100-Year-Old Veteran Kept Jewish Prayer Book over His Heart as He Confronted the Holocaust

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

This Reflection was written by Jesse Schraub, who turns 101 this month, with the help of his three daughters, Alice Kinsler, Ellen Gang, and Laura Siegel.

In 1943, I was drafted into the military at age 18, having never before been away from Brooklyn, New York. When asked which branch of service I preferred to join, I chose the Army; I wasn't a swimmer, and I figured the Navy or Marines would surely mean drowning.

In the 1940s, there were concentration camps in Europe and overt anti-Semitism in the United States. I had heard on the news that innocent people were being slaughtered in Europe just because they were Jews. Despite my anger and horror, I knew I had to control my feelings if I was going to be effective in fighting the Nazis.

Though an observant Orthodox Jew, I decided not to bring my tallis (prayer shawl) when I entered the Army. I was worried that sacred items could be intentionally desecrated or accidentally damaged in warfare. The pocket-sized prayerbook provided to Jews in the Armed Forces stayed in my breast pocket, over my heart.

I was to be stationed overseas for nine months, arriving after the Allies liberated France on June 6, 1944. On October 18, a week after leaving Boston Harbor, my ship docked in Liverpool, England, then we traveled by train all day to rainy Southampton.

I was resigned to the fact that I wouldn't be able to follow a kosher diet during my tour, but couldn't bring myself to eat pork sausage. So I bought two cans of sardines, all that the ship's PX had. I ate one, and the other I saved "for a rainy day," which fortunately never came. (To this day, I love sardines.)

When my battalion arrived at the Normandy beachhead, we could see the huge cemetery of about 10,000 soldiers' graves. It wasn't lost on me that if we had arrived there four months earlier, we would have been among those 10,000.

We bivouacked at Normandy for about a month. One day in November, heading east to the front, I was doing guard/directional duty for my battalion. A farmer came out of his nearby house and asked me, "Voulez-vous une tasse de café?" I understood that he was offering me coffee and enthusiastically replied, "Oui!" The farmer asked, "Voulez-vous laver les mains et le visage?" I hadn't washed in weeks and it was obvious. "Oui!" After washing up, I was almost surprised to see my skin underneath all that dirt. I enjoyed the coffee, bread ("très bon!"), and soft-boiled egg from one of the laying hens, and thanked the farmer and his wife with my chocolate D-bars and all my cigarettes.

In December 1944, we deployed to the Hurtgen Forest in the Ardennes region of Belgium for the Battle of the Bulge. The cold was brutal, and I wore every item of clothing I had. On Christmas Day, as I sat in my gun emplacement on the snowy hillside from which we fired our weapons, the fog lifted and the planes resumed their flights. I heard a young soldier crying for his mother. I prayed that it would never be me in that position.

Among the challenges I faced was the growing, horrific knowledge of what Hitler was doing to my fellow Jews. I was angered and disgusted by the atrocities. How could people be such animals? I cried out to God, but it never shook my faith. I was the target of anti-Semitic comments from platoon mates and others; some didn't want to share a tent with me. But I also found unexpected kindness and humanity, such as that of a buddy who came to my defense when an anti-Semitic platoon leader was bullying me.

I found it near impossible to observe my religious rituals, holidays, and dietary laws, and had to constantly remind myself that this would be temporary. I "observed" Jewish traditions in my heart, such as daily prayer and the custom of refraining from work on the Sabbath, when I couldn't observe them in practice.

But being a Jew also made me an asset: I had grown up speaking Yiddish, the colloquial language of Eastern European Jews, which shares much vocabulary and grammatical structure with German. Among the 40 soldiers in my platoon, I was the only Jew and also the only soldier familiar with any language other than English. I earned their respect by serving my unit as an unofficial translator.

In April 1945, when the war was winding down, we were deep in Germany, near the Czech border. One morning, I heard, "Schraub! Front and center!" At the command post, I was told that someone had a problem: "Talk to him!"

