortcomings and pray for the strength to be better in the year to come.
On Jewish holidays, my family assembles at my grandmother’s house and goes to her synagogue. It’s a very small congregation, with no rabbi; the services are directed by a lay leader — generally a thoughtful local obstetrician who very gamely pinch-hits as a clergyman.
Like most churchgoing Americans — I use the term loosely — I can take sermons or leave them alone. However, this past Yom Kippur, lay leader Charlie Mann gave a short talk that I thought deserved a wider audience than a few dozen hungry Jews. In fact, he told a story that every American should be familiar with.
First, some background: During the Second World War, there were about 25 percent more Jews per capita in the American military than there were in America at large. Some 550,000 Jews served; among them they won 50,000 decorations — DSCs, DFCs, DSMs, Navy Crosses, Legions of Merit, Silver and Bronze Stars, Air Medals, Medals of Honor, and 15,000 Purple Hearts.
After the D-Day invasion, in Northern France and Belgium, two American Jews won the Medal of Honor, and several hundred were captured, when the Germans launched the Battle of the Bulge counterattack. When Sergeant Isadore Jachman’s company was pinned down by murderous fire from two German tanks, he broke cover, alone, grabbed a discarded bazooka, and fired on the tanks, causing them to retreat. Jachman suffered fatal wounds, but saved the lives of all the men in his unit. When the two tanks in Lieutenant Raymond Zussman’s command were stopped by heavy German resistance, he ignored gunfire and grenades to clear the way forward. According to his Medal of Honor citation: “Going on alone, he disappeared around a street corner. The fire of his carbine could be heard and in a few minutes he reappeared driving 30 prisoners before him.”
Captured Jewish soldiers ended up in comparably perilous positions; Allied Jewish POWs were frequently separated from their gentile comrades and sent to slave-labor camps, or to death camps. A staggeringly brave American Christian named Roddie Edmonds had something to say about that. He was the subject of Dr. Mann’s sermon.
Like the captured Jews in question, and several thousand other men, Master Sergeant Edmonds was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Bulge. As the ranking prisoner at the Stalag IX-A POW camp, he was in command. In December 1944 — while the Battle of the Bulge was still being fought — Stalag IX-A’s commandant ordered all Jewish prisoners to present themselves in the camp yard.
Sergeant Edmonds knew that if the 200-odd Jews among his men could be identified, they would almost certainly be murdered. So Edmonds ordered every single American prisoner — all 1,275 of them — to assemble before the commandant.
Standing in frond of his men, Edmonds told the commandant: “We are all Jews here.”
The German officer refused to accept the answer, “They cannot all be Jews,” he said to Edmonds. Edmonds repeated that they were. The commandant drew his pistol, pressed it to Edmonds’s head, and demanded Edmonds identify the Jews. Edmonds told him, “If you are going to shoot, you are going to have to shoot all of us.” And not one of his men backed down.
Interviewed in 2015, one of Edmonds’s Jewish men, Paul Stern, said that these 70 years later, he can “still hear [those] words.”
Edmonds warned the commandant that the Allies were going to win the war and that the commandant would surely be executed for war crimes if he proceeded. With that, the commandant withdrew and the matter was dropped. Germany surrendered five months later.
Edmonds was an exceptionally humble man, and his story isn’t well remembered (though he is memorialized at Yad VaShem in Israel). In the last few years, his son — the Reverend Christopher Edmonds — has helped get his father some much-deserved recognition. Now, according to the Times of Israel, Edmonds is being considered for his own Congressional Medal of Honor.
In the very first prayer of Yom Kippur, Jews pray for the strength of character to fulfill all their obligations, make good on all their debts, during the upcoming year. Dr. Mann told this story just before the daily prayer for the success and safety of the United States, our government, and our armed forces. He tactfully reminded everyone of what is arguably Jews’ greatest debt, that to American Christians. It was a short talk during a long fast, but it was remarkably heartening.
Happy New Year.