We conversed--me in my broken German, he in his perfect German. For a short time, we could not catch each other's words, but I surmised he was a doctor. He was taking an apparently psychotic patient to an asylum and needed a driver and an interpreter. Realizing that I was speaking Yiddish, he used the Yiddish word "meshuggeh," rather than the German word "verrückt," to describe the patient. I then perceived this doctor was a Jew, and we began to converse quickly and fluently. His Yiddish accent was familiar to me. I asked where he was from, and he replied, "Mielec, Poland." It was my father's hometown!

He told me that when he and his wife were taken by the Nazis, they agreed that, if they were separated, they would meet at the edge of the town when the war was over. Did he really think she was alive? Was there a town left? Then the doctor said that he had managed to hide a bottle of kosher wine during his wartime ordeal, and he invited me to join him at his makeshift hospital on the coming Friday evening to welcome the Sabbath.

On Friday, I went to the small, two-story building where I saw a dormitory-style room in which he was nursing 15 concentration camp survivors. In his office, we shared the traditions of blessings and wine for the Sabbath. That improvised ceremony was the sweetest and most memorable Sabbath of my life.

The doctor's story was only one of the many that have stayed with me.

While in Germany, I was approached by a Jewish civilian who told me he survived a death march by pulling a metal fence post out of the ground, and hiding it among his clothes until, in the middle of the night, he used it to kill a Nazi guard and escape. Hearing what was happening to Jews--my people!--and to others, not far from where I was, awakened me to what evil drove innocent people to do.

Previously, I found a pistol in a house that we had searched, and traded it with another soldier for a camera that he had found. That was fortuitous, because shortly after V-E Day, I saw something that needed to be recorded and shared.

We were billeted at a farmhouse in Tittling, Germany, near the Austrian border. On a beautiful morning, we woke up to the sound of hammering. Being the only person in the group who could speak any semblance of German, I was asked to find out what was happening.

One of the carpenters told me that they were making caskets for about 800 decedents who were found in a mass grave 5 kilometers down the road. The carpenter told me that the bodies would be buried, in pairs, in the yards of local homes so that each German family would be reminded daily of the atrocities committed by the Nazis. I don't know if that's true. But it's comforted me for decades to think people lamented the barbarism.

My buddies and I felt we needed to confirm the existence of the mass grave. I brought my camera--I wanted proof so no one could say it didn't happen. As we approached, we could smell the rancid stench of decaying corpses and saw the rows of murdered people in the pit. When local civilians were asked if they knew what had been going on, their stock answer was, "Ich weiss nicht" ( "I don't know").

I sobbed, enraged at what I was seeing and learning, and have never forgotten this horrifying experience. I've donated my original photos of the mass graves to Yad Vashem (also known as the World Holocaust Remembrance Center) in Israel. As long as I'm alive, I'll continue to share this memory and distribute photocopies of the pictures, so that those who were murdered will never be forgotten.

Two months later, I sailed home across the Atlantic and up the Hudson River. We debarked on July 10, 1945, at Camp Shanks in Orangeburg, New York. While I was on a 30-day furlough, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. If the peace treaty hadn't been signed in September, ending the war, I would have been sent to Japan in November Like so many times before and since, I felt that God was watching over me.

When I was discharged in January 1946, the first thing I did when I walked into my father's house was wash my hands, put on my tallis, and pray. I needed that act of cleansing, gratitude, and faith.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Jesse Schraub was born in August 1924 in Brooklyn, New York, to a Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish family. Raised primarily by his grandmother after the sudden death of his young mother, he studied chemical engineering at City College until he was drafted in 1943 and deployed with Company A, 91st Chemical Mortar Battalion, to Normandy after D-Day. In December 1944, he fought in the Battle of the Bulge. In 1945, he served in Occupied Germany, including after Victory in Europe Day. Following an honorable discharge in 1946, he studied and practiced accounting until the age of 94. Jesse and his beloved Esther were married for 68 years and raised three daughters.

Editor's note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